Good point. We’ll see.
Hey Fang, his basic premise is that social distancing can certainly slow the spread of the virus, but that the lockdowns and draconian measures were unnecessary and sold on the basis of faulty analyses.
The idea that this virus was going to rampage through the world in an uncontrolled, exponential fashion until 100% (or even 60% theoretical herd immunity) was never going to happen, in Levitt’s view. Saturation would have been achieved at maybe 25% penetration, maybe lower (many viruses are like this - the normal epidemic curve). With a relatively benign virus like COVID with its characteristics (low IFR, propensity to affect mostly those who on average are well past productive years), the costs of the shutdowns will far exceed what they were intended to prevent.
He is right.
I went to get my car’s emission test done as they reopened today. Not much changed since pre-covid. The line went all the way down the street. There were three police watching, but everything was peaceful, no one cut the line or blocked entries/driveways to surrounding businesses. Instead of waiting in a small room during the test, they had me stand behind my car. Everyone wore masks. While longer than usual, the line moved nicely, predictably. Now that my car passed, I will be able to renew the registration by mail.
My parents attended church this weekend in Virginia. They said their church was the safest place they’ve seen - better than any of their local stores. It holds about 500, but they are limiting services to 50, everyone had to wear a mask. They have most seats blocked, ushers tell you where to sit and when it is your turn to leave. They wrote down names and phone numbers in the event contact tracing is necessary, and they disinfect the seats between services. They felt very safe and looked-after. I hope all religious venues open up with equal consideration for their worshipers.
I was at Home Depot yesterday. It sure didn’t look like they were limiting the number of shoppers (but, hey, it’s a big store). There were about 15 people in the checkout line at the garden center side. Mask compliance was 100%, but social distancing was on the sloppy side. No one seemed particularly concerned. Only one car was doing curbside pickup.
DD is beginning a CE college class today. It was supposed to be in person, but it went online. So okay… go with the flow, right? I still envisioned the class meeting at the appointed time, reading and discussing, just on zoom or something. Last night at 8:30 DD got an email from the professor that the class was going to be run as an independent study. I was quite annoyed. She has the right to run her class how she wants, but this is almost the polar opposite from the class description we originally signed DD on for, and I wish the college hadn’t waited until the last minute to spring this new format on us. Ugg. My hope was to provide some structure-lite for the summer as a bridge between the mess that has been DD’s education the past two months and a (hopeful) return to full on school in the fall. I have a complete and sincere newfound sympathy for all of those parents and students who continue to rethink their fall plans. I find myself grumbling about spending $500 for “independent study”, so I can’t imagine paying tens of thousands to find out at the last minute that’s how its going to go down.
Covid. Riots. Money. Hello, June.
@Socaldad2002, I guess you again did not read my question. I was seeking insight into what happened in the 68 pandemic, because I certainly do not share one posters recollection that many families lost a member early from disease in the 60s. In the 1920s and 1930s, yes, but really not for todays 50 somethings. I did not know anyone who lost a family member prematurely until I was 16, though I did sadly know damaged victims of rubella.
There are numerous different studies and projections of this pandemic’s outcome, and you can use Google to find them, to answer your question.
I wasn’t really responding to your statement directly, but wanted to better understand what would happen if we did nothing which seems to be the suggestion by you and a few others. Here’s my original question to you again in case you would like to give us your opinion on the matter.
"An honest question. How many people do you honestly feel would have died in the U.S. if we did nothing and went about our business as usual?
For comparison purposes we currently have 106,000 deaths in 3 months WITH extreme social distancing, SAH orders, non-essential businesses stopped, mask wearing, hand sanitizing, etc…"
Since you referred me to Google, at the end of March, POTUS and his task force said that between 1,500,000 - 2,200,000 would be dead in U.S. if they did no intervention.
Let that sink in a little…
First of all, New York City is at something at 20% penetration and if you think what happened there is benign, you and I have a different version of benign. If you think that killing over 1.5% of the entire population over age 75 in the space of two months counts as “benign,” you and I have very very different belief about what constitutes benign.
Secondly, if saturation is achieved at 25%, how does he explain Bergamo? Seroprevalence was 61%(!!!) by the end of April.
What does Levitt think is going to stop the disease? Nobody’s immune. It’s not like some people just don’t get it even if they’re exposed: with big exposures (meat packing plants, prisons) virtually everybody gets it.
@thumper1 , yes of course I mis-typed. My mom was waiting for her negative test result, which she got today.
Tennessee nursing homes are doing periodic (not sure how often) mandatory testing of staff, testing of residents if any staff are infected, and quarantine/testing of new or returning residents.
Can we do anything right anymore? The cost to disinfect and reuse an N95 mask exceeds $110 per mask so far, according to WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/warnings-surface-about-new-system-to-disinfect-n95-masks-11591026809?mod=hp_lead_pos5
Stop trying to infer, @socaldad2002. You keep getting it wrong. I gave you the benefit of the doubt at first, but now I think it is just intentional by you.
@“Cardinal Fang” - there will always be pockets of high density that will have higher saturation rates, just as there will be places where people are naturally “more socially distant” (maybe South Dakota? Rural California?) that will have lower ones. Saturation is always viewed in the context of averages across a population you are trying to estimate. Estimates in highly dense environments (the cruise ships, e.g.) have been consistent with the 25% saturation number.
It is an interesting counterfactual regarding what would have occurred in the US had there been no coercive social distancing (of course, people would always have modified their behavior voluntarily - no doubt that fact plays some limited role in the 25% saturation estimate).
We can guesstimate this number: 330M (potential infectees in US) * 0.25 (hypothesized saturation level) * 0.0026 (CDC central estimate of IFR across all age and risk cohorts combined) = ~215,000.
This of course does not tell the whole tale. The better way to think about a pandemic is in terms of the “excess burden of death”, which is currently running at +15% in the US. Many of the people who are dying would have died anyway later this year (e.g., median survival time of nursing home patients on entry is 3 months for males, 8 months for females, with 55% of patients dead within 6 months of entry).
We will know more next year when the retrospective analyses are undertaken, but my guess is that the excess burden of death for the pandemic alone for the year following the beginning of the pandemic would have been less than 200K. Not ideal of course, but this is a once in a hundred years pandemic, and losing ~0.07% of the US population does not to my mind justify the costs of the shutdowns (including the highest unemployment since the Great Depression and disruption of the education of millions with their entire lives ahead of them). YMMV.
ETA: I just saw your other question regarding what Levitt thinks will “stop” the virus. I won’t put words in his mouth, but I assume he believes that it will never “stop,” but will become manageable when the virus runs out of attractive hosts. You assume 100% of the people are susceptible, but there is no evidence that that is the case. It probably isn’t.
If you’re talking about Creekland, here is the exact quote:
I don’t imagine Creekland’s grandmother was having children in the 1960s.
In my paternal grandmother’s era, it was common for people to lose babies and young children. That was a long time ago! She was born in the 1890s. My mother’s brother died as a young child, of meningitis… in the 1920s. When grandmothers in the 1960s talked about their youth and young adulthood, they were not talking about the 1960s.
Don’t know why I can never get it right using the quote function…anyway @doschicos I’m not equating anything, just citing examples.
Covid- 19 is real. Spread of infectious disease is real. Death is real. It just seems to me the media is OK with that risk if the cause is right (according to them). But if it were a baseball game or a Broadway show all of a sudden everyone is crazy for being in a crowd. Seems a bit hypocritical to me.
Focusing a bit more on Covid - 19, I think we need to move to a point where the more at risk folks (and I’m one of them) take special care and the rest go about your business (and be smart about it). My reasoning is nothing will be fundamentally different in a month or two months or six months or until we have readily available vaccines and treatments. If someone wants to stay inside for six months, let them do so. Many companies will be quite lenient with WFH for a long time. Others will be more comfortable heading out. That’s what happens in a free society.
Not sure I’m getting anything “wrong”? I’m asking a simple and important question:
“If we did no intervention, what would the U.S. death rate be right now?”
I don’t believe schools were closed for mumps and rubella, but individuals were often put in serious quarantine and in Britain for example you wouldn’t be allowed to return to your school if you’d even been exposed. (The plot for Arthur Ransome’s Winter Holiday.) In the US schools and swimming pools were closed for polio outbreaks.
We’ve been playing games with our extended family every weekend. If you download Steam you have access to their tabletop stop simulator and the tabletop simulator has tons of games, some which are scripted (they take care of mechanics and scoring) and some where they just give you the objects and you have to move pieces and score yourself. So far I can recommend Sushi Go Party, Carcassone (excellent no glitches that we’ve discovered), That’s Very Clever (a dice game) and Ethnos (a pretty long and elaborate board game.)
I know a family that was devasted by the lack of seatbelts. The luckiest kid only lost all his teeth. The unluckiest kid was in a coma for years before he died.
@cardinalfang, I am familiar with death rates in the US in the early 20th century. My parents were born then, and yes, they lost family early. What that has to do with US reaction to the 1968 pandemic, which was the topic of my post, is unclear to me.
How would anyone on CC be able to answer that question?
Let’s just move on, please. Lots of important things to discuss.
There’s a sloppy conflation of where these deaths are occurring. People say, “nursing homes,” but this conflates nursing homes where people live out the rest of their lives with post-acute skilled nursing facilities where people (usually elderly) go to rehabilitate from certain serious injuries like strokes. People in the kind of nursing homes where people are getting skilled care at the end of life have a short lifespan, but people in post-acute care have a considerably longer life span.
In my area, two of the three outbreaks, with deaths, were in rehab centers. Residents in rehab centers do not typically have the short lifespan of people in what we normally think of as “nursing homes.”
Correct. In New England, alot of the ‘nursing home’ facilities that experienced alot of Covid were rehab centers. My family member who died there was supposed to leave after just a few months - she was getting rehab and from a bad fall and some balance and memory issues. Its not true that most people there would have died anyway within a few months.
My mother went to two different rehab centers after her first stroke. She was rehabbed, and then she returned to her own apartment and lived another five years. Those centers are truly for rehab. People are discharged back to their former homes.