There are a lot of people who are calling the social-distancing movement a “panic” that is needlessly wrecking the economy. But I thin we can all agree that it buys us some time by slowing the spread of the virus. Here is a list of advantages that I see from this.
1. We can produce more ventilators before the demand peaks.
2. We can keep our health care workers healthier longer.
3. We can evaluate treatment protocols.
4. We can test many more people, and we can analyze the data we obtain from doing so, before making further course corrections.
5. It is possible that the course correction that we need is even stronger quarantines. But we could never do that without first finding out that the milder social-distancing measures have been tried first and failed.
But how do we back down from this once we convince everyone that even being within six feet of another person is much too dangerous to consider? If we have a cure in 30 to 60 days, great, but we won’t.
Isn’t there a trade off in terms of declines in GDP and increases in the overall mortality rate? If we save 1MM lives from CV19 and lose 1.25MM from starvation and hypothermia is the world better off?
If you want to see actual panic in the US (not just smartly stocking up supplies at home), then do nothing and watch how Americans react to hospitals overflowing capacity. Where I live, my friends were already reporting ATMs out of cash and even problems getting cash out of banks late last week. But I suspect there’s big difference between telling the public that millions may be infected eventually and reporting that there are millions of confirmed cases.
I agree there’s a trade-off b/t how much we lengthen this and the lost economic activity, but I would disagree that getting past it fastest will have the best economic outcome. Note, this is not a direct disagreement with your statement, but just clarifying my thoughts on the nature of the trade-offs. I think there is a sweet spot trade-off in the middle somewhere, but no one knows exactly where that is. So I would urge conservatism up front for the option value I mention in my comment below.
Yeah, but starvation and hypothermia are not going to happen or unhappen in 3 months. And we need to account for the positives, too. Deaths from flu, traffic accidents should go way down. Air pollution in China is way down.
Net, I guess this is the heirs going into debt to buy medical care to save the retired. Don’t say they never did anything for you. If I thought they understood what they were doing, I could admire it more.
I think this is exactly right. There is option value in strong precautions now, as we ramp up capacity to treat, and learn more about the virus.
Ideally, we will learn that warm weather slows down the spread too. We know it doesn’t stop it completely, but it may slow it down (Singapore can be seen potentially as evidence for both these conjectures).
I would say that allowing for additional time for all sorts of preparation is the largest benefit. You mentioned ventilators, but settings up drive-through testing sites, making plans to rotate more doctors from clinics into a hospital setting, moving around departments in hospitals, planning for potential overflow in other buildings, ramping up testing throughput (production, distribution, and processing samples for results), and other preparation activities take time to plan and execute. Slowing the rapid increase in cases, particularly severe ones, helps with all of this.
Prof Paterson, who is also an infectious disease physician at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, said it wasn’t a stretch to label the drugs “a treatment or a cure”.
“It’s a potentially effective treatment,” he said.
“Patients would end up with no viable coronavirus in their system at all after the end of therapy.”
The drugs are both already registered and available in Australia.
more on
https://www.cairnspost.com.au/coronavirus-australia-clive-palmer-donates-1-million-to-covid19-trial/news-story/43af5d47d67c18d1e4fb74b480790326