How would the coronavirus have played out if we did nothing? similar? 10% worse? 2X worse? 5X worse?

Great post. I agree. Is all this simplistic bumper sticker like info around. I think the main reason was just we wanted to be cautious but I personally don't think the lockdown has had much of an effect. I mean maybe it would have been ten 20% higher infection rates over the course of the last couple of months. I would say people just wanted to see if we could come up with some good drugs are vaccine really quickly. So it was good to be cautious but we kind of have a better understanding now and can slowly go back to normal

If our whole society was <50, I'd honestly be fine with a steady rollback. People wear masks and try to keep transmissions slow, not all at once. Some younger people do have bad reactions, and some do die.

But I have parents that are 65, and many do too. If we let this because omnipresent in society, would you want to risk your parent dying a terrible death? Not worth it.

I assume you mean if we just carried on and dealt with it like we do the flu every year. Probably would have had 20% higher infection rate across the boards nothing crazy but at least we have had time to develop better treatments and work towards a vaccine

Swaglord_the_real_one wrote:

If our whole society was <50, I'd honestly be fine with a steady rollback. People wear masks and try to keep transmissions slow, not all at once. Some younger people do have bad reactions, and some do die.

But I have parents that are 65, and many do too. If we let this because omnipresent in society, would you want to risk your parent dying a terrible death? Not worth it.

I think the contention of the original post is that it is already omnipresent

He's basically challenging the notion that you can only transmit a virus when you have an acute infection

he's saying the actual science is much more complex and that people can transmit viruses for years after they've become seriously ill from them or had and acute immune system response. If you actually read papers in the NIH database you can see that our understanding of virology is much more complex and also the science is not even clear. Most of the studies indicate that respiratory viruses can stay in the air for Days Inn in door situations and also people can transmit them for months this goes against the simple notion that simply washing your hands and not touching your face and wearing a mask will keep you safe. I tend to agree that we like to live by simple fairy tales which do not carry the subtleties of life capture the subtleties of life

Ezrun wrote:

Great post. I agree. Is all this simplistic bumper sticker like info around. I think the main reason was just we wanted to be cautious but I personally don't think the lockdown has had much of an effect. I mean maybe it would have been ten 20% higher infection rates over the course of the last couple of months. I would say people just wanted to see if we could come up with some good drugs are vaccine really quickly. So it was good to be cautious but we kind of have a better understanding now and can slowly go back to normal

Tbh, I think the shutdown saved a lot of lives. I think it would have been 10x worse at a minimum if we did nothing. The fact that this virus has steadily killed 2k Americans per day while everyone was doing their best to stay home and limit contact means it would have absolutely ravaged us if we didn’t change our habits drastically.

Why not just isolate the vulnerable portion of society and let the rest carry on with being productive. I know some will counter that 50% or more of the population is vulnerable but sometimes people have to make a Call of what they do. I'm just saying why not let people that want to self isolate and let others try to be productive how does controlling other people make you safe

What do you actually base that on? Obviously people are still getting infected and dying even with stay-at-home orders so how would having people carry on with life as normal have made it ten times worse? I think most of the deaths happened because it hit before we even realized and New York City was especially vulnerable cuz of the subway system. If people are getting it during stay-at-home orders how would have been ten times worse

the projections for how bad it would be if we took precautions have proven to be very very accurate so I would tend to place a lot of value in their estimates of up to 2 million deaths if we didn't do anything.

in short: most expert projections said if we did a lockdown and social distanced we could expect ~100k-250k deaths as most likely outcome. This seems very likely to be the case now. The latest iMHE projection is 113k-225k by Aug 4. So thy might have been a bit low, since we still have almost half the year left then, but remarkable close given all the variables. definitely close enough to lend credence to their methods.

So these sam projections were predicting up to 2 million deaths if we did nothing. So given the high level of accuracy of there projections so far, I'd have to have a pretty compelling reason to doubt their 'as many as 2 million' projections.

Experts were right, internet morans were resoundingly wrong. Again.

MidFootStriker wrote:

Why not just isolate the vulnerable portion of society and let the rest carry on with being productive.

Exactly.

Quarantine Fauci and Bill Gates.

Let the rest of us continue making our own decisions and living in peace.

At no point have the experts been correct.

It would be a lot worse. Study exponential growth.

HeroesForGhosts wrote:

At no point have the experts been correct.

honestly, what are you talking about?

they predicted pretty much exactly what has happened so far. It's not their fault if you don't know how to read a projection.

and if you turn around and say something along the lines of

"they said 2 million!!! where's the 2 million!!"

you're just exposing yourself as dishonest, misinformed or just plain dumb.

HeroesForGhosts wrote:

At no point have the experts been correct.

Especially Donald J. Trump!

lol

But the lockdowns only flatten the curve. The same number will get infected or probably more will by not allwowing for natural herd immunity to happen quickly. Flattening the curve was to allow for more hospital beds which don't really save that many anyway. And less than 1% of hospitals were overwhelmed so I don't think the total death count would be any different at the end even though it would be higher in the short run. More important is that experts predict that our shutdown will cause an additional 10 million to die of starvation in the world. So we didn't really save anyone, just prolonged a few lives by 3 months and we murdered 10 million.

flatter than you wrote:

But the lockdowns only flatten the curve. The same number will get infected or probably more will by not allwowing for natural herd immunity to happen quickly. Flattening the curve was to allow for more hospital beds which don't really save that many anyway. And less than 1% of hospitals were overwhelmed so I don't think the total death count would be any different at the end even though it would be higher in the short run. More important is that experts predict that our shutdown will cause an additional 10 million to die of starvation in the world. So we didn't really save anyone, just prolonged a few lives by 3 months and we murdered 10 million.

We are a country that burns food to prop up prices, so don't tell me about a lockdown being the reason for people starving.

Also, you're presuming that we will never come up with a treatment or vaccine that can mitigate some of the losses. If we let it rip through the country and kill 2 million people in the name of the economy and then 3 months later we discovered a treatment that would have saved many or most of those lives........how king sick would that be?

Also it's amazing how people use evidence of non-overcrowded hospitals during a lockdown as evidence that a lockdown isn't needed to prevent overcrowding. If I have to explain the faulty logic of that to you, you're probably beyond hope anyway.

After reading that rambling post, I can understand how you flunked out of med school.

And why ask these questions "How would the coronavirus have played out if we did nothing? similar? 10% worse? 2X worse? 5X worse?" if you can't even be bothered to give your own opinion on them?

There is too much wrong here for me to debunk in one sitting but the reason we "all" dont get colds/flu at once is we have varying levels of resistance. Many people have antibodies to the less virulent coronaviruses, probably same for rhinovirus etc. Also some infections are asymptomatic, also some simply are careful or don't have significant exposures.

With flu, if you have seen a similar strain before, you may have some level of immunity. This is (in part) why pandemic flu episodes hit demographics differently. The greater the "newness" of the flu strain though, the more people are naive. We don't forget what flu strains we have seen, they just change a lot and we do forget to an extent so we wind up with poor but measurable immunity as a whole. Usually not zero immunity though.

With CV19, we have no immunity. I don't believe its "airborne" as you describe but small droplet transmission is similar in many ways and is surely a factor in enclosed spaces. Indeed, the factor I would guess.

HeroesForGhosts wrote:

At no point have the experts been correct.

argument is over wrote:

honestly, what are you talking about?

they predicted pretty much exactly what has happened so far.

It's not their fault if you don't know how to read a projection.

They predicted that you're a clueless imbecile.