thrifty++ wrote: ↑Sun Apr 19, 2020 7:58 pm
Compare say Australia and NZ which had more notice for lockdown and had quick lockdowns. Especially NZ which has one of, perhaps the most, comprehensive combination f measures in the world, ordered on rapid 48 hour notice for the whole country. The curve is not only flattening but is being smashed out of existence before it really had a chance to start.
Ha, ya, I mean Australia and especially NZ actually handled this so they're sort of not relevant to the discussion of countries who didn't handle it. It looks like Alaska is going to be able to pull this off too. The strategy of early containment was obviously the winner, but most countries punted on first down (sorry for the American football reference) so now we pay with money and lives.
@GTOO: I know Sweden is doing way worse than their Scandinavian brethren, the point is their shit is not falling apart. Italy's first death was Feb. 22 and Sweden's was March 11th., so by this metric, Sweden is 18 days behind. 18 days ago Italy was around 220 deaths/ million, Sweden is currently at 152/ million. Italy's nationwide lockdown started March 9th (they had regional before this), and their death peak had just passed. By April 1, it's clear that Italy had been in full panic mode for awhile, and for good reason. I know Sweden has been following voluntary social distancing policies and everyone lives alone, but unless their deaths blow up in the next two weeks, IMO, it's hard to make the case that major shutdowns weren't an overreaction (except major hotspots). What's confusing to me is how to explain the trajectory of Italy, Spain and NY vs. Sweden? It's like a different disease.
I think 60,000* by next Monday and 100,000 by the end of May (assuming lockdown continues) are high estimates (not unrealistic, just upper end of realistic). The major hotspots in the U.S. look like they've already peaked or are peaking now. Are you seeing something I'm not @GTOO?
I'm trying to think about the tradeoffs here, and, obviously I'm just spitballing an incredibly tough problem, but I'd say shutting down the economy in the manner we're doing now (assuming no better options were/ are feasible for at least the short-term) for ~3 months, I'd want to be saving ~1,000,000 U.S. lives (sorry for the American bias, but I live here so I'm most familiar with what's going on in the U.S. and its policies and numbers). And those ~ are hyper-approximate, I'm not trying to calculate the days of quarantine to lives tradeoff exactly, the point is, if we are saving ~200,000 lives, I don't think the economic risk of 3 months of shutdown is worth it. Before you attack me as an economy loving monster, remember that, at some point $$=lives, a relevant percentage of the lives lost are people who didn't have long to live and that around 2.8 million Americans die every year.
So how many lives do we think we're currently saving by continuing quarantine and do you think it's worth it?
*How do we feel about NYC adding in all of those presumptive deaths? Do they count? I think they're closing in on 5,000 at this point, which is 1/8 of all U.S. deaths (using worldometer).
Brazil: My understanding is that, like Sweden, the efforts in Brazil are not strict enough to do much more than slightly delay the disease. Unlike Sweden, many Brazilians can't afford to stop working, Brazilians live in very dense areas and, my impression is, the lockdown measures are not being strictly followed when compared to even Sweden's voluntary measures (I'm not on the ground there and I don't think their reporting is trustworthy, so I could be wrong). I don't think things are going well there, but, let's be honest here, with the projections for rich countries, I'd expect hospitals to be totally over run and death in the streets. It's possible they are far enough behind that this hasn't really hit yet or I could be grossly misunderstanding what's going on there.
The main point is, there are a lot of poor countries with some combination of dense population, inadequate healthcare funding, the inability to afford a major shutdown and a lack of strong or decisive leadership. Is no one surprised that a worst case scenario hasn't played out in at least a few of these countries yet?
For those outside the U.S.: Jacob has mentioned this before, but a big part of what's happening in the U.S. is that we have a MASSIVE distrust of our government. It's almost the only thing that cuts across party lines. Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem like the U.S. is using the extra time we bought to develop much of a plan on how to deal with the world we are likely to face after the lockdown... Oddly there is a lot of trust that this virus isn't as bad as it seems and that the government printing money will hold the economy together. Amazingly, this seems to be sort of working for now.
RE: U.S. Unemployment
The new unemployment benefits are fucking insane. They massively expanded who was eligible to apply for unemployment and if you can show you lost ANY W2 or 1099 income, the federal government will send you $600/ week! I have to imagine this is strongly influencing the numbers.
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