It looks like Sweden had it right.
No schools or businesses closed. No stay at home order. No travel restrictions. Restaurants open. Business as usual.
The new IHME model (updated yesterday) projects 6,000 deaths in Sweden through August, with the minimal preventative steps they have taken (image attached). In a country of 10 million, this is 600 deaths per million. The number is similar to what Spain will see by August, even though they have had severe restrictions.
How can that be, we are told we are flattening the curve etc? From what I understand, the reason that can be is that coronavirus is more infectious and has a much higher incidence of asymptomatic cases than initially realized. And it's not nearly as dangerous as we have been led to believe.
If this 'business as usual" approach of 600 deaths per million in Sweden is scaled to 330 million people in the U.S., there would be 200,000 deaths instead of the now expected 60,000. We have saved 140,000 lives by shutting the economy.
As pointed out by the esteemed epidemiologist Prof Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College in London- "It might be as much as half to two-thirds of the deaths we're seeing from COVID-19 would have died by of the year anyway." That's a pretty cold and heartless statement.
But I would also say that is far more cold and heartless to ignore the impact of turning off the economy- widespread permanent job loss, lower paying jobs, huge increase in foreclosures and homelessness, a massive federal deficit, increases in divorce, spousal and child abuse, depleted retirement funds, reduced quality of life, and death.
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday.
U.N. warns economic downturn could kill hundreds of thousands of children in 2020
Some things we already know for context on 140,000 deaths- 2,800,000 people die in the U.S. every year, 500,000 die from smoking (40,000 from second hand smoke), and 70,000 (0.02% of the U.S. population) died in the flu season of 2017-2018.
Six months ago, if you were asked to choose between losing the excess 140,000 people in the U.S. (and > 50% would die before the end of the year regardless), which is 0.04% (1/25th of 1 percent) of the U.S. population.
-OR-
saving these 140,000 people and putting the American economy in a deep and long lasting recession, what would you have said?
*****
I don't mean to be cavalier in discussing vulnerable people and death. But this pandemic attacks the vulnerable, and death is the most blatant end result of a pandemic. It is hard to discuss preventative measures etc without this metric.
IHME | COVID-19 Projections
