(11-28-2020, 06:26 PM)NeptuneBeachBum Wrote: [ -> ] (11-28-2020, 12:11 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote: [ -> ]They are definitely not made up, but I believe they are overinflated, almost certainly. I don't think you can get a pure picture from excess deaths because I'm sure some deaths were mitigated by lockdowns (car accidents, for example). The question regarding Coronavirus has always been what percentage of people that died from it were inevitably going to die in the next few months, anyways. We know it affects the heart, so it makes sense that it could be the final straw for people with systems that were already failing. I don't think we've looked at that closely enough. Regardless, I just don't believe the numbers are deadly enough to support lockdowns.
What would be the fatality rate for a disease need to be for you to support lockdowns?
All decisions, especially political ones, are trade-offs in some capacity. I don't really don't care to entertain the leftist position that we risk everything to save one life. That's [BLEEP], and we don't operate like that anywhere else. It just rhetoric they used to create a political advantage for themselves. There is an opportunity cost for every political decision. You aren't just looking at fatality rate, you are looking at everything else you'd be losing as well. So, I guess I'm saying I don't think there's a clear cut answer, but I can share my thoughts on where I stand. My position hasn't changed much since early April.
I've followed this very closely, since mid-late January. I told my wife that I thought we were headed for a lockdown, well before it was even on the radar here in the US, not because of what we knew, but because of what we didn't. The virus appeared to be deadly, and some numbers had the fatality rate at 65% for the elderly and 1-3% for healthy adults. Those are insanely high numbers and would have wiped out millions of people. However, we were getting all of our data from that time from China, and I wasn't sure if the numbers were accurate. This was bad enough, but we also didn't know how it spread, if people developed immunity, or anything else about it. In that scenario, it seemed better to shut things down early. I was even thinking we should cut off all travel in the US by mid-Feb, but a lot of people were still optimistic we could contain the virus. I was hopeful that China would get it under control and we wouldn't have to worry about here, but I certainly thought it was going to be catastrophic if it broke contain.
After the virus showed up in Italy, I knew that it had broken contain and that there was very little chance the virus would die. This is when we started learning there were several people who didn't have any symptoms at all, which meant the fatality rates were overestimated, and it primarily affected the elderly and people with weak immune systems. It also appeared that people developed immunity. By then, I felt comfortable enough saying that only people who were over 55 and with preconditions should go into lockdown, along with their families (in retrospect it probably should have been 65 and older). If we had done that, the US would have likely achieved herd immunity with very few deaths, and, since immunity would be fairly widespread, the elderly and compromised would probably be able to end their lockdowns by now. Keep in mind, that the global goal shifted after Italy because the virus had clearly broken contain, and the only options left were herd immunity or a vaccination. It blows my mind that there are people that still think we can snuff this virus out by social distancing, but whatever. Still, I stocked up on meat and non-perishables early (didn't think about hand-sanitizer and TP, unfortunately).
Then the virus hit the US, and I didn't mind a 3-4 week shutdown, but it was pretty clear that we were overreacting at that point. Most of our early deaths were due to bad policies by some governors and the mistaken belief that people should be put on ventilators to help them breath. If you eliminate those practices, I speculate that we would have cut our early deaths in half. Since then, we have gotten even more data and the truth is that this thing isn't any more deadly than the flu. If we knew that from the outset, would we even care? I don't think we would.
Anyways, that's a meandering, non-specific answer to your question, but the truth is there is no perfect answer. We should be following the actual science, which is distinct from the party that just uses that saying as a slogan. More people in US has been swayed by their political leanings than by the scientific evidence. Our media is largely to blame for that, because they are just a bunch of fear-mongering, money-hungry mouthpieces for their party.
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