May 2: How many deaths are realated to COVID-19?

I continue to be baffled by the desire of so many to downplay the death toll of this virus. Why is this happening? I really hate to think that many are ready to trade-off life for economic recovery, as if this were really a dichotomy. I'm not the only one who thinks that economic recovery will start only when people will feel safe. People will not feel safe as long as they don't know who is contagious, and are assured that the medical system can take care of them, with adequate availability and, as soon as possible, effective therapies (while we wait for the vaccine). The upshot is that prioritizing safety by opening up slowly and making sure that we don't cause new waves, is ALSO the best path to recovery. Let me stress again that we DO have to start allowing people to get out of their houses to go back to work. Clearly we cannot stay home forever.... Even that does not make the virus "go away" . It's still out there waiting for us to come out... but, if we did manage to stop the spread, we are in a position, via testing, distancing, masks, etc. to keep it "down" and medically manageable. Still this needs to be done with extremely careful planning around the notion that the virus will continue to be present and will continue to infect people as long as there are available "hosts". We need to figure out how to co-exist, by keeping the infection rate as low as possible so we (let me repeat) can buy time to develop therapies and ultimately a vaccine. The name of the game is to prevent death as much as reasonably possible. It's no consolation to me that "in the scheme of things" my own personal risk of dying is still "low". Even 3 million deaths in the US would mean that each of us would have only a 1% chance of dying ... (aside from age and other considerations). Would that be OK? is it OK that 65K have already died and we'll probably double that before the "first wave" is over? And to all the folks that insist on claiming that other causes of death are being labeled "COVID" for some nefarious political reasons, let me point out the same death rates have happened everywhere else in the world both with leftists and rightist governments. The best way to view the effect of this virus is simply to compare current death rates with those of past times when Covid-19 was not around. Red lines below show current rates compared with historical death rates for all reasons. Graphs are for NYC and several other nations (you need to click on the NYC graph to see the bottom part.. sorry). BTW, the bend of the curves downward correspond to the enactment of stay-at-home rules and/other distancing restrictions. Without those measures the red line would go up until most of the population is infected and some percentage (still unclear) would die (including a high % of medical personnel in overwhelmed medical systems).

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