The economic impact will be huge, and I'm really worried about that. This will also force us to look at many things and perhaps make decisions that we've never thought about before. I think an adequate appraisal of the situation is called for, because I think the hysteria is going to have some serious unintended consequences. Obviously there's a huge range of possibilities that can happen, so saying 'have an adequate appraisal' is somewhat of a silly notion. But people out there feeling justified in fomenting fear so that people will "take it seriously" is so incredibly short-sighted. I will grant that many people propagating the fear genuinely believe it. With regard to fear, I'm not talking about taking precautionary measures such as closing schools, working from home, limiting contact, not going out, etc. I'm talking about needless conjecture that has no basis. Something like the idea that's been passed around that 'because the federal government waited, millions will die.' There an idea that if you're not out there subscribing to this thought process, that you're not taking this serious enough and do not understand the gravity of the situation.
I've long believed that there's a certain level of arrogance about the comfort of our current situations. We live in huge outlier of human history. Because we're accustomed to this, we believe this is how things always will be, and we think issues like this are a thing of the past, so we forget how fragile and delicate numerous issues are just because we've lived in times of relative comfort. I was in residency when Ebola started to break out. I wasn't thinking the sky was falling, but I thought it was interesting when people were so invested in dismissing it as a possible threat. I think there was also a lot of subtle cultural elitism / racism involved in this dismissive attitude to the idea of us not being able to have a breakout here as we're watching it happen across West and Central Africa. And keep in mind this is something with a mortality rate up to 90%, and people were saying "yeah, the flu kills a ton. Go get a flu shot." Ebola was luckily contained. At one point the CDC had estimated that over the course of a few months the number of Ebola cases could reach 1.4 million. There's a particular poster here who has rated this current outbreak as a 10. If you go back to
the Ebola thread from 2014, this same person's concern about Ebola after the first case in the US was a 0. They thought it was political media hysteria.
But I digress. The idea that we're somehow immune from an absolute catastrophe happening has been silly. And I think with anything untested that we don't have data on, you have to exhibit some real caution in making declarations of something being safe when it's never been tested. So, to be fair, we don't know exactly what will happen with COVID-19. And yes, the comparison with influenza may not be the best. But I do think it's important for us to assess our underlying assumptions. Yes, we don't have any immunity to corona as we do influenza, so there's concern that it can spread more. The CDC currently estimates that there have been 22,000-55,000 influenza deaths
in the US alone from October 1 - March 7. There have currently been 7,000 deaths
world-wide from corona. China's rate has slowed drastically, if the numbers are to be believed. Yes, they've done some pretty intense quarantines, but also consider that they had absolutely no lead time on this and Wuhan has a population of 8-9 million, and about 18 million in the metropolitan area. China has had 3,213 deaths, again if the numbers are to be believed, and this is stabilizing.
On the other hand, yes. We have to make sure that this doesn't spread so far and wide that it collapses our healthcare system. That's a real concern. Most of that concern comes from watching what's happening with Italy, and it's stated that we're about 11 days behind them, but we're only referencing total numbers. It's important to note that Italy has 1/5 the population we do, that we have 3x the amount of critical care beds, and that their population's median age is nearly 10 years higher. We don't know what will happen here, and it's important to look at what's happening elsewhere, but we also need to look at it from more than one simplistic angle, regardless of which side that data falls on.
Yes, we need to take this seriously. Yes, we need to exhibit cautions as prevention is much easier than cures, even if you overdo it. But no, making claims about millions dying as a result of delayed action not only has no basis, but is not actually helpful. Think beyond this current crisis and think to the next time another infectious disease, or other public health crisis, arises that carries with it an even larger burden of mobidity and mortality. How effective will the short-term strategy of now translate then? Yes, we need to get people to take it seriously. No, beating people over the head with hysterics
will not get them to take it seriously, but will do far, far more damage for the public good and trust the next time a crisis comes along.
tl;dr none of us have any idea what will happen, despite referencing evidence that may lean one way or the other. It's better to be cautious than be sorry, but if you feel people aren't taking something serious enough, simply ratcheting up the fear isn't actually going to change those peoples' behaviors, and in fact may drive them the other way. But you yourself may feel better, even though you have not helped with any change. Try a different approach, because I'd like everyone to be more cautious, too, and I recognize that your behavior "helping" isn't really accomplishing that.
But I've digressed again from my original point. We're going to have to reevaluate many things we've never looked at. Like, many would argue that if we need to have the world shut down for 6-8 months to save 50k lives, then it's worth it. I'm not going to attempt to put any value on life, but if we're quickly determining that if something like that is necessary and that's what we should do, then we'd also have to ask ourselves the question if we should be shutting down the roads so we don't have 40k automobile fatalities each year. That's, again, not an implication of what should or shouldn't be done, but it's important for us to look at some larger applications and scenarios when we're trying to process what the long-term solution to something like this would be in a vacuum.
