[buzzkillington]

I find it incredible that no one has done these studies before issuing the lock down orders. Without knowing what the proportion of people who have been exposed but aren't sick any response is the wrong response.

If it turns out that it's already spread to most everybody lock downs are just a way to create more homelessness. If it turns out that the only people with the antibodies are the ones in the hospitals we need martial law.

[fragmede]

The lock-downs are because we don't have the tests and we don't have these studies, and still won't, for weeks or months to come. They're being run as fast as possible but there's a lot we don't know about this disease. In the meanwhile, people are getting sick and dying.

We can disagree on whether a lockdown causes the least amount of societal distress compared to some of the other options, we can argue on when we would personally chose to enact lockdown. We could even try and work out what it would take to prevent people losing their homes and dying. $2000/month UBI seems like it might help.

But seriously, doing anything at all is wrong? And the only right response is to do nothing? No ordering more PPE, no preparing for a surge, no rebalancing shifts so the contagion doesn't take out the police force/navy/healthcare workers/etc?

Saying that any possible response is wrong seems like pretending the problem will go away if we pretend it doesn't exist. Which is really hard to do while people are dying.

[watwut]

No response is response too. It would be incredible to done such massive studies before antibodies tests existed and organizations were able to do them on mass scale.

What they had at the time were models (which predicted asymptomatic cases) and information on how it looks like in countries that did not done measures soon enough. Even as China lied and made their numbers smaller then the were, enough was known publically and even more by secret services.

[mike_d]

These studies were done well in advance. Every bit of research we have about the 1918 Influenza points to social isolation being the only effective way to combat a pandemic.

[Robotbeat]

South Korea shows that test and trace works just as good or better than lockdowns. Which is why our failure to get high testing rates early on is such an utter travesty.

[platyp]

South Korea does not "tell" us any of that. The government did not force a lockdown, but massive voluntary social distancing occurred anyway.

[Robotbeat]

That’s not a lockdown, though. Voluntary behavior change is much better (than having to force a lockdown) if you can manage it.

[buzzkillington]

Please provide the doi for the articles which tell us the prevalence of covid-19 in the general population.

[gonational]

Your comment, unfortunately, won’t be appreciated by lemmings until the unemployment rate is 45% and hundreds of thousands are dying from disease and starvation.

[dang]

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

[yters]

Yes, if you google "coronavirus iceland" you'll see they've tested almost their entire population. They found 1586 confirmed cases, of whom only 6 died, which gives a fatality rate of 0.4%.

Turning this around, if we multiply confirmed deaths by 264, that gives us an estimate of how many cases there are. So, for example, with UK's death count of 6159 this means about 2.4% of the population is infected. Furthermore, on the Diamond Princess only 20% of the people onboard caught the virus under poorly quarantined conditions. So, to extrapolate even further, this would imply that over 12% of the UK population has already been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. This means that the UK should peak at about 50k deaths, without any protective measures.

In 2018, the UK had 50k deaths due to flu in excess of normal flu deaths.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/30/winter-deaths-hi...

[JamisonM]

Iceland has only tested 28,992 of its residents as April 6th, so that throws the rest of this conjecture out the window. (Although regardless the conjecture was probably not a great idea.)

https://covid.is/data

[yters]

The point is Iceland has the best statistic on death rate due to comprehensive testing.

[JamisonM]

I think the real point is that your original claim was a small sample that you were extrapolating wildly from turns out to be 10x smaller than you claimed.

Furthermore you are focusing on a tiny portion of available data instead of all that is available.

Given that New York State has 4,000+ deaths your "model" would indicate that 1MM residents have COVID-19? So if it rips through the remaining 19MM residents in the course of a few weeks the result will only be 80k deaths? And of course the healthcare system won't break down?

Also you said that the Diamond Princess only had a 20% infection rate but the Greg Mortimer is reporting a 60% infection rate. Seems like you've got a lot of facts wrong on the first pass, IDK.

[yters]

It seems that 'all available' would diminish the signal of Iceland's good stat. What we really want is 'all good stats'. I think only South Korea is the other country with extensive testing.

According to my model NYC should only have a max of 13.5k deaths, without any mitigation.

Based on the Greg Mortimer stat, this bumps up to 41k for NYC.

[JamisonM]

It doesn't seem to pass just a basic level of consistency with present experience to believe that with no mitigation New York would only have 13.5k deaths when they already have 5.5k+ (and we know many more that have not and maybe will never be confirmed).

Even the idea of 41k at this point beggars belief, they are already well over capacity with some mitigation and the bodies are literally piling up.

I find it hard to wrap my head around the logic here.

[vonmoltke]

> I think only South Korea is the other country with extensive testing.

South Korea has tested a tiny fraction of their total population, because the testing is largely targeted via contact tracing.

[standardUser]

Iceland may have the best statistic on their death rate from this virus, but these things are not static and depend on a zillion factors (slight exaggeration).

[yters]

It is close to the other country with a lot of testing, South Korea.

[phaemon]

From your own link: "The failings contributed to the worst flu season for seven years, with 15,000 deaths from the virus, around twice the average figure, and the worst NHS performance on record."

Not 50,000.

[yters]

Sorry, I misread. This doc says (look at last couple pages) the 2014/2015 and 2017/2018 seasons had over 25k deaths from flu.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

So my calculation shows cov2 is about twice as bad as a strong flu, with no preventative measures. If we hit the 20k or less with preventative measures that the Imperial model predicts, this will be on par with regular flu season.

At any rate, much less than the 200k+ deaths originally predicted by the Imperial model and that pushed the UK to lockdown.

[JamesBarney]

Bergamo had an 0.4% of it's population die in excess of usual in March and no one believes that 100% of the population was infected. Which would put the UK at 240,000.

[JamisonM]

Something to consider: https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/12501803096032870...