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There is a lot of pent up health care need building up. Some of it lethal.

The impact of the lockdown is going to be 10-100x that of coronavirus itself. No healthcare system is prepared for it.




I agree the lockdown(s) have a real, destructive impact that has to be acknowledged and weighed.

But you blew it with those crazy numbers..


How would the hospital load look like in the US today without lockdowns?


In New York? They’d be fucked. In most of the rest of the country? Simply canceling sporting events, concerts, conventions, and other mass gatherings would probably have been enough. Even the CDC is now saying surface transmission is highly unlikely and that the aforementioned superspreading events were disproportionately responsible for the early exponential growth,


You don’t need a giant gathering to have a potential superspreading event.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/23/missouri-hai...


So a disease that’s easily on its way to being the number 3 or 4 killer in the U.S. this year is going to be outweighed by...what, exactly?



75,000 potential suicides is terrible, but that’s about two orders of magnitude fewer than a reasonable worst case for the virus.

Addendum: and we have financial tools to deal with the economic stress. We don’t have much in the way of treatment for the virus yet.

The fact that we’re not throwing money at the unemployed is a crime.




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