it seems like this is the response from most people everywhere about until their region hits the knee of the exponential curve. this pattern played out in Italy, Spain, France, and now the US.
the Imperial College paper estimates 2 million dead in the US with no response and ~1 million dead with a limited response that doesn’t involve a full shutdown. That paper explicitly doesn’t consider the very severe economic impacts but it’s hard to imagine that deaths on that scale aren’t worse than whatever they might be.
Those estimates are based on constantly changing data. And “exponential curve” means a lot of things. We are just now starting very limited testing in the US... what do you want to bet the number of tests given follow an exponential pattern just by nature of how they are deployed? If your test deployment is exponential your infections is gonna look exponential even if the underlying data isn’t... at least for a little while.
You can curve fit anything if you forget about the bias in your data.
~1 million is the current annual death rate in the US (~0.8% last I checked), and the disease kills older people much more than younger people. How many of those 2 million would have died anyway in the next couple of years? How many would have contributed to the economy over the next few years? How many of those who will die from a recession would have contributed to the economy?
These are tough questions, but I think they're worth answering so we know what we're really gaining by shutting down the economy. I know we want to save as many lives as possible, but we should also know the cost too.
Another thing to note is that the virus will overwhelm emergency rooms world wide and deprive many other patients of adequate care that will cause some unnecessary death.
So it isn't just virus deaths you have to factor in.
> the Imperial College paper estimates 2 million dead in the US with no response and ~1 million dead with a limited response that doesn’t involve a full shutdown.
The paper points that all these estimates are based on extremely biased data.
Testing a random sample of the population to get a reliable estimate of the scale of the epidemic is dirt cheap compared to the drastic measures currently being taken.
It's incomprehensible to me that this wasn't one of first steps taken.
the Imperial College paper estimates 2 million dead in the US with no response and ~1 million dead with a limited response that doesn’t involve a full shutdown. That paper explicitly doesn’t consider the very severe economic impacts but it’s hard to imagine that deaths on that scale aren’t worse than whatever they might be.