I found another graph
That’s per week
We’re exceeding the worst week of the flu, each day, almost every day
COVID-19 is at least, like, 700% worse than a really bad flu
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Cherry-picked data is cherry picked. As has been pointed out before, that figure covers a full 12 months. We’re barely 2 months in from the first case of COVID-19 in the US, and we’re at over 42,000 and climbing. Extrapolated at this rate for the rest of the year and you’re in the high hundreds of thousands of deaths, possibly in the millions. It could still be the largest cause of death in the US for this year. It’s most certainly going to be in the top 3, with cancer and heart disease (you know, those things your doctor harps on you about every visit).
ETA: I was just talking with someone about the good news that New York is down to about 400+ deaths a day due to COVID-19. That’s more than a 9-11 every work week, and that’s the good news. Yet we gave up centuries-long civil rights and spend trillions of dollars on security theater and war, while killing tens of thousands of people in other countries. And you think the response to COVID-19 is an over-reaction?
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Now do 1917-1920.
The administration is working on it.
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Nobody in their right mind still denies it’s more dangerous, and more deadly than Influenza. The question still is, how dangerous. There’s degrees to this. We At some point in the future, not tomorrow, not next week, and probably not in May either, but at some point we’ll have to consider when the negative effects of the lockdown outweigh the benefits, and make plans how to get back to more or less normal lives.
The rate of spread is going down, even in the US:
Oh and btw, before the Wikipedia critics break out the memes again, Wikipedia is not perfect but it has a strict policy of sourcing things, that I’ll trust over personal guesstimates and proof-by-animated-gif any day.
Yes, because of the social distancing measures we currently have in place.
It’s fine to make plans for how we’ll eventually start re-opening the country for business and what kinds of precautions will have to remain in place until such time as the viral threat has passed. It is freaking RIDICULOUS to suggest that this is the right time to return the country to normal business as Trump and his sycophants have been doing.
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The number of cases are still rising in my state, BECAUSE WE HAVE LIMITED ACCESS TO TESTING. We have no idea how many people are getting it, or how many people have actually died from it, because they couldn’t get tests.
But sure… open up the economy… Who cares if people die… Trump’s supporters need for a hair cut is far more important than the members of my family working retail, after all… 
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But the President of the United States declared in no uncertain terms “Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.” way back on March 6. You must be talking crazy talk!
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didn’t say it, am not
That’s of course true for testing, but I think we have a pretty good idea about how many people are dying from it. Infections might go unnoticed, death rarely does. And because of that, the lethality of Covid is bound to be lower than what a naive division of “current cases” by “current victims” might suggest.
Try as hard as you want to put words in my mouth, I didn’t say it that way, not even remotely. I’m not advocating for a return to normal. I want people to think about how they can fight the epidemic without sacrificing too much of their civil rights, or even worse, to come to the conclusion that their civil rights are not important right now. Because if they are not important now, when will they be? We can’t lock everybody in their homes until the risk is down to 0.0.
It’s hard to have a calm discussion with someone who is basically accusing you of murdering people with evil words.
Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, there’s more than two kinds of people in the world? Besides the good, caring ones who insist that no easing of restrictions must even be talked about now, because the very thought might kill people, and on the other side, the ghoulish Trump supporters willing to climb over mountains of corpses just to get their hair done?
Right now, the lockdown is the right thing to do (and I’m putting this in bold so nobody will twist it around in my mouth) but it hurts people too, and in the end it will kill a number of people > 0, and denying that is neither constructive nor honest. So the categorical demand that nothing can ever be lifted until the last case of Covid is eradicated is neither realistic, nor as humane as it may seem.
No one is insisting we can’t discuss the topic of when and how we might ease restrictions. The “good, caring” people are simply saying we aren’t yet at the point when we can start easing those restrictions—let alone open the country entirely—and anyone arguing otherwise is asking for mass deaths.
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100% agreement there…
… but I think we do need to lock down “smarter, not harder”, and learn more from South Korea. This lockdown is a very blunt instrument, a bit like fighting a sepsis with amputations. We need finer tools.
Unfortunately, because COVID symptoms are cardio-pulmonary in nature, when there is insufficient testing the cause of death can be mis-attributed to other effects, resulting in a recorded death rate for the disease that is lower than its actual impact.
Because COVID can exacerbate underlying heath conditions and result in serious respiratory system impairment even in cases where the patient recovers, I think you’ll find that the lethality rate is going to be higher than you might think, not lower. If someone gets COVID and then contracts pneumonia a month later because they had to be put on a respirator and suffered from reduced lung capacity, pneumonia might technically be what killed them, but the COVID made it possible by impairing their lungs in the first place.
Protesting distancing measures and lockdown requirements by brazenly flaunting them and attacking health care professionals and epidemiology experts who are advocating for their imposition for everyone’s sake is not how you go about solving anything, though. It just exacerbates the problem.
Of course civil rights are important. But here’s the thing: we do actually live in a society, and to take care of each other, it’s vital that we keep our distance from others as much as possible. That absolutely sucks, and is harmful to a lot of people in a lot of other ways, but a government response that isn’t founded in “what have you done for me lately” / “I don’t care about you, I want my X” and is instead premised on giving people the financial and social support they need to weather this period where the best thing to do is stay at home is absolutely fundamental to preserving your civil liberties.
It’s a good thing risk is nowhere near zero right now, otherwise this discussion might be seen as premature hand-wringing. 
Hey, speaking of putting words in people’s mouths…
Almost all of what needs to be done to shift to a South Korea-style recovery period is predicated on instituting a testing regime that dwarfs the laughably ineffectual system we currently have thanks to Trump and his cronies. No re-opening process can safely take place when we don’t know where the disease is or who has it and who doesn’t. We need orders of magnitude more tests every day, the results need to be available quickly (hours or even minutes, not days), and people like Rand Paul need to not be complete dumbfucks and actually isolate while they wait for their results to come back, even if they’re asymptomatic.
Civil rights != “I should be allowed to do whatever I want”. If you want this lockdown to go away quickly, you need to comply with advice from health care professionals and pandemic response experts who know more about how to mitigate this problem than you do.
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We need the level of testing they have in South Korea to start with. The lack of widely available tests in the US at this late date demonstrates an inexcusable level of mismanagement. We can’t just skip to where South Korea is now without enacting the measures they had in place weeks and weeks ago.
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Did Xeni, or anybody else, suggest the lockdown should continue forever?
If we keep moving our goalposts around we can have a great big argument with nobody about nothing
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Fair point, but excess mortality can still give us a statistical bound on that, it can’t just run away unnoticed
oh my god, who is doing that?
Again, there’s degrees. Fighting an epidemic does not necessarily imply the necessity to order people to stay at home, who would be perfectly capable of implementing social distancing measures by their own accords. Depending on where and how you live and work, that may seem like a great idea, but it’s not sustainable for everybody.
And I do really resent this idea that is popping up here again, that “protesting” would make things worse. No. I agree we need to listen to science, but I had to learn to be skeptical about rules and measures the authorities throw my way, and I’m not going to abandon that now. That doesn’t mean to deny and reject everything out of principle, but when people start to tell me to shut up and obey, I get wary, and maybe question things more than I would otherwise - and particularly in times of crisis!
I’d love to have some goalposts, like, “When the reproduction rate R0 goes below x, we can lift this measure”… but we don’t, do we. It’s all made up ad hoc, which was fine in a hurry, but now we need some criteria to get out again.
Yeah you’d have to be crazy that people gathering en masse in violation of social distancing guidelines, spreading misinformation about the pandemic and applying political pressure on state and local governments to end quarantine measures early might have any kind of negative effect.
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Well which is it, “now” or “probably not in May either”
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didn’t say it
didn’t say it
didn’t,… damn! this is exhausting.
I want people to use their brains and make up their minds about what makes sense to fight this disease, and what is just ineffectual, blunt stop gaps applied by inept bureaucrats. If that’s harmful, it’s certainly a first in my lifetime that political participation and a critical view on authority were a bad thing.
I’d have thought the difference between setting criteria, and meeting those criteria would have been more obvious.
By and large, the protestors we’ve been seeing aren’t making use of their brains and minds to determine what actions make sense—they’re ignoring the people who are.
That’s why we believe that the protesters are indeed making things worse.
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