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

The OP asks a good question, but it's not as simple as just saying 10x or 5x more cases.

In a typical flu season, it's not uncommon for a third of an office to get the flu around the same time. Imagine that happened with Covid 19 and out of either being too sick to work, fear of getting the disease or fear of giving it to someone else, workers in truly essential areas stopped going to work for even a few days. I'm talking primarily about water, electric, internet, mobile phone service. law enforcement, and the pipeline of services that gets food on your table.

The result would be chaos. Initially, looting and violence would break out in the cities. Fires would be started and would rage out of control because not enough firefighters would show up to fight the fire. Millions would flee from cities. This breakdown of civilized society would be extremely rapid. If water, electricity, and food supply was cut off to a city like New York, it would look like a war zone in less than a week.

I'm not saying this is what would have happened. I'm saying this would have been a possibility. I think that, behind closed doors, this is what mayors, governors, etc were fearing and frankly still are fearing.

Lmao, okay, pal.

Source: the crack on your butt.

Humans are imperfect, like every other machine. There are an infinite number of things that can require outside intervention. A healthy lifestyle is important, but it won’t save you from rabies or polio. It won’t save you from toxins, poison, or venom. It won’t save you from cancer or a near-fatal car crash. It won’t save you from an infected wound. A healthy lifestyle minimizes human flaws, but you still have the fatal flaw of being human.

That’s not how exponential functions work, bro.

Life would have gone on as normal.

Where is Sweden's exponential growth stupid. They never reached over 80% ICU capacity. We aren't sparing anyone we are just dragging this out causing more economic damage and hurting quality of life which in turn will kill more. This went from slow the curve to not overwhelm hospitals to we can't let anyone die ever. Even with a vaccine this won't be eradicated. You fools can't counter these simple truths you just keeping crying the sky is falling.

You and Jesse have been the biggest whiners. Stay in your mom's basement, wearing your masks, fantasizing about socialism and post all day but the rest of us are ready to live.

flatter than you wrote:

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.

this really is the new talking point they're receiving through their helmets.

jesus mary and joseph wrote:

Blackjack Pershing wrote:

The krauts we’re charging at is across no man’s land and we mowed them down with machine guns.

Only 1% made it to our lines, so I guess we didn’t need the machine guns after all.

This is quite possibly the dumbest analogy I've ever seen.

I think what was trying to say is that those who are against the shutdown shouldn't take the outcome(lower infection & death rate) which was the result of aggressive shutdown measures as reasoning for no restrictions. The lower numbers are because aggressive measures have worked.

How it quickly overtook meat packing plants is an example of unrestricted commerce during Covid.

The virus is still in charge. Not taking measures is folly.

This isn't just about saving old people.

It's about maintaining enough sheild to be able to keep infrastructure such as meat supply from cratering.

Or utilities. Or healthcare.

.... Answer to OP??

1000% worse.

MidFootStriker wrote:

Victim 45671 wrote:

Sweden? You mean the country that has 9x the death/1mm ratio as their neighbors Norway and Finland? Yeah, great example. Sign me up for that.

This is exactly the type of idiot answer that made me write the post

You're an idiot!

LOL! Yeah, right. You made your own rambling post to start this thread in alleged anticipation of the replies it may get that you may deem idiotic before they were ever drafted.

Look at yourself. You bash a guy's answer to a question that YOU posed and STILL have never provided ANY opinion on yourself. Do you have even one?

A lot of our best studied meds give marginal benefit for chronic illnesses where diet and exercise are proven to be much more powerful. Half of my time in primary care with patients focusing on lifestyle changes. I can't out medicate what some people eat. Most of life expectancy gains over the last 150 years are probably due to sanitation, clean water etc stable food supply and better treatment of infectious disease with antibiotics and vaccines.

Kvothe wrote:

It would be a lot worse. Study exponential growth.

This is what I've been saying all along! If we did nothing I could easily see 100's of millions of Americans killed by this horrible, horrible virus. Stay Inside! I refuse to die for your salon appointment. Stay Inside!

As far as I'm concerned the shutdown was close to worthless. Yes it prevented deaths, but since this virus is really impacting the very very frail a huge percent of the deaths prevented are still going to be people dieing of other causes in the next year.

If we did nothing in 90% of the US except stopped mass gathering it would not have overloaded healthcare. What happened in New York city was based on population density and there are a few selected places where the virus could strike at that level over a short period of time. Also since New York already has at least 25%-30% infected, it would leveled off as they moved towards herd immunity.

If we had not shutdown we would be in a much better place economically and effects of these continued shutdowns will last for years. I don't know if people have accepted that if the goal is to not get the virus these shutdowns need to last for 14-20 more months. Around 10% of the country already has had the virus. It is so widespread any idea of stopping it is out the window. Even countries like South Korea that have stopped it are extremely vulnerable to another outbreak sine it take 2 weeks to show symptoms. They also have to isolate themselves from the rest of the world until there is a vaccine which is bad for business.

A year from now when we have the total deaths over a full year we are going to find that total death toll did not increase by the number of Coronavirus deaths. A huge number of those deaths were just pushed forward a few weeks or months. Right now we are just delaying the inevitable at a huge economic and social expense

Yes. Again, we are not SAVING LIVES by staying at home but PROLONGING DEATHS

Stop. The. Tongue-in-cheek. Dis. In. For. Ma. Shun.

If it was actually ubiquitous, then we'd have homogeneous transmission throughout the country, and presumably similar death rates in each region with some adjustments for age and condition. But we don't. Moreover, the transmission rates have fallen dramatically because of social distancing. We were getting 10-20% or more new cases as a percentage of total cases back in March and part of April. For a long time, cases were growing at about 30k/day. As total cases increased, the percentage growth in cases decreased markedly even as new cases were flat. That means that each sick person was infecting fewer sick people. This didn't stop the virus cold because we were not testing very widely, contact tracing, and isolating individuals from their families. But it did decrease the proportion of people who caught it from those who had it, from 20-25% of total cases per day to 1/70th yesterday, about 22k/1.4 million. At least 83,664 have died in the U.S. of this, really a good deal more not yet identified because death certificates take 1-8 weeks to be issued, sometimes more. With 64 million cases, the # of flu cases last year, we'd have at least ten times this # of deaths and health systems throughout the country would be collapsing.

Go to encoronavirus.org and you will see lots of examples of how interventions save lives. Countries that moved fast to effectively test, trace and isolate had a huge advantage over those who were behind. Compare S. Korea with the US. S. Korea got their first confirmed positive the day after the US got its first confirmed positive. S. Korea ramped up testing to over 300k while the US was at just under 1,000 by the end of February. Now, Iowa has more deaths and positive cases that all of S. Korea. Iowa's population is just over 3 mil. S. Korea is 51 mil.

Germany has also been a leader with excellent measures like their corona virus taxis that transport potential positives for testing and treatment instead of having people wandering around health care facilities infecting everyone. Germany's death rate is 93 per million. US is 253 with New York at almost 1,400 per million.

So, within the realm of those who did too little too late and those who were early and effective you see huge disparities in the outcomes. To then think that things wouldn't have been much worse in the US without social distancing measures is just completely ridiculous.

And for those who point to Sweden, they are not an example of doing nothing. Sweden was very early in testing and tracing, much like S. Korea. That creates a huge advantage by keeping community spread in check. Sweden does have restrictions. Events with more than 50 people have been banned and high schools and colleges are closed. But Swedes are doing a lot of social distancing, just not under the threat of a government order. Bars and restaurants in Sweden are doing table service only to minimize crowds. Many bars in Sweden are closed because table service reduces the number of people that they can have by about 3/4th. Most Swedes are working from home and no one is travelling. In many ways, Swedes have done more social distancing under their voluntary system than people in the US have done with mandatory directives from the government.

If you want to see corona virus unchained, Tanzania may be the best (worst) example. The president of Tanzania makes Trump look like Angela Merkel. He has urged people to go to church/mosque because he believes that prayer will protect people from the virus. The capital Dar es Salaam is overrun with the virus and hospitals are filled with COVID 19 patients.

Russia and Brazil may be the next best (worst) examples of close to do nothing approach. Putin put in place lockdown measures, but was too late and is now lifting them when the country is still seeing 10k+ positives a day. Brazil is a mess with governors and local officials trying to implement lockdowns, only to have Bolsinaro try to overrule them. The country is on the verge of a military coup because the virus is raging through the country.

Why is the title of this post in the past tense? We are still in the middle of this situation.

As of my typing right now we've lost 83K nationally, and the peak isn't here. Flyover states are about to be hit hard, so we'll easily double that number by the time we're back to flat - assuming this doesn't carry over into the fall and winter.

Even the feds are saying that number now, 150-170K US deaths from this.

And that's with lockdowns. You're about to see, in states such as Iowa which didn't mandate lockdowns, how bad it can get. Extrapolating that, had we done nothing, we'll see the estimate.

I'm saying 1.5-2 million US deaths had we done nothing, and that's only in 2020.

Ive been in the danger zone in ICU filled with COVID patients. I can say this to quote a badass Vietnam vet

“Best weather predictions are always made the day after”.

I think you misunderstand what a lot of people in this thread are trying to say.

"Go to endcoronavirus.org and you will see lots of examples of how interventions save lives. Countries that moved fast to effectively test, trace and isolate had a huge advantage over those who were behind. Compare S. Korea with the US. S. Korea got their first confirmed positive the day after the US got its first confirmed positive. S. Korea ramped up testing to over 300k while the US was at just under 1,000 by the end of February. Now, Iowa has more deaths and positive cases that all of S. Korea. Iowa's population is just over 3 mil. S. Korea is 51 mil"

Your paragraph talks about COVID-19 as if it's over, that it's gone, and it's not coming back. This is obviously not the case. There is no cure. There are barely any treatments. All these other nations have done is extend the timeframe for the current death toll in the hopes someone can find a cure or at least effective treatments.

Everyone has been told that the plan is to flatten the curve. The states hardest impact so far have appeared to have done that. However, it's a false premise that this will ultimately save anyone. It will only save the healthcare system from becoming overwhelmed so other deats unrelated to COVID-19 can be avoided. There will continue to be death until their is a cure or some kind of treatment. How long we want to see when that will happen is what everyone is arguing about!