Posted on 03/18/2020 12:56:21 PM PDT by Kaslin
Federal and state governments are making a massive gamble about a little-understood new virus. They are betting our future on the most extreme worst-case scenario without considering the costs.
Federal and state governments are making a massive gamble about a little-understood new virus. They may not only be betting our entire economy, but our nation’s future. Thus it’s imperative that they not make foolish choices.
We shouldn’t allow policy under a Republican president to be driven by a Democrat like Steve Mnuchin, whose overwhelming priority is reassuring Wall Street above all else. Voters don’t vote for Donald Trump to get Obama-Bush bailouts of Wall Street and welfare expansions.
The current gamble seems to be to shut down the nation indefinitely to suppress a virus that is especially deadly to some demographics and experts agree cannot be contained, only slowed. The New York Times claims the basis of many U.S. officials’ decisions so far is a report from Imperial College London, and other models that spit out similar results. It says to contain the virus it will be necessary to quarantine Americans for two- to three-month stretches repeatedly over the next 18 months.
The alternative, says the report, is 4 million Americans dead, half who would otherwise have lived but instead die for lack of medical capacity such as ventilators. If we merely quarantine sick people and those at risk, a “mitigation” strategy, it projects the U.S. death toll at about 2 million, again half from lack of ventilators, not depth of disease.
And it does flatten the curve — but not nearly enough. The death rate from the disease is cut in half, but it still kills 1.1 million Americans all by itself. The peak need for ventilators falls by two-thirds, but it still exceeds the number of ventilators in the US by 8 times.
— Jeremy C. Young (@jeremycyoung) March 17, 2020
This is why state governors are shutting down restaurants, schools, entertainment venues, government offices, parks, historical sites, churches, and travel. Most Americans and businesses likely can sustain a suspension of their lives for two weeks, the usual annual vacation time.
But start extending these bans to one and two months, and then to four and six months, and people are going to revolt as they sit chained to their houses, watching their jobs, businesses, and retirement accounts disappear, replaced with funny money taken from yet-unborn generations and no end in sight. Numerous people are already skeptical and fed up with the lockdowns, and we’re not a week in.
Plus, these are just estimates, not a crystal ball. We can’t know the future, and different countries have already shown highly different disease spreads based on different population characteristics, health care capacity, and government response.
Just one competing projection, from the Hoover Institution, suggests “the total number of cases world-wide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000″ (emphasis added). This is near the annual death rate due to flu in the United States alone. We don’t know if that estimate is accurate either, but that’s the point.
Here’s another hysteria skeptic with impeccable medical and statistical knowledge, John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology, and statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.
If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from ‘influenza-like illness.’ If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from ‘influenza-like illness.’ If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction?
We’re acting as if coronavirus is for sure going to amount to the worst-case scenario without knowing that is true. If we all do shelter in place for the next year and a half while politicians pass the equivalent of the Obama-Bush stimulus that suffocated the economy 12 years ago, the “experts” will insist the nation’s long-term ability to provide for itself was required to save millions of lives. There will be no way to prove them wrong, even if they are.
It seems a fool’s errand to pre-emptively and indefinitely risk everyone’s livelihoods without hard information about what is happening and a risk assessment that includes the serious dangers of killing the U.S. economy, not what computers project will happen with lots of missing, unreliable, and rapidly changing information.
The current numbers we have not only show that different countries are managing the disease better and worse, but that not one of the countries further along in the spread of the virus is anywhere close yet to indicating these apocalyptic numbers for the United States, at least in the next two to three months.
Here is a chart my husband made using WHO, CDC, and other public data about deaths per day of outbreak. It shows the U.S. death rate due to Wuhan flu is much lower at the same stage of the outbreak than most of the other high-spread countries.
Anywhere from 80 percent of infections in adults to 95 percent of infections in children appear to be mild to moderate cases overcome in about two weeks with rest at home. The vast majority of cases look like CBS News Correspondent Seth Doane’s. He can even be on TV while infected, for pete’s sake.
NEW: CBS News correspondent @SethDoane has been diagnosed with COVID-19. Doane has decided to self-identify and is currently under quarantine in Rome.
Doane describes his experience from his home for @CBSThisMorning: pic.twitter.com/XWBl6wIMyV
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) March 16, 2020
Sharyl Attkisson has gone through the U.S. deaths to March 17, and as in other countries they are overwhelmingly among the very elderly and people with pre-existing conditions. The entire population is not at severe risk from coronavirus — although we are at severe risk from a wrecked economy and welfare expansions beyond Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wildest dreams.
If we continue the present course U.S. politicians are taking, “we’ll be spending a lot more than we’ve ever been willing to spend before to avoid flu deaths. Eighty-three percent of our economy will be suppressed to relieve pressure on the 17% represented by health care. This will have to last months, not weeks, to modulate the rate at which a critical mass of 330 million get infected and acquire natural immunity,” writes Holman Jenkins at The Wall Street Journal.
Is it right for the nation to require our children’s futures be destroyed to keep alive less than 1 percent of our population until the next flu season? Could we not attempt to keep them safe by less disastrous means?
Every year, 40,000 Americans die in car wrecks. I don’t see any critical mass of politicians calling for banning cars, and if they did, they would lose their next election. That’s because we as Americans have decided that the benefits of modern transportation outweigh the lives of 40,000 Americans a year, which a few years ago included my own young brother. Do I still drive a car? Daily.
My point here is not that I like people dying. It’s that very often our society chooses to allow deaths because the alternative is worse. I’m suggesting the severe social and economic tradeoffs of unlimited quarantine are an important consideration that is not being taken seriously enough.
That’s especially true because the majority of people now being kept home are not at severe risk. Here are the currently known fatality risks by age and comorbidity (pre-existing health problems), from WHO and Chinese data:
Would it be more prudent to severely shelter those at risk while the rest of us keep the country going? We can take steps like this while not choosing to crush small businesses and employees who cannot telework for one or two months, let alone 18.
Iceland Foods at Kennedy Centre, West Belfast will be opening their store between 8-9am for the elderly starting this Tuesday. The wider public are asked to respect this hour as it has been allocated for elderly people only. Would be great to see other stores now do the same 👏 pic.twitter.com/nfu5Hsz5um
— Paul Doherty (@Paul_Doherty__) March 15, 2020
In introducing his competing model, Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution writes of serious flaws in predictions of 1 million or more Americans dead from coronavirus:
Based on the data, I believe that the current dire models radically overestimate the ultimate death toll. There are three reasons for this.
First, they underestimate the rate of adaptive responses, which should slow down the replication rate. Second, the models seem to assume that the vulnerability of infection for the older population—from 70 upward—gives some clue as to the rate of spread over the general population, when it does not. Third, the models rest on a tacit but questionable assumption that the strength of the virus will remain constant throughout this period, when in fact its potency should be expected to decline over time, in part because of temperature increases.
He points out that South Korean data, which is more complete than most other countries’ data, shows huge disparities in risks between old and unhealthy and young and healthy. “Clearly, the impact on elderly and immunocompromised individuals is severe, with nearly 90% of total deaths coming from individuals 60 and over. But these data do not call for shutting down all public and private facilities given the extraordinarily low rates of death in the population under 50,” Epstein writes.
“Of course, every life lost is a tragedy…but those deaths stemming from the coronavirus are not more tragic than others, so that the same social calculus applies here that should apply in other cases,” he says.
The costs Americans are being forced to bear may be more than is rational to impose. Already one-fifth of working Americans are being laid off and having work hours cut due to not even one week of suspensions.
“[T]he massive curtailments of the U.S. economy can have as many health consequences as the virus itself—if millions lose income and jobs, become depressed in self-isolation, increase smoking, and drug and alcohol use, and postpone out of fear necessary buying and visits to doctors and hospitals for chronic and serious medical conditions unrelated to the virus,” writes Victor Davis Hanson.
What if the real scenario is one of these: 1) We plunge the nation into a depression that kills many businesses and addicts millions to welfare, in a nation that has already pledged more welfare than it can afford for at least the next three generations. Because of this depression, many people die due to poverty, lack of medical care, and despair. Millions more transform from workers to takers, causing a faster implosion of our already mathematically impossible welfare state.
2) The nation quarantines only at-risk populations and those with symptoms, like South Korea has, and ensures targeted and temporary taxpayer support to those groups, goes nuts cranking out ventilators and other crisis equipment such as temporary hospitals using emergency response crews, while the rest of us keep calm, wash our hands, take extreme care with the at-risk groups, and carry on.
Why would the entire nation grind to a halt when the entire nation is not at a severe risk? I would rather have a flu I am 99.8 percent likely to survive than the nation plunged into chaos indefinitely because we pulled the plug on our economy during a stampede.
At the very least, Congress should wait a week or two, while half the nation or more is home, to see how the infection rates look as millions of test kits go out. The worst-case scenario they are predicating their actions on may not be the one we’re facing. Prudence suggests a measured, wait and see approach to policy until we have better information, not chucking trillions of my kids’ dollars out the window “just in case.”
We’ll know over the course of the next days. If the deaths each day keep doubling every two days we have a very big problem. I read we have 90 people on vents today. If the number of new vents each day keeps doubling every two days there won’t be enough vents in the country soon.
If each ventilator dependent patient needs it for 5 days and the number of new vents needed each day we are going to have a national crisis soon. We will have medical students bagging people in hallways.
That is the question that should have been answered sometime around January 15th.
But China was not in a sharing mood.
It is completely moot now.
Sounds a bit hysterical to me.
I think you need to learn to recognize cynicism when you see it.
Thanks for the ping...it’s an interesting article. I have no problem admitting I have absolutely no idea what to expect, and I’m not sure anyone else does either. The unknown is what’s fueling public panic, as much as the legacy media fanning the flames for their own purposes.
I don’t know any seniors unwilling to totally self-quarantine, while those who are younger and at minimal risk continue life relatively unchanged, if that’s what it takes to cause less damage to the economy. There’s so much about this that’s making almost no sense.
But beyond that they will immediately try to wreck the economy to bring their socialist utopia to fruition.
“America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” ― Claire Wolfe. ...Our problem may be that there is nobody who will tell us...
They didn't come through though. Look at the SARS number by country. China and HongKong had 7400 of the 8000 cases. Taiwan and Singpore represented another 1000. The US had 75 cases. It was contained.
Ebola was contained too. The US had just 4 cases
In both cases, we took very few steps to contain it. Both could have been disasters, but we were spared. Neither was as contagious as CV.
Swine through came through but it was less lethal than the regular seasonal flu and didn't get reported on until it was almost over.
The Coronavirus won't cause it, the panicked and hysterical reaction to it...
If Covid-19 follows the path of SARS-CoV-1 this could be over by July.
SARS first appeared in November 2002. By May 2003 it’s rate of increase had peaked, by July 2003 SARS was essentially over. It was fought entirely with quarantine and social separation since there was no vaccine. We don’t remember it here because there were very few cases in the States. Worldwide there were over 8,000 confirmed cases with 775 deaths. Most were in China.
Covid-19 is the name of the current SARS outbreak, the virus causing it is known as SARS-CoV-2. By March 1st it had already infected 10 times as many people as SARS-CoV-1 but at a lower death rate; 2,800 deaths. It shares 86% of the genome of the 2002-2003 SARS bug.
What makes Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 so dangerous is its extreme rate of transmission. It can make everyone very sick at the same time, overwhelming the medical system. There aren’t enough ICU beds and ventilators for everybody to be treated all at once. In China it was infecting a lot of healthcare workers making the situation worse.
Shutting down public life is intended to slow down the rate of transmission enough to spread out the bulge of serious cases so that the medical system has a chance at treating them. That’s what is meant by flattening the curve. Two weeks ago there were 129 confirmed US cases. Today there’s 7,300.
At this point the only known means to fight Covid is social separation and quarantine. But South Korea is reporting success with chloroquine. It’s an old drug used to treat malaria. If true that will be a godsend.
We’ll know over the course of the next days. If the deaths each day keep doubling every two days we have a very big problem. I read we have 90 people on vents today. If the number of new vents each day keeps doubling every two days there won’t be enough vents in the country soon.
If each ventilator dependent patient needs it for 5 days and the number of new vents needed each day we are going to have a national crisis soon. We will have medical students bagging people in hallways.
FReeper Zeestephen calculates the fatalities per case actually went down today. Nature is going to work it’s course here. We have the best hospital system in the world. Ripping the wings off our economy mid flight was never necessary.
How do you know? Some say the Great Depression was caused by a 10 per cent drop in economic activity. What percentage drop are we experiencing now? I’d welcome some encouraging facts.
Well some are wrong. It was caused by a collapse of the American banking system. You can read all about it in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's definitive study that NBER generously offers for free:
If we destroy the economy to fight the virus, we will only be able to do that ONCE. We have a corona virus, SARS MERS Covid 19 ever few years. When the next one, and there will be another, we will not be able to have a robust and money printing response.
DK
The coronavirus panic will make a whole lot of people poorer. But it can’t inflict the sort of damage that creates a Great Depression. The exploding mortgage bubble of 2008 had potential to bring down the banking system and we dodged a bullet there.
The covid panic and closing of so many businesses will create a huge drop in “demand”. The government’s reaction will be a massive “demand stimulus”- sending a check to everybody and granting tax breaks to small businesses. The idea being that it will jump start a damaged economy.
“And if you think consumer confidence will recover once the lock downs are lifted you are dreaming.”
Yeah, because the economy never recovered after millions lost their houses and jobs when the housing bubble exploded. Oh wait-
Spare me.
And current estimates say 20% to 60% of the population will get the disease ovewr time.
Why post this Federalist garbage?
Free Republic will never be the same after this hoax blows over.
That is the God’s truth. It is sickening. Those folks GOT to be on someone’s payroll.
It may not last very long, but it may be enough to kick Trump out of office.
“It’s an old drug used to treat malaria. If true that will be a godsend.”
Trump is being raked over the coals by the media for daring to say the malaria drug shows promise, which it absolutely does. He needs to fire the sawed off democrat Dr Fauci who contradicts Trump every time he mentions a drug that might help. The president is trying to be positive and reassure Americans. That’s his job. Fauci is all doom and gloom and runs over to CNN right after the pressers end, where the Trump haters grill him about Trump being an idiot needing to keep his mouth shut. Fauci once more is a democrat partisan and Trump needs to get rid of him and bring on Dr. Oz or Dr. Drew. My prediction is Trump will do exactly that in the next few days.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.