Or as the Romans liked to call it, decimation.
2 Likes
Easy to say, but hard to make sure you do it, in the heat of the moment. I mean, what if he ran out of his burning house, and you had to stab him with your pitchforks? How would you feel if getting too close to the fellow members of your mob resulted in another outbreak?
I know it sometimes involves hard decisions, and personal sacrifice, but maintaining quarantine until public health professionals say it’s ok to go out is really the right thing to do.
2 Likes
The U.S. death toll was doubling every 4.4 days during the second week of March
The U.S. death toll was doubling every 2.8 days during the third week of March
The curve has not flattened, it has gotten worse
6 Likes
The Russian bots seem to be out in force promoting this (while, ironically, the Russian government seems to just be suppressing all information internally about the spread of the virus, writing off deaths as regular pneumonia, which isn’t going to bite them on the ass at all, I’m sure).
I’m seeing a lot of “reasonable” conservatives now with plaintive cries of, “There surely must be some middle ground!” They don’t seem to get that the “middle ground” is millions of Americans dead and the economy wrecked. (In fact, what they’re proposing would be the worst possible thing for both the economy and people’s lives.)
13 Likes
“…but only in the biggest cities? Hmm…”
This is fascist thinking - that people who someone else deems “not productive” - are a drain on society and must be either eliminated or allowed to die.
THESE PEOPLE CAN GO TO HELL.
7 Likes
They might need a nudge.
Much like how Christianity seems to be riddled with fundamentalists, the GOP is riddled with fascists. And there’s a fair amount of overlap between the two. Both organizations need to step up and decry the people ruining them. Or give in to them.
brought to mind:
7 Likes
This is the kind of guy who saw Logans Run and thought “What an elegant solution to our problems!” Just have to deal with some pesky miscreants from time to time, no problem.
3 Likes
The new rule is that murderous mobs must wear square dancing hoop skirts that are not less than 6 feet in diameter. You want to kill, then pay the dress maker first.
6 Likes
14 Likes
9 Likes
2 Likes
Maybe when this whole thing blows over he’ll be able to track down his rug.
4 Likes
“With a 3% bump in our marketing budget Soylent Green should be able to capture 12% more market share.”
1 Like
Like this?
2 Likes
If we’re really going to get into it, that’s not quite apt; as the Wikipedia article points out, the “value of a statistical life” is not the same as the price to save any given individual life. It represents a marginal cost relative to a specific situation, meaning that its value is highly context-dependent, and has a non-linear (decreasing) relationship with the number of lives saved. So you can’t just multiply it up.
For the kind of calculation you are talking about, the conventional approach is to put a cash value on “quality-adjusted life years” (QALYs). For example, the UK NHS generally does not fund interventions costing more than perhaps £30,000 per QALY; so, for a newborn with 81 years’ life expectancy, that comes to £2.43m for a complete cure, but for a 70-year old it would only be £330,000. (The actual calculation is more nuanced for people near the end of their lives).
If you suppose that, depending on how the UK responds, it might save up to 5% of its population, or 3.3m people then, weighting that by age using these data, I make that a total of 45.3m QALYs (based on a life expectancy of 85 for simplicity). Based on current norms, society would therefore accept measures costing up to £1.4trillion overall, or two-thirds of the UK’s annual GDP. So if quarantine measures result in a (highly speculative) 15-20% GDP contraction, then that is certainly not obviously more than we can afford.
But it’s also in no way justified to say we don’t even need to do the math. Even a 20% GDP contraction is approaching Great Depression levels – which in itself would cost a lot of QALYs – and that would certainly shift the consensus on what we can afford. And that 3.3m figure assumes unchecked covid-19 could kill 5% of the population on top of the number who will ultimately die even with treatment. If the actual delta were more like 1%, the napkin calculation above would support the opposite conclusion.
I think the moral is, anyone taking a dogmatic position on this is wrong. We have the threat of large numbers of deaths on one side, but on the other side, we really do have the possibility of the economic harm becoming empirically worse. When we talk about the Great Depression, that wasn’t just about billionaires losing their yachts.
1 Like
#AllLivesMatter again, this time the alleged millions who will allegedly be killed by a recession?
3 Likes
Hmmm, I fail to see the moral dilemma.
If the economic system won’t work to save millions of lives in a pandemic without resulting in even more dead, morally you don’t just let millions die - you change the fucking system.
Economics isn’t immutable natural law, it’s something we made up to collectively manage resources. The economy is a tool to serve our purposes, not an angry god to be appeased.
Our leaders need to remember that, and it’s probably well past-time we reminded them.
14 Likes
