I understand their thinking because not working is causing a massive amount of collateral damage, but the virus doesn't care about any of that. If everyone goes back to normal too early, this all just starts over, and folks are forced to be inside even longer, there's just no way around it.
This is wrong. We are not forced to be inside because of the virus. It would have been totally possible to have this pandemic going on with zero lockdowns, which would have probably led to worse health effects, and less-bad economic effects.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people claim that we must lock down or that the virus is forcing us to do this or that, as opposed to it being a political choice based on tradeoffs.
In fact, I predict that after things open up, they will not shut back down, no matter how bad the second wave of the outbreak gets. People simply won't accept it.
It’s a false choice between the economy and people’s lives.
The problem is that while labor economy was shut down, the financial system was not, so that rents and debts had to flow out of people that could not generate income, and the government has been ignoring the issue with nominal support.
Not freezing debts/rents across the entire economy is how this whole thing spins into a depression
If you're a renter you live in a home that a landlord built or paid someone else to build. And if people stop paying rent then they stop paying people to build. Construction workers lose their jobs and our housing problems are made worse.
And don't have any illusions about the rich losing here. Most units are owned by small time landlords who will be wiped out by a rent freeze. Those units will be gobbled up on the cheap by rich people that can borrow money at cheap rates.
> And if people stop paying rent then they stop paying people to build. Construction workers lose their jobs and our housing problems are made worse.
So what? They've already stopped paying people to build. Construction workers have lost their jobs already. While having to keep paying their rent, or mortgage.
This is a temporary disruption, and needs temporary, stop-gap measures to stop the bleeding. Nobody's advocating to stop all rents forever.
> And don't have any illusions about the rich losing here. Most units are owned by small time landlords who will be wiped out by a rent freeze.
1. No, they aren't. Most units are owned by real estate companies.
2. Couple it with a mortgage freeze, and none of them will be wiped out. You can, in fact, kick this can up the hill until it hits the capital markets...
The “lockdown” is a Fabian strategy; one of the goals is to preserve our ability to stage an economic comeback after the health crisis has been resolved. In the near term, the economy is toast no matter what we do (short of a well oiled contact tracing and isolating machine).
Even if widespread shelter-in-place orders were not in effect, if the virus spread through a lot of the people in a town, you can bet that people wouldn't be going out as usual. Nobody* will be eating at restaurants if they hear dozens of people in town got sick while eating out and died because local hospitals are over capacity.
I don't think that's true. The mindset I've consistently seen is that people do agree with the dichotomy, and are just willing to sacrifice the economy because they don't think it's very important. How many times has the line been trotted out that we can't sacrifice human lives for the sake of the economy?
First of all, that number is clearly exaggerated. No current evidence supports the claim that a million people in the USA dying of covid is remotely plausible.
Now to the substance of your argument: this has little to do with capitalism. If most people are not working for a long period of time, in any society, even a non-capitalist one, then that society will rapidly become dramatically materially poorer.
We make choices to improve material conditions at possibly increased health risks all the time. Longevity is not the only metric for overall quality of life.
I would happily accept some increased risk of my own death for the lockdown to be over. Correctly navigating the tradeoff requires figuring out how much increased risk of death is acceptable, not asserting that it’s zero.
It's not just Covid. If the hospitals are overwhelmed, that car accident you get into means you might not be able to get medical care, causing a small issue to become deadly. You may not be able to get treated for a heart attack.
Further, we are seeing people still testing positive and having health problems over a month after first symptoms. If your entire supply chain is taken out, essential or not, you can end up with larger problems than when you started. If you think it's a problem that the meat packing plant has to close after a single case, wait until 75% of the plant is symptomatic.
Finally, the solution is to have enough tests and contact tracing so that people can confidently open up, knowing that we can stop the rate of transmission. This shutdown should be used to prepare for a way we can safely reopen, a la South Korea.
Without a lockdown, most of the country will eventually be infected. NYC currently has 21000 excess deaths, so extrapolating that to the rest of the country would mean 21000*328M / 10M = 690,000 excess deaths. That's assuming that nobody else in NYC is going to die of Covid 19, even after lifting the lockdown, so this is an extremely conservative projection, and it's already close to 1M deaths.
What's implausible about this? Is Covid 19 less lethal outside NYC? Can R remain below 1 anywhere in the country, without a lockdown?
Lots of current evidence supports the claim. COVID is clearly more contagious than the flu, and herd immunity (without a vaccine) will require between 60-70% of the population to become infected. That's 229M people. COVID is also more fatal than the flu. Its IFR is roughly 1%. So 1% of 229M is 2.3M fatalities, and roughly 20M additional hospitalizations.
If you believe the IFR is lower, say .5% (still over 5x the flu), then you still have the same number of hospitalizations, but just 1.15M fatalities.
If you believe the IFR is the same as the flu (0.1%), then you'll still have 20M hospitalizations and 230K fatalities.
Say we're really lucky, and the IFR is the same as the flu, and we find a therapeutic drug to help treat it, dropping the IFR to half of the flu (0.05%), you have 114800 fatalities, but still the 20M hospitalizations.
The math is just brutal. What will the impact be of 20M hospitalizations, to say nothing of the deaths?
80-90% of people who catch this disease would survive without treatment. If America won't support people who might die of starvation when stuck at home, then the individually smartest response becomes to take their chance with the virus.
I don't need to explain what a 10-20% death rate would do to society, however.
There's also some very concerning long-term effects for those who have recovered. There's a trend of seeing lung-scarring or other things that I'm sure will come up again int 10 or 15 years. Imagine that happening to a large portion of society.
Even recovered people who feel fine can have chronic issues due to the virus. Young, healthy people may come away with serious lung issues without realizing it[1].
Keep in mind death is not the only negative outcome of this. My wife's uncle is relatively young (50s), completely healthy, gainfully employed, and has contracted Covid. He's been in the hospital for over a month, has been on a ventilator for weeks, is currently off but has been in and out of the ICU, his lung has collapsed, he can't feed himself, he can't walk, and he's currently re-learning how to swallow. If he makes it out of the hospital (that's a question mark right now), he's not going to be able to support himself. He won't be able to walk without getting winded so he will need a wheel chair, which will prevent him from doing the job he had before he went in. His experience, which has a decidedly negative economic impact and which is not uncommon for those who have needed to be hospitalized by covid, is completely missing from the "covid only impacts old people who were unproductive and probably would have died anyway" narrative.
This is absolutely true and this would get a lot worse if people decide to end the lockdown early. If one needs money to feed their family now, the chance of them either passing or being incapacitated are not to be taken lightly.
I had hoped the government would freeze all the mortgages, bills and offered real assistance to people in need. The stimulus check for the hoi polloi is a joke. I personally don't need it, why did I get it? I know I could donate it to the poor but that's not the point I'm trying to make. That stimulus seems to be a way of saying "but we already helped you".
I'm sorry to hear that. I'm not arguing that covid only impacts old people, I'm saying 4 things (in general, maybe not the one particular quote above):
a ) covid won't destroy society in any case
b ) we cannot endure a lockdown until the disease is eradicated or a vaccine is produced
c ) a lockdown ended before the disease is eradicated or a vaccine is produced will just lead to a second wave of the disease
d ) the economic burden of the lockdown will increase exponentially as more businesses run dry
I don't want your uncle to be sick. But I'd rather your uncle get sick than have you, your wife, and your uncle lose your jobs; and then have your uncle get sick anyway.
You're getting downvotes but it's true. There are other considerations that are completely being ignored by the ivory tower types. It's shocking to some, but jobs are how people afford to live their lives (buy food, pay rent, pay tax which funds government, etc).
I'm more concerned about social and political unrest that often results from mass unemployment, people losing their homes, not enough to eat, etc than losing people to the virus (which still stucks). 22 million unemployed and growing is enough to swing elections in dark directions...
If 20% die but 8 out of 10 are very old and sick, then globally 4% die who are healthy or not very old.
4% of an (healthy not very old) population dying still means overall the economy would contract by 4% (because product/service demand is down 4%), which would still be the greatest recession in the last 8 decades.
Your comment ("not much") is thus completely false.
Sure, but the idea that this virus kills 20% of all people is stupid. You just made that number up. We don't have much we can do to treat this disease. Nobody believes it would ever go that high. If somehow it does, even more than 80% will be old and sick.
4% of a population dying also does not mean the economy contracts by 4%. You just... made that up too.
Lastly, you've assumed that a 4% annualized economy contraction from one month in a quarter means that we'll see 4% by just keeping this going. That's... wrong. The negative impact of lockdowns will compound. I don't give a shit if the economy shrinks by 4%. It's absolutely fine if we have a bit of a shitty economic time. Prolonged wide scale poverty for millions of people is an entirely different beast.
«kills 20% of all people is stupid. You just made that number up»
I did not claim that. I just took this percentage from the hypothetical situation you used to build an argument (you yourself said if 10-20% die then it wouldn't mean much to the economy.)
«4% of a population dying also does not mean the economy contracts by 4%.»
Yes it does. Basic economics. With everything being equal, the size of an economy is linearly proportional to the number of persons. A population half the size of another one will buy half the number of cars, half the food, will spend half on entertainment, etc. So if 4% of average individuals die worldwide, consumption (thus the economy worldwide) is down 4%. Like I said, it's basic economics.
«Lastly, you've assumed that a 4% annualized economy contraction from one month in a quarter means that we'll see 4% by just keeping this going»
No I don't assume that. Read again what I wrote. I am only talking about the impact of a certain percentage dying, not about the impact of the lockdown.
You sound like Dennis from Always Sunny talking about how girls need to sleep with him if they're alone on a boat because of the implication of what would happen if they refuse, but denying that he actually said anything threatening.
> "I don't need to explain what a 10-20% death rate would do to society, however."
Yes, you didn't claim anything. But the implication is clear. When I responded I assumed you meant 20% CFR.
> Yes it does. Basic economics. With everything being equal, the size of an economy is linearly proportional to the number of persons.
I don't know what else I can say other than this is a dumb statement that you just made up.
* It's not a basic tenant of economics
* All things aren't equal, ever
* It's not a linear relationship, nor even always positively correlated over time depending on context
And lastly if you actually believe your math, then its clear that for any realistic death rate the economic impact is negligible.
Note that you are confusing me with another user (Filligree) who started the thread and initially threw these "10-20%" figures. Personally I do not believe 10-20% of the world population will die.
«I don't know what else I can say other than this is a dumb statement»
Not dumb. It's a good approximation, especially because post-pandemic times (after people have regained their jobs, which might take months/years) will be identical to pre-pandemic times with the ONLY difference being that a certain percentage of Americans will have died prematurely. That percentage will directly translate to an economic loss.
Look, the fact your post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23019875) was severely downvoted indicates most HN users disagree with you. I tried to take the time to explain to you why. You don't get it. I don't have any more energy to spend on this discussion.
You're right, that was another user, rendering most of this moot. I got 3 downvotes, and I don't particularly care if three people disagree with me. Similar opinions expressed elsewhere have gotten more upvotes. Shitty appeal to the people fallacy.
> Not dumb. It's a good approximation, especially because post-pandemic times (after people have regained their jobs, which might take months/years) will be identical to pre-pandemic times with the ONLY difference being that a certain percentage of Americans will have died prematurely. That percentage will directly translate to an economic loss.
This is simply not true. The world does not click back to the state it was with fewer people. Millions of people are now unemployed. Thousands of companies will no longer exist. The lockdown is killing small businesses disproportionately fast and that gap is going to be filled by larger businesses. Larger businesses have fewer local employees. The wealth gap is going to be greatly exacerbated, and this will affect everyone. Supply chains will change, inflation will change, consumer spending habits will change. The economy is going to feel different, and in a large part driven by how long everything takes to restart. x% of people dead meaning x% worse economy is just an irrelevant, naive comment.
I don't really care to debate this further either because... it's not interesting
> If everyone goes back to normal too early, this all just starts over, and folks are forced to be inside even longer, there's just no way around it.
This whole thing just starts over if we EVER go back to normal unless a vaccine is invented. Herd immunity is impossible to achieve during an effective lockdown. It's not like we're any closer to being able to safely resume activities than one month ago. A highly infectious disease with asymptomatic carriers cannot be eradicated.
I hate people saying generic statements like "we have to stay inside until its safe" with no reason to believe its getting safer.
> This whole thing just starts over if we EVER go back to normal unless a vaccine is invented.
We can get to normal faster if effective pharmacological treatments come out from the ongoing trials. If we can treat it, or at least prevent it from being severe, it is not a problem of public health anymore.
Technically true, just as hopeless for any practical time scale. The economic problems of being on lockdown will compound over time. We cannot wait until we have treatments or a vaccine.
