A Middle Course Between COVID-19 Hopes and Fears

1. Even taking into account underreporting of deaths, the crude CFR, which currently is close to 6 percent nationwide, vastly overstates the lethality of the COVID-19 virus, since testing so far has been skewed toward people with severe symptoms, who are not representative of everyone who has been infected.
2. If DiBlasio and Cuomo had set up special nursing homes for people with COVID and shut down the subways to be cleaned and disinfected every night starting at the beginning of February and canceled Chinese New Year, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved.
3. The CDC also estimates that 35 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus never develop symptoms, which implies that the infection fatality rate (IFR)—deaths as a share of total infections—is between 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent.
4. Our response should have always been focused on places that old, sick people congregate like hospitals, nursing homes, senior communities, etc.
5. If the excess deaths number stays positive or near 0 for the rest of the year, then yes COVID was definitely killing people who would not have otherwise died.
6. Of course, it only went that way in Sweden because it's a uniform population of good-hearted, wholesome people who voluntarily wore masks and locked themselves in their homes without the government having to make it mandatory, because they knew their stupid, far-right wing president should have ordered harsher measures.
7. And even to the extent that the deaths can fairly be attributed to COVID, a significant number of deaths were of people who were very ill to begin with and likely had months or even days left to live regardless of the virus.
8. Age seems to be largely a proxy for serious preexisting medical conditions such as hypertension, heart and lung disease, and cancer, which are independently associated with COVID-19 deaths and become more common as people get older.
9. Years of life lost is become a less-callous-sounding way of saying it's only killing people who were going to die anyway.
10. In other words, older people, who account for about 17 percent of the population, are 26 times as likely to die from COVID-19 as people in the youngest age group.
11. It is because thanks to the states banning non essential medical care in the name of saving us from this virus, people who otherwise would have gone to the doctor and had their cancer discovered did not.
12. The current challenge is finding a way to emulate Florida's apparent success in protecting people who are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 without broad business closure and stay-at-home orders, which are unsustainable and economically ruinous.
13. You just don't put COVID positive people in nursing homes.
14. The current challenge is finding a way to emulate Florida's apparent success in protecting people who are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 without broad business closure and stay-at-home orders, which are unsustainable and economically ruinous.
15. You don't lock healthy people in their homes in Kansas because a virus is killing people on their death bed in New York.

https://reason.com/2020/05/27/a-middle-course-between-covid-19-hopes-and-fears/