Action was taken so the final death toll and peak daily deaths will not come anywhere close to these numbers in the US and UK: My do nothing model would of peaked at about 5,000 deaths a day for the UK sometime in June: 250,000 total dead by end of August. And a peak of 25,000 deaths a day for the US sometime in June as well : 1 million dead by August. UK is already at 700 deaths per day so 5,000 a day in a few months doesn't sound far fetched if nothing had been done to flatten the curve. The US is a bit harder to believe, 25,000 a day as currently there are only about 1,500 deaths per day. But i guess we would have been at 3,000 already if nothing had been done. A country like Sweden with a do nothing approach would peak out at just 800 deaths per day because they only have a 10million population. That is why they can risk doing almost nothing. Although i still think they will be forced to do stricter lockdowns soon. Action was taken so the final death toll and peak daily deaths will not come anywhere close to these numbers in the US and UK. But was the economic damage worth it to save those lives?
Just think how many doctors, nurses, first responders etc would be part of those statistics had we not shut things down?? The economic pain hurts for those who haven’t lost anyone or been affected. Others have lost family and friends and couldn’t give a fuck what their March 401k looked like.
You are closing out 3 probabilities that are severe What if the virus mutates heavily once its spreaded enough oftwn What if the virus does long term irreversible damage to the lungs? What if we had a quicktest by end of summer that allows to save 30 or more percent from ever getting infected?
it is a valid question: there are 3,28 7 (on aver) driving fatalities every day; we think that is worth it; smoking causes over 1300 deaths per day and that seems worth it; drug overdose deaths or alcohol-related deaths are only slightly behind. We are saturated with death everyday - so are the massive measures for coronavirus reasonable compared to other things that kill us?
If nothing was done and this was allowed to play out, I think citizens themselves would have gone into self imposed isolation (best case scenario). The Americans would of course shoot anyone who got within 50 feet of their house, and I bet that in the end, more people would have died from Americans killing each other than from the virus perhaps. I really do think that had this played out in other ways, the end result would been likely worse. Imagine the governments telling you to continue to go to work while in your own office tower, bodies start to pile up. The frontline healthcare workers would all walk off the job because instead of just seeing hundreds of patients a day, they would have thousands of very angry people. The military would have to be called in to control the riots. Look at Ecuador where bodies are piling up on the streets, and now imagine that on a bigger scale in more dense areas. Who in their right mind is going to go to work or who will go shopping? Given the extreme population densities of today, chaos would have taken over and the bloodshed, simply from the fighting, would have been perhaps an even bigger problem. Then citizens would be wondering why the government didn't shut down the cities in order to curtail the virus from spreading. I honestly think that the situation we are in now is perhaps the best out come possible. We got a glimpse of what happened in Spain and Italy, and NY is perhaps going to be the worse case scenario in the US. But if nothing was done, the chaos in NY would have been practically every major US city, and of course much worse since the infections would have been magnitudes higher.
I made this argument too...why has smoking not been banned yet? Oh, it would reduce tax revenue and lose votes. That's why. Politicians don't care if you live or die. They just care about being reelected.