Yes. Exponentially wrong.
Millions (plural) of deaths predicted, with intervention.
I am aware that this thing isn't over, but we aren't going to get close to that number and you know it.
And yes, the hospitals being open is important. Why? We were told we had to stay at home so we don't overwhelm hospitals, which would cause more deaths. We did that. Hospitals are laying people off now, because there's no traffic. So now it's turned into, "stay at home until there's a vaccine" or "stay at home until there's more testing", or "stay at home until this is all over". The goalposts keep moving. We're at over 30 million unemployed. 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed. Some reports say that if this continues, up to 7.5 million small business could permanently close. At what point do we have to say enough is enough? That's what I'm trying to get at! At what point Wesley?
24 and under, you're more likely to get struck by lightning than die of Corona. 54 and under, 0.0046% chance of death from Corona. I'll take those odds. Almost 40% of deaths are from nursing homes. That's relatively easy to manage. The elderly should be in a stay at home. Everybody else? Idk...
I think with what we know, it's reasonable to give people the CHOICE to return to work. The CHOICE to go out to eat. The CHOICE to go to church. The CHOICE to stay home.
I get that it's really nice for some people to stay at home, collect money for not working, play video games all day, but that isn't sustainable and will end up hurting the country long term. There isn't an easy answer, but I do think some discussion between "OPEN EVERYTHING UP NOW" and "WE GOTTA STAY HOME FOR A CURE" is good.
We're stuck in a situation where our bias is to favor intervention because it allays a number of our unconscious anxieties. This is a common bias that drives a lot of healthcare decisions, but it's not specific to healthcare and is fairly broadly applicable to many facets of life and society. But when applied to healthcare specifically, it certainly has numerous consequences that often aren't perceived by our conscious evaluations (this is true elsewhere, too). I'll occasionally have medical residents or medical students with me and this is often a large point I try to emphasize. Medical training is often very intervention-focused. It requires larger contexts to be able to tolerate the anxiety to goes along with "doing nothing." The example I generally give is that of whether or not you should anti-coagulate (provide blood thinners to) someone with atrial fibrillation. It's a fairly simple and not-too-uncommon scenario that can be applicable to many other decisions. Atrial fibrillation is an arrhythmia that can lead to pooling of blood that may make one more likely to develop clots that then can pass out of the heart and, for instance, create an ischemic stroke in the brain. But putting someone on a blood thinner comes at it's own risks (risk of bleeding). The reason I use this scenario is because it's easier for people to put themselves in the shoes of someone making a decision on whether or not to anticoagulate a patient. When this hypothetical patient comes in, you will weigh out the risks vs. the benefits and ultimately arrive at some decision. A rhetorical question is posed about potential adverse outcomes of each decision. In the event that you decide to anticoagulate, the patient ends up having a fall, has a brain bleed, ends up on a ventilator in an ICU for 2 weeks, then dies. Nobody wants a patient to die, but the anxiety about this is assuaged by reassurances that one took a calculated risk to help an individual, and that this, while unpleasant, is part of a risk that was taken. The second scenario is that this same patient comes to clinic and a decision is made to
not anticoagulate. This patient then ends up having a massive stroke, ends up on a ventilator in an ICU for two weeks, then dies. The subjective experience of the healthcare provider who participated in the decision is generally quite different in each of these scenarios, but in reality each scenario required a calculated risk that has no guarantees. As a general trend, there would be much more anxiety (guilt or second-guessing) in the individual that had an adverse outcomes related to
withholding intervention rather than those who had an adverse outcome by
providing an intervention. The second is much more likely to wonder "I could have saved this person, why did I do nothing?" But the first is reassured that their actions to intervene is evidence of actively attempting help a patient (and evidence of caring), and the insecurities one may feel is much more effectively mitigated than in the alternative scenario where they may feel that they should have been more proactive.
We're at a similar junction as a society. It's much easier on the psyche to tolerate indirect deaths that result from active measures that we're taking. It's much more psychologically distressing to our society to feel like deaths have happened because we feel that
we allowed them to. When we collectively have these emotional biases, it facilitates us tolerating decisions that may not actually be better for the collective good, but is much more effective at pacifying our anxieties about current crises.
