minten

I'm not totally sure it's actually number of deaths. People die all the time. I'm guessing it's more like the perceived (not objective) risk of you dying yourself.

After locking things down a few weeks the curve will be bend and hospitals will be better equiped. You won't reach zero or even close to it.. And yeah, I do think the economy will work nicely. It's a horror show in many parts of the world and first world economies don't care and never did. It's a horror show even in parts of those first world countries themselves in some areas and the economy doesn't even care then. When media get tired of covering this, people will lose interest and continue to do what they've always done.

This is not about humanity though, is it. Humanity will surive this virus whatever we do. It's about individual humans making individual choices and a significant percentage of these humans have enormous trouble listening to any rules now, let alone in a few months. If death % was higher perhaps you'd have chance, but I agree with Castanza any lockdown over a month can't be done because too many individuals will simply no longer obey as they know this virus will most likely never affect them.

You're assuming tech is static though. Developments in screening have gone from virtually non existent to 10-minute tests being experimentally available in just weeks. Once you can screen people within minutes, why would you still need to shut borders?

Aren't we trading where the economy is in 6-12 months instead of where it is now? Not saying we won't go down further or anything (who knows), but obviously the market is forward looking.

Good point In my country (~7K cases reported, but very little testing, ~400 deaths) the youngest death is over 60 years old. Average age of death is over 80. But also here younger patients do occasionally get admitted to hospital; they just seem to always survive in the end. Of course, these stats tell you nothing about possible permanent lung damage etc.

don't we have pretty solid data from two different continents by now showing us that they aren't (apart from a few isolated exceptions)?

It might backfire, but still seems like a better solution than the alternative. We've seen people going crazy over toilet-paper (my local supermarket has sold out for weeks in a row now); if somehow masks are spun as the solution to staying healthy, some people would end op hoarding millions and millions of them while most others will kill each other over what's left. healthcare would get nothing. humankind at its worst. So yeah, let's first ramp up production and then take it from there.

You make it sound like people dying from COVID are generally perfectly healthy people in their prime. We both know that's just not true. The very, very, very large majority of deaths are already very sick people with very serious underlying conditions; people that would have a limited life expectancy even without this virus ever having been near them. If it wouldn't have been COVID now, it would have been something else very soon. Every stat from every country shows this. The only thing that contradicts this conclusion are on a micro-level: isolated anecdotes of outliers.

Sure, every death is terrible on a micro-level. When discussing on a macro-level we normally never go down to the micro-level though. Not sure how it helps to do so now. A national newspaper in my country wrote a whole piece today how it's perfectly normal in regular times for hospitals to assign a certain worth to a life: i.e. what treatment is (or isn't) offered to which patient, based on disease, age, life expectancy, whatever. And that there's a limit to what you'll be offered if the math just doesn't support it. By the newspapers' own calculations the worth assigned to saving a life in this crisis is at least 100 times higher per patient than in any other disease/treatment out there. To be honest, their methodology was quite flawed, but you get my point.

FYI, still nowhere near (as in less than 10%) to cancer deaths. or cardio vascular deaths for that matter.

Your post makes a lot of sense. I'm surprised about the large number of ER-doctors etc that go on cam these last few weeks, visibly very emotional, about the COVID-situation and patients that they've lost. Really makes me wonder why this gets to them (which it obviously does), while their day-to-day job normally can't be that much different.

Not proven, but pretty likely based on experiences with similar viruses. Btw, they injected COVID-19 on a couple of macaque monkeys, then had them recover and then injected them again. They did develop immunity. That being said, you would think you'd have a large enough number of human subjects you could try it on at this stage.

FYI. Hydroxycholoroquine did not (statistically significant) outperform the no treatment group in the aforementioned French study either, only in combination with Azithromycin (which the Chinese study didn't investigate).

i've seen that story appear like twenty times on different media today, with a clear sense of how this was somehow Trump's fault (and also, like this is somehow funny; i mean someone died, hello..). you can put a lot of things on Trump, an enormous amount of things actually, but if someone starts self-medicating randomly with a chemical whose name vaguely resembles something he saw on tv (but apparently couldn't fully remember the name of) i don't think there's really anyone outside himself to blame.

Number of people dying of malaria is about 400.000 per year. Let's say we value these people's lives at a conservative 100K. So, say, we invest 40 billion a year in trying to save these people. According to the Bill Gates Foundations a 100 billion investment will eradicate the disease forever, so that's what, 2,5 years, and after that zero deaths forever. Atmittedly, a very poor back-of-the-napkin calculation, but so is everybody's virus math as well. And btw, those dying of malaria are mostly children. Those dying of this virus are mostly old people. If you re-do the math based on life expectancy the situation becomes even more ridiculous. But will we invest those kinds of money, or even a fraction? Nah, probably not. We don't see them dying, and those dying will never be us, so why bother. Not saying Trump is right with his "let's get back to work and fuck it"-attitude, but the hypocrisy about how much a life is worth gets to me sometimes.

You think? Just want to point out it's a deal we rarely ever make in any other circumstance.

yeah, apparently you do know better than everybody else, including people working in the field. anyway, here's an fair Forbes article on both drugs: forbes.com/sites/marybethpfeiffer/2020/03/22/one-patient-dodges-a-covid-bullet-is-she-a-harbinger-or-outlier/#583db5b85b84 I work in the field. I am a practicing MD in NYC. Good luck. well, a lot of your colleagues disagree with you then. anyway this is pointless as nobody knows at this stage, we'll see pretty soon i guess.

yeah, apparently you do know better than everybody else, including people working in the field. anyway, here's a Forbes article on both drugs: http://www.forbes.com/sites/marybethpfeiffer/2020/03/22/one-patient-dodges-a-covid-bullet-is-she-a-harbinger-or-outlier/#583db5b85b84

Not sure if anybody noticed but new daily cases from most European countries were quite encouraging today (finally). Italy 6500 -> 5500, Lombardy 3250->1700, Spain 3925 -> 1750, Germany 2500 -> 2500 (down from 4500 Friday), France 1800 -> 1500, Switzerland 1250 -> 650, UK 1000 -> 650, etc. Perhaps people just don't tend to come in in weekends (altough seems weird to me, considering you need pretty serious complaints to get a test at all in most European countries), no clue. Hopefully lockdowns and semi-lockdowns are trickling down into the numbers at last, we'll see tomorrow.

Trials using this exact drug combo will start on Tuesday in NYC. But I guess you know better. We'll see if you're right.

It's nice to have a theoretical debate whether mask work or don't work, but fact is they're in very short supply in virtually every IC, at least in Europe, right now. There was even a report today in which the Czech Republic supposedly confiscated a shipment of hundreds of thousands of masks which were supposed to be send to Italy, only to use it in their own hospitals. Encouraging regular folk to start hoarding them now amid a shortage seems irreponsible to me; even if they do the job to some extent, hospitals need them more.

Honestly, I can think of about a hundred ways in which this is different than 1929. And only two or three ways in which this is somewhat similar.

The wild-card is this all gets fixed much sooner than we now think: better treatment, curves start to bend, whatever.. It might not be that likely, but it's a possibility, unlike any other recession. The economy could go into full gear, fueled even more by an endless supply of money and a consumer no doubt very eager to spend if they still got cash, within months, if not weeks, instead of years or decades. So, accounting for this possibility, should soften how deep the market should logically go. Because there's always that chance you wake up in the morning and there's a complete fix (figuratively speaking). The virus developing in Europe does show there's so much we do not know yet about how this will develop, and you can't just copy Italy to the rest the world. The spread seems to be so weirdly different in different countries (and not only compared to the Asian countries). The extremely low death rate in Germany for one. Or the Scandinavian countries that started out in line with the rest of Europe but have somehow really bended the curve this last week, with in some cases (Sweden) much less contaiment measures than the South of Europe. I know, there are differences in testing etc, but still. And Italy that keeps going up and up and up (unlike what I'd expected). The same virus seems to have a enormous wide variance in how it hits a country, from very hard, to very mild, for reasons we just do not know yet.

Didn't we all already know about what was happening in Wuhan around that time? I know I did.