we love you guys but Cliff is and has been right all along
20 million dead in the U.S. alone? Sorry, still not seeing that, unless I misunderstood him at the time, and he meant worldwide. (Not sure if he ever clarified.)
Or do you just mean he was right about stopping public congregating, implementing stay-at-home orders for workers in non-essential fields, etc.?
That, I'll grant.
But we need to keep in mind that
even that can be done too soon. (An extreme case: Would it have made sense to shut down Kansas when Hubei was shut down? Obviously not. It only made sense to shut down Kansas when they crossed a certain number of cases, which was
months after Hubei did. Any earlier, and you just needlessly kill people indirectly through depression and unemployment.)
Economic damage costs lives, too; it just costs them later and more indirectly. Therefore the management of this crisis is all about sailing straight between Scylla and Charibdys. Don't forget either monster.
To put it even more bluntly: Do you, like me, have a beloved relative who is over-80, diabetic, with asthma? Well, here's some news: Our efforts to "flatten the curve" are not, repeat,
NOT, about trying to prevent that person from getting the virus. They are going to get it, and they are probably going to die of it, unless a miracle-treatment or vaccine emerges.
We know this. We've known it since early February at the latest. (Mid-February is when I went to get the hem let out in my charcoal-colored suit, if that's any indication of how much of a
sure thing this is. I am expecting funerals,
plural, in the coming year.)
What, then, are we trying to do, if we aren't trying to prevent them getting (and dying of) the virus?
We're trying to prevent them dying of it
all at once. We're trying to prevent the
extra, non-COVID deaths that'll occur if the medical system gets overloaded.
And, yes, we're trying to delay granny's death until a vaccine, maybe, can be produced. Let's hope.
Normally, an 85-year-old diabetic with asthma has, what, a 8-year mean life expectancy? Maybe less? (Any actuarials for insurance companies in the room?) But, now SARS-CoV-2 exists in the world. In 3 years' time, every single human on the face of the earth will have caught it already, one way or another if they don't live their
whole lives in quarantine.
But
pretend for a moment there's no chance of a vaccine. And pretend you never heard of hydroxychloroquine. And, just to have a number to work with, let's presume a person with those conditions usually lives 8 years in a world without COVID-19.
Well, in a world
with COVID-19, it's gonna be shorter. There is no chance that we can prevent that 85-year-old from getting SARS-CoV-2 for
that long through general societal shutdown, and we're not even going to try. It would be
morally wrong to try to shutdown for that long. We'd kill a half-billion people through poverty. (Sure, we can still try to do it by quarantining
only the 85-year-old, but that's a different matter.)
So that means we accept that the life-expectancy of elderly persons with chronic conditions was already cut in half, the moment that the first patient caught a dry cough in Wuhan. We just didn't
know about it until later.
Our goal is to flatten the curve, precisely to prevent overburdening the medical system, precisely to prevent
needless deaths. Some earlier-than-otherwise deaths are now
unavoidable, but deaths in that group will cause
yet more deaths if they happen all at once, so we're trying to stretch them out. Can't stop 'em happening; but next year is better than next month.
Sigh. It stinks, but there it is.
I hope you all have dark suits that fit.
