[traitsnspecs]

If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms.

There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have.

My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.

[alasdair_]

2% to 4% is the number of hospitalized people that die IF they get care.

If the health system is overrun, and there are zero ICU beds or ventilators available, that number will go up quickly. THAT is the problem we are trying to avoid.

[traitsnspecs]

The numbers matter here. Go up by how much?

[infinite8s]

Look at the difference between Italy's death rate and South Korea's.

[Twixes]

2-4% is huge for a novel highly infectious disease. Our healthcare system is not prepared for that at all, without aggressive measures that's potential for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US.

[traitsnspecs]

Fully agreed - but I'm wondering why the solution has been less bars, not more temporary hospitals, ala China.

[Twixes]

Temporary hospitals are being set up, but we simply don't have the capacity to build life–saving machines fast enough to handle the no-social distancing scenario. Neither did China, really.

[solotronics]

Having live television feeds of people dying in the streets (like in Wuhan) would absolutely crater the economy and cause massive social unrest.

[cmurf]

Free market knew of this possibility, but pocketed the profits for shareholders instead of making investments to prepare. And the government didn't intervene. This is a culture problem. We weren't listening.

SARS experienced countries made very different decisions, over the past few months, and since 2003.