You're a true believer, I get it. But continuing to try and sell the same bullshit isn't going to work because all you've got is... basically just parroting other people's soundbites badly. I mean, you're not even taking into account your own bullshit numbers. You are apparently willing to watch forty million people die to "save the economy" without even taking into account what you would do with forty million dead bodies, much less all the other shit that would happen as you rack up an appalling death toll in the name of other people's profits.
Also, those forty million would actually make sure that shit would be worse because guess what? No one is just going to stand around and dispassionately watch them die, none of this shit happens in a vacuum no matter how hard you wish it to.
You've ignored the World Food Programme's predictions of 30 million deaths from starvation due to the economic consequences.
BBC News said:
The WFP chief - who has just recovered from Covid-19 - began his Security Council briefing by saying "excuse me for speaking bluntly." There is no blunting what could happen in a world facing - even before this global health crisis - what David Beasley called the worst humanitarian catastrophe since the Second World War.
In an interview, he also expressed fear that 30 million people, and possibly more, could die in a matter of months if the UN does not secure more funding and food. But this is also a world where donors are reeling from the steep financial cost of their own Covid-19 crises.
You've also ignored the loss of life from poverty. Just go look for anything on the subject, if there aren't hard numbers on the cash element (because sometimes it's the same people who make bad decisions about their health and their finances) you have to admit we're dealing with a genuine issue here.
https://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap-us-0411
Poverty in the U.S. is often associated with deprivation, in areas including housing, employment, and education. Now a study co-authored by two MIT researchers has shown, in unprecedented geographic detail, another stark reality: Poor people live shorter lives, too.
More precisely, the study shows that in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.
This eye-opening gap is also growing rapidly: Over roughly the last 15 years, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women who are among the top 5 percent of income earners in America, but by just 0.32 and 0.04 years for men and women in the bottom 5 percent of the income tables.
There are countless sources out there and the idea that a great depression wouldn't cost hundreds of millions of years of life even in the developed world is absurd to me. 'The economy' isn't something for rich people, they're the ones who'll be least effected and probably turn a big profit from all of this long term by buying in while the market is cheap. It's the poorer people who'll lose their savings, homes and jobs and have measurably worse lives.
You can go take a look at how this is hitting poorer countries if it's going to be more impactful to you. The same problems can exist in the west in lesser severity.
More than 80 000$ / QUALY? Burt it depends heavily on opportunity costs (how this money would be used otherwise).
BTW, it is an interesting though experiment: how much I would be willing to pay to get life 1 day longer? 1 day longer in life of my mother? It calculates up to surprisingly low amount per year (or surprisingly high amount per day/hour). Anyway, practical conclusion is that I need to call my family.
As lets admit, noone cares what I think about lockdown.
There is a big marginal difference between days and years for me too when I think about it that way. It's mostly so I can have time to plan and say goodbyes though, not really because I want to live the day itself. By preference for my own sake I'd prefer to die suddenly and will probably have do not resuscitate orders put on me when I get to that age.
I would not go with % - that is pointless. For avoidable deaths I would want much higher % than for ones that are not avoidable or extremely hard to avoid.
For example any deaths caused by surgeons not following basic checklists are unacceptable. Things like operating wrong patient, operating on a wrong side (removing left lung instead of a right lung etc), not washing hands in XXI century etc are all things that still keep happening. Deaths due to random unexpected and undetectable and unpredictable and untreatable aneurysms are more acceptable.
In this case I mean % of people slated to die of Corona, like if there was a solution that would save X% of them and doom the others at what point would the problem be small enough to tolerate. Pretty much everyone would agree to 99.9% so where would the line be? Then I would argue that proves X times the current costs is too much to spend as well if that's the proportional value.
As for medical errors there's definitely an interesting argument to be made by people involved about the trade offs between overwork and overcredentialism. If we lowered the qualification requirements, and some pay, for the field to have more hands available would that be a net benefit? I've heard of some zaney studies of just having mandatory checklists for each operations actually cutting deaths by medical errors massively too.
Assuming that your numbers of people saved by lockdown are correct and taking 80 000$ / QUALY, reduced to half ("elderly and sick" part).
US population: 300*1000*1000
lost years: /200*11
QUALY per lost year: 0.5*80000
300*1000*1000/200*11*0.5*80000=660 000 000 000$
So "reopen economy during COVID" would need to demonstrate 660 billion over "keep lockdown going on".
And you need to compare "normal economy + COVID + lockdown" with "normal economy + COVID" not with normal economy.
And both my QUALY and your death rate are likely to be wildly different numbers in other estimates.
If you'll take 1 in 200 as a base rate for the entire population (maybe half infected and maybe 1% fatality rate with maybe 11 years life expectancy) then yeah I think we're way too high even before we try to account for other QUALY problems caused as a result.
The current federal stimulus act is costing ~2.3 Trillion. I'd assume state spending on lockdown measures will add up to some substantial fraction of that but I can't find what it would be. The US economy is ~21 Trillion. The GDP would've gone up by ~2.5% in 2020, probably, and now will go down by at least 6%. Not all of that cost is going to be upfront, since GDP doesn't leap back up immediately. It took until 2011 to get back to the 2007 peak after the recession, and a few years after that to make up for the lost growth. I've seen ~10 Trillion thrown around and ~15 Trillion wouldn't be unthinkable, but it'd be 6% of 21 Trillion for 1.3 Trillion this year and several times that in total. We could call it ~4.7 Trillion for ease of calculation.
In total I'd put ~$7 Trillion up as the total cost, assuming the effects of the stimulus are accounted for in GDP and we only need to account for the bill. Unless 90% of that was unavoidable it's significantly over 660 billion.
The reason I oppose the lockdown so strongly is because I'm not seeing any arguments that that
would be the total cost to actually save those lives. A lot of them could be saved by less drastic strategies and the costs could extend to several times that if the lockdown draws on for several more months. A marginal cost over a million dollars per life year isn't unthinkable if the louder alarmist voices are listened to, and then we have the fun of trying to add up the life years lost as a result of the poverty, social isolation and stress.
Again, the 3% Who mortality figures is before it has been reliably screened for confounding variables. Everything from the requirement to achieving immunity to the actual mortality if left out of control is not currently known or reliably verified.
What this means is that all leaders are essentially making a bet as to whether the virus would blow out of control . Those who aren't taking the risk are locking down the country and those that aren't are letting it roam free.
Note that this is the observation from Malaysia, where most the Ministry Of Health advocate for extended contact tracing in part due to your reasoning, namely that the people most at risk ccan self isolate and paying them a UBI for doing so is cheaper then locking down the country. However the PM decided, hey, I'm not taking the risk of becoming the next Italy and subsequently lockdown the country.
Admittedly even if the MOH recommended actions were followed, it would only have bought us about two weeks before the growth becomes exponential as it spreads to the idiots.
:Fake edit:
On the topic of Sweden, note that Sweden is functionally under a soft lockdown, its just that due to the farrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr higher education and critical thinking levels in their populace, they can rely on their population from doing something stupid, ala our malaysian idiots.
It'll be interesting to see the results between different countries at the end of this, but one argument that might be made for social distancing is 'smaller' infections even if they do still occur. This is just from a blog post but it's an interesting idea that seems to have some evidence backing it up.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/03/know-when-to-fold-em.html
Many studies have found big effects of initial virus dose on many outcomes. For covid19 we
know that patients with more viruses in their blood (higher "viral load") show more severe symptoms. And
for other viruses we see that such patients also die more often. But in terms of the most direct sort of evidence, I've only been able to find these empirical studies connecting initial virus dose size to human death rates:
- Deliberate infection with low doses of smallpox is reported to have cut death rates of infected from 30% to 1-2%, or from 1 in 5-6 to 1 in 50.
- Among 126 African kids infected with measles, the first in a family to get it had a 14x lower death rate relative to other kids in the same families. Presumably that first kid gets it from outside the family, via a low dose, while other kids in the same family are infected at home, via a larger dose.
- In a Hong Kong high-rise, one resident infected many others with SARS, possibly via aerosols, but those who lived physically closer got a higher dose, and saw 3x the death rate.
- This New Yorker article mentions 2 more cases, but I can't yet find cites to studies.
The first case, of a deliberate low dose infection, saw effects in the range 8-30x, while the other two cases of observing a natural difference in dose saw effects of 3x and 14x, giving only lower bounds on deliberate dose effects. So while we can't at all be sure of the deliberate dose effect for Covid19, we have good reason to expect it to be
at least a factor of 3. And maybe a factor of 30 or more.
