Even assuming that coronavirus deaths in the United States increase by a factor of one thousand over the year, the resulting deaths would only outnumber annual traffic deaths by 2,200.
It is unsound to compare a relatively stable number (traffic deaths) to an exponential (the coronavirus). I hope that she will re-think and retract.
She writes as if increasing by a factor of 1000 is some sort of ridiculous upper bound. In fact, if we were to go ahead with business as usual and not do self-quarantining and social distancing, we would have to be darn lucky to have deaths increase only by a factor of 1000.
Lately, the number of cases in the U.S. and many European countries seems to be doubling every three days. If that pace continues, then in thirty days the number of cases will already be one thousand times what we have today. And in another two weeks, it would be 32,000 times the number of cases today.
Given this rate of spreading, one can expect that the number of deaths would double more rapidly than the number of cases. That is because the health care system would be overwhelmed. There would be too many critically ill patients to be able to treat them all.
As of Friday afternoon, there were about 2000 cases in the U.S. If 1000x were the upper bound for the spread of the virus, then we would see 2 million cases. If I thought that Americans could go about our normal business and have no more than 2 million cases, I would advocate going about our normal business. But instead, even with the actions that we have taken to date (note that these are less drastic than actions taken in several other countries), I think that holding the number of cases to 2 million would be optimistic.
I hope that I turn out to be foolishly alarmed about the way that this virus spreads. But to me, the exponential looks formidable.
Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen points to the British policy. As far as I can tell, they seem to be saying that you only need to worry about isolating known cases.
Some critics believe that the British approach will not slow the spread of the virus, and that the Brits know this. These critics see the Brits as consciously preferring to expose a large share of their population soon, on the theory that once they have immunity the crisis will be behind them.
The potential downside of that approach is that they might soon see their medical facilities overwhelmed, so that more cases become severe and fatal than otherwise might be the case. But if not, and their approach works, then they can certainly laugh at the rest of us.
Also, perhaps by the time you read this the Brits will have re-thought and retracted.