[mathdev]

That's false. Death is the natural and inevitable outcome of life. The people who would die of COVID are nearly exclusively people who would die relatively soon anyway. For an average 85 years old person, the risk of dying due to COVID if no mitigation is attempted is 6.3% [1], less than the risk of dying of other causes during the next year (9.6%) [2].

A 20 years old is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed by COVID.

The life expectancy saved by the lockdown is just so small. I find it extremely hard to believe that the lockdown will cause less loss of life than the new virus would have.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S1473-3099%2820...

[2] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html#fn1

[Daishiman]

Are people expected to suffer the disruption of having a substantial number of people taking two weeks off to recover from this disease with a non-trivial chance of needing medical intervention?

Are you going to be willing to postpone all medical interventions for the next three months because there's just not going to be available hospital capacity for your broken tooth?

[CydeWeys]

It's substantially more than two weeks for people who get a worse case of it, by the way. I had a mild case and was off for two weeks. If you get a more severe case, and especially if you need hospitalization, you're looking at at least a month of recovery. This virus attacks your lungs, which take a lot longer to recover from than your typical cold or even flu. The best comparison as to how long you're out of commission for is pneumonia.

[elcritch]

You're getting downvoted, but while it may not be pretty to think about, these other factors are important to consider. Even the expected years of life lost (which are factors found in medical literature). Unfortunately COVID-19 does affect younger people to a degree (40-50's) who could live healthy productive lives for decades, so it's not going to be pretty numbers.

Still "Flattening the curve" seems to be the only thing epidemiologists are focusing on, but ignoring the death toll from unemployment, domestic abuse, depression/suicide, and others. Not to mention how many people will die from exposure to being evicted due to being unable to pay rent or hunger from buying groceries. Or the long term effects of depressions or social anxiety from being locked down, etc. These are real factors.

The CDC's lack of modeling of these factors is disconcerting, if not bordering on _incompetence_. I've been searching for models (preferably using STAN or similar to calculate adjusted statistical likelihoods) to estimate holistic effect of lockdowns on overall death rates adjusted for those factors. So far I haven't found anything, or very limited research.

It sucks, but as a society, we have to be able to critically analyze the situation, including the tough factors of triage at a societal level.

[rmrfrmrf]

My assumption was that at least part of the reason for isolation measures is to prevent what happened with the Spanish Flu, where unfettered transmission created the conditions for a mutation that turned the U curve for mortality into a W curve.

[mathdev]

I think it's mostly to avoid the bad press of having to do triage at hospitals, long-term consequences be damned.

[catalogia]

Is Covid-19 more likely to suddenly mutate and become more lethal to young adults than, say, some strain of influenza doing that (again)?

[mathdev]

The opposite. It mutates more slowly than the flu.

[DanBC]

> The people who would die of COVID are nearly exclusively people who would die relatively soon anyway.

Why are we building emergency mortuaries?