In their attempts to reopen economies and relax social distancing measures, many people (including Trump, Boris Johnson, Dr. Michael Katz, Thomas Friedman) make unfounded claims like Covid-19 is not that dangerous, it's like a bad flu, you can't hide from germs, you're going to catch it eventually, anyway, so why not just go out and get it over with.
Problem #1: We do not currently know if people gain any robust, long-term immunity that protects them from future infections
Problem #2: There
is evidence that the newer
mutant strain that evolved in Europe and has become the dominant strain
worldwide, is both more infectious and makes people prone to 2nd
infections,
Problem #3: It's already clear that this is much worse than a bad
flu. In a bad flu season (Oct-April), we generally get around 50-60,000
deaths in the U.S., primarily among the very old, infants, and
immune-compromised. Whereas with covid-19, we already have nearly 80,000
deaths, and that was primarily from Feb-April. Since we know this is
going to continue for another 12-24 months, we can assume there will be at least tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of more deaths by the end of the pandemic, even if the nominal mitigation efforts
currently in place continue.
One of the big problems with people like Katz, Friedman, Trump
and Johnson, and others who claim the "cure" is worse than the disease, and who are calling for us to just go out there and take our chances with this "bad flu,"
catch our immunity and move on, is that they don't bother to
extrapolate the number of deaths that would occur, let alone put that
into a context that is meaningful to the general public.
But here's an attempt:
- Because Covid-19 a brand new zoonosis, humans have no natural immunity (unlike the flu, where we have been exposed to dozens of different flu strains over our lives and have developed immunity to many of them. And there are vaccines. This gives us the possibility of some protection against novel flu viruses). Consequently, in a typical flu season, 9-40 million Americans catch the disease, which translates to 2.5%-12% of the population.
- With Covid-19, we have no natural immunity, nor a vaccine, which means almost everyone is vulnerable. Consequently, the CDC and WHO predict that, without mitigation, 60-70% of all humans will catch the disease.
- In the U.S., that translates to 196-230 million people getting infected.
- Even if no one died, and if only 10% of these people got too sick to work, that's still 19-23 million people not working. When you consider that we currently have 30 million unemployed (official count), we are now looking at the disease doing as much damage to the economy as the "cure."
- But that's assuming it spreads in a random, heterogeneous manner. In reality, diseases don't spread heterogeneously. For example, Amazon warehouses, food warehouses, grocery stores, nursing homes, meat processing plants, are all places where we've already seen the disease spread rapidly among workers or patients who, by the nature of these facilities, are either crammed close together or have human vectors (eg nursing homes) passing the disease from person to person.
- So, if we let the disease run its course and see millions of people too sick to work, with concentrations in the food industry, we could see severe food shortages, even in a wealthy country like the U.S. In poor countries, particularly war-torn ones, it is nearly certain that we will see famines of biblical proportions.
- Now let's talk about deaths, since that's what really scares people. If we take the WHO-estimate of 3.8% mortality and multiply it times 200 million sick Americans, we're talking about 7,600,000 deaths, which would easily be the deadliest pandemic in history. The Spanish flu, which up until now was the deadliest pandemic in history (at least that we're aware of) killed 675,000 Americans and 50-100 million people worldwide.
- But the true mortality rate is, no doubt, lower than 3.8%. Let's be generous and give Covid-19 the same mortality rate as a bad flu (0.1%). That would still translate into 200,000 deaths, which is far worse than seasonal flu, and serious enough that to suggest we should just let it run its course, rather than doing everything in our power to mitigate it and reduce the deaths, is like proposing premeditated mass murder, just so the economy can reopen.
- The actual mortality rate, however, may actually fall somewhere between 3.8% and 0.1%. We just won't know for a while, probably not for a few years. But let's say it's actually 1%. That would translate into 2 million deaths.
No comments:
Post a Comment