Originally Posted by
stimpy
Aha! This is the key. My argument is that the panic has MUCH more societal cost than the deaths. The deaths affect a few, but the panic affects everyone. Again, us rich people can afford to deal with this. I don't give a hoot about the stock market crashing because the rich can afford it and it will eventually come back up again. But the vast majority of humanity are losing what prosperity they had. Humans need both good health and prosperity. What good does it do to be healthy if you don't have a job or the ability to take care of your family?
You've made this argument before, and I agree that destroyed livelihoods have terrible societal (and health) costs.
BUT: a) China managed to bring this under control outside Hubei within 3-4 weeks, and within 8 weeks in Wuhan/ Hubei with extremely aggressive measures. Even then, the economy did not grind to a halt, but it was severely impacted.
b) Assuming China has an aggressive, Israel-style 'no visitors without quarantine' policy, it will be able to go gradually back, not to full capacity, but significantly improved economic outputs save for some severely impacted industries e.g. hotels/ cruises etc.
c) "Business as usual" will allow increased production/ consumption _for now_ until infrastructure choke-points are breached: we can see this happens around 0.1-0.2% prevalence (i.e. Italy). Then, super-aggressive measures are brought in, which, because they were instituted late, are both less effective, and will therefore take much, much longer to bring things under control (if at all)...the knock-on economic impacts will be much bigger than being aggressive early.
d) Let's assume you really do care about people in LMIC countries: aggressive measures in rich countries will impact them to an extent in terms of consumption, I concede. But e.g. tourist attractions in Paris are not really dependent on factory workers in Vietnam for their viability, same goes for football matches. So yes, people will be impacted, but those people will be in rich countries.
e) The likelhood of severe economic slowdown, and its duration, will be far greater with a true pandemic than aggressive early measures.
What's really _different_ about COVID-19 compared with e.g. influenza pandemics we've seen, is that COVID-19 appears to be more _susceptible_ to aggressive social distancing, to a surprising degree. To be fair, we've never done what was done in Wuhan in modern history (as far as I know)...but it's worked far more effectively, and quickly, than at least I would have conceded...
These aggressive measures aren't enough by and of themselves: the population remains susceptible, and in LMICs, we just aren't looking for COVID-19. So until there's a vaccine, there is vulnerabiltiy. But if one can bring down numbers aggressively to the low hundreds, there is the possibility of extremely fine-tuned aggressive containment measures going forwards until we have a long-term solution. That won't be possible if there are tens or hundreds of thousands of cases, followed by millions of cases.
tb
PS 'the few' deaths you mention would be around 50M+ in the next 12 months...a doubling of ALL cause mortality.