“The Cure is Worse that the Disease” Narratives Are Miscalculating the Damage of the Disease

Thanks for collecting all of this information. As you might expect I read it in detail, and I think there are some important gaps in logic and data that need to be brought to light lest people draw an incorrect conclusion. I’ve been watching pundits taking insane stands that its somehow morally ok to sacrifice the elderly for economic growth, and I know you don’t intend to be fodder for those kinds of talking points.

1. It’s important to look at cases where a targeted containment approach was taken, such as South Korea. They got hit the same time as us, and if they emerge from it before us it’s because they reacted decisively with TESTS & DATA and targeted containment. Had the US responded in Jan or early Feb with a massive commitment to testing then broad-based quarantines might not have been needed and resource deployment would have been predictable. I cannot understate how catastrophic the CDC’s continued failure to produce adequate test has been on the health crisis and subsequently the required response. The faster the testing changes the shorter the first cycle of broad-based quarantine will need to be.
2. In your analysis it seems you attribute the entire loss of GDP and Stock Market Value to mandatory quarantine — not to the pandemic itself. What makes you think that if all cities & states across the US removed their quarantine recommendations that business would bounce back to normal? Conferences restarting? People resuming dining out? Rebooking that cruise while infection rates in major US metros go exponential? What about the risk of the healthcare segment collapsing, which is 20% of GDP? Is it just the quarantine or do humans avoid activities that might make them sick if they can? In NYC I can tell you that it was private schools, private business and non-government organizations that first to start closing to protect employees and patrons before the local government mandated anything. Many responsible business owners and citizens saw the threat and reacted out of responsibility to the community rather than pure economic self-interest.
3. You mention the bad data and the unreliable stats on mortality and infection rates. Its this unknown that makes a modeling exercise like this a shot in the dark. It’s called the Novel Corona Virus for a reason — it’s new and scientifically we don’t yet know how our bodies or different populations react to it. I encourage you to have a look at this running tally of actual infections and deaths by country. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ A few things should really jump off the page at you:
4. The number of confirmed infections in Italy 69k number of deaths 6.8k — that’s about 10%, which suggests either a ~10% death rate or a grossly under-estimated infection rate. Either one is very bad news for the rest of the world that’s trying to figure out what it might do to their own population. And very bad for predictive models.
5. Take a hard look at the ‘resolved cases’ a problem with the running tally is that some people are 2 days in and are ‘mild’ but those same people might be critical by day 14, and some number of them dead by day x. Out of the 131k ‘closed cases’ — meaning people are either confirmed healed or confirmed dead 85% recovered (great!) 15% are dead (very, very bad). I’m not suggesting 15% as a proxy for death rate — but I am reinforcing the fact that so little is known about this virus today models suggesting the “cure is worse than the disease” is speculation at best — and dangerous at worst.
6. I think there is some misunderstanding about what ‘flattening the curve’ does, and why despite there being a 12–18 month cycle on this virus it doesn’t have to mean 12–18 months of quarantine.
7. Again — we are forced into mass isolation/distancing now to lack of testing — which would have allowed us to isolate more surgically. Right now quarantine its our only defense against our healthcare system crashing (not enough beds, not enough respirators, potential collapse of frontline medical professionals).
8. However, IF we could only get testing into distribution so that people without symptoms can also be tested — then we can be prepared the second wave. With sufficient tests, then asymptomatic people can be required to quarantine — as the general population returns to ‘normal’ there will be another outbreak — but at more manageable levels over a longer period of time and hopefully with better insights into effective treatments.

So, we disagree — but at least you know I take you seriously.