ExxWhy wrote:



That was 9 days ago. This is from yesterday. Both are honestly opinion and it will be a while before the final results are in.

Sweden says strategy working

Quote:

Asked about the death rate, Dr Tegnell said: 'It is not a failure for the overall strategy, but it is a failure to protect our elderly who live in care homes.'

neal10a wrote:

Wellp, it seems to me we are using statistics to justify our approach to fighting this problem. I always get nervous when folks rely on stats which can be used to prove almost anything. The problem is how accurate are they and do we have enough sample to rely on. As it is now we are runing up a huge national debt and threatening a collapse of our economic system based on inadequate statistics IMHO. I have experienced polio, measles, chicken pox, mumps, asian flu and other epidmics, but I have never witnessed an econmic shut-down like this. So the question is what is worse this virus or economic collapse.

Quote:

Our choice is not whether we intervene or whether we go back to the normal economy,” says Emil Verner, an economist at MIT’s Sloan School who has recently looked at the flu pandemic of 1918 for insights into today’s outbreak. “Our choice is whether we intervene—and the economy will be really bad now and will be better in the future—versus doing nothing and the pandemic goes out of control and really destroys the economy.”

Overall, Verner and his coauthors found that the 1918 pandemic reduced national manufacturing output in the US by 18%; but cities that implemented restrictions earlier and for longer had much better economic outcomes in the year after the outbreak.

Verner points to the fates of two cities in particular: Cleveland and Philadelphia. Cleveland acted aggressively, closing schools and banning gatherings early in the outbreak and keeping the restrictions in place for far longer. Philadelphia was slower to react and maintained restrictions for about half as long. Not only did far fewer people die in Cleveland (600 per 100,000, compared with 900 per 100,000 in Philadelphia), but its economy fared better and was much stronger in the year after the outbreak. By 1919 job growth was 5% there, while in Philadelphia it was around 2%.

Quote:

These days Paul Romer sounds exasperated. “We’re caught up in the trauma: kill the economy or kill more people,” he says. There is so much “learned helplessness, so much hand-wringing.” The New York University economist and Nobel laureate believes he has a relatively simple strategy that will “both contain the virus and let the economy revive.”

The key, says Romer, is repeatedly testing everyone without symptoms to identify who is infected. (People with symptoms should just be assumed to have covid-19 and treated accordingly.) All those who test positive should isolate themselves; those who test negative can return to work, traveling, and socializing, but they should be tested every two weeks or so. If you’re negative, you might have a card saying so that allows you to get on an airplane or freely enter a restaurant.

Testing could be voluntary. Romer acknowledges some might resist it or resist isolating themselves if positive, but “most people want to do the right thing,” he says, and that should be enough to snuff out the spread of the virus.

Romer points to new, faster diagnostic tests, including ones from Silicon Valley’s Cepheid and from the drug giant Roche. Each of Roche’s best machines can handle 4,200 tests a day; build five thousand of those machines, and you can test 20 million people a day. “It’s well within our capacity,” he says. “We just need to bend some metal and make some machines.” If you can identify and isolate those infected with the virus, you can let the rest of the population go back to business.

neal10a wrote:

Wellp, it seems to me we are using statistics to justify our approach to fighting this problem. I always get nervous when folks rely on stats which can be used to prove almost anything.

justme wrote:

This makes me wonder what is going on with this lockdown. Why did we do it?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/#comparison