[MaybiusStrip]

>And what % of patients infected actually end up in the ICU vs. just have a sniffle and a cough for a few days?

This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.

> I'm not saying "do nothing", but I am saying "shut down the world" is too extreme in the opposite direction.

Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?

1. You have a hypothesis that taking less drastic measures would result in a manageable death rates and less impact on the economy. However, Wuhan and Italy tried to deal with the virus through these less drastic measures (telling the elderly to self-quarantine, asking the population to social-distance), and the results were disastrous. Does that not invalidate your hypothesis?

2. Even if you're right, and there was a good chance we could avoid the worst of the epidemic, we know for a fact that the worst case scenario is that in the US, 21 million people will require hospitalization, and 1.7 million people will die. Saying that it's worth taking a risk on less drastic measures is the equivalent of saying it's OK to play Russian roulette because the odds are actually really good: it totally ignores the tremendously high cost of the worst case scenario.

I have found that risk-analysts like Taleb have the most convincing arguments for why all these extreme measures are called for. Check out his twitter: https://twitter.com/nntaleb

[sershe]

My point (in the other thread, but this is going the same way) was that yes, if someone says let's have 100 people of all ages play Russian roulette (only the gun has 30-50 capacity, and also loaded guns mostly go to much older people), that is very bad.

But if the alternative is, we will instead take those 100 people and make them really miserable, make a few homeless and/or drug addicted, maybe have one commit suicide, starve a few of them, get a few divorced, and ruin a few lives completely - disproportionately affecting the young and children - let them play Russian roulette. I am not convinced, but at this point to me it's looking more and more like that's the case.

Politicians (in NZ) are already saying it's going to be worse than 2008. - The cost of the Soviet union collapsing (a purely economic disaster I can really relate to, even though I do think Soviet union disappearing was a great thing as such) in Russia was 3-5 years of life expectancy, over a decade, for EVERYONE. How many lives is that? Not counting the missing births and the knock-on effects of both, as well as the total waste of life that the 90ies in Russia were for many people.

[MaybiusStrip]

You are taking my Russian roulette analogy way too literally. The "bullet" is not literally just dead people, it's also the economic impact of letting this disease run rampant, which you are clearly not accounting for.

We aren't just shutting everything down to save lives, we're shutting everything down because we some reason to believe that if 70% of the population gets this disease in a very short amount of time 20% of them are hospitalized, and at least 2% die (in truth, the CFR would skyrocket if we don't flatten the curve), the societal and economic havoc would be much worst than the one resulting from these government imposed quarantines. At the highest end of the risk spectrum, it could be orders of magnitude worst. Do we know that for sure? No, hence the Russian roulette analogy: some chance of extremely high risk, esp. when it comes to the entire planet: NOT WORTH GAMBLING.

If you think that world leaders are currently sacrificing the economy just to save lives, you are not paying attention to what they have been doing.

[umvi]

> This data is easily available: ~20% of people who get the virus are in life-threatening condition. Thats a 1/5 chance.

No, it's not "easily available". There's data flying around everywhere from different countries as this situation rapidly evolves and you can torture it to tell any story you want. If the data is so easily available, couldn't you have at least linked your source?

> Experts disagree with you. Maybe you should ask yourself why?

The "experts" in this case have never dealt with a global pandemic of this scale before. So they are inexperienced experts giving it their best guess based on what they know about disease transmission and math. But they clearly did not factor in the effects of shutting down the global economy for 3-6 months in their quest to optimize for a single variable. I'm sure we'll have a lot of "lessons learned" after this is all over and the experts will be much more experienced the next time around...

[MaybiusStrip]

Sure, I was referring to this study which shows that 20% of cases were either severe or critical: http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

True, this is only in China. In most other countries, it's still too early to be able to collect great data because of how quickly the situation is evolving (the denominator is bound to be wrong due to delays between cases being detected and the amount of days it takes before cases evolve into severe/critical condition or death). But it's data, and you can't easily dismiss it.

> So they are inexperienced experts giving it their best guess based on what they know about disease transmission and math.

This isn't entirely true. The epidemics in China, South Korea have more or less been resolved, and many of the steps being taken in other countries are based on comparing the outcomes in those countries compared to ones that are failing to slow the spread of the disease with disastrous consequences (Italy).

> But they clearly did not factor in the effects of shutting down the global economy for 3-6 months in their quest to optimize for a single variable.

It's possible that the health experts are not taking the economical windfall into account, but the politicians enacting the laws probably are. These decisions are being made in rooms with people who, with their knowledge pooled together, most likely have more information about the disease and the economic impact of their decisions than you.

Secondly, the reasoning for national shutdowns earlier rather than later is to shorten their length. As of now, local government officials are hoping not advocating 3-6 month shut down, but rather trying to avoid one by shutting down now. I remember reading the figure of 2 weeks but I cannot find it quickly now. We will see.