I'm probably gonna get chewed up and spit out but I see both sides of the coin here.
My muddled musings follow.
The why are we quarantining the healthy battlecry. We all know you can be shedding away and infect people. I dunno. Maybe these banner wavers don't realize that. I'm here complying, but I gotta admit: I want my part time job back post haste. I'm not okay.
These demonstrations are spreading. I think they feel like they're dumping the proverbial tea in the Boston Harbor. As much as I want to throw something at these protesters, I may want my right preserved to protest something someday. At my age, it doesn't look like I will, but who knows?
I think a huge problem for a lot of people truly hinges on the unknown of all this. *I* understand we basically know squat still. Look at the knowledge ventilators may cause more harm than good. But we didn't know that. Remember the panic for 30,000 ventilators? Field hospitals are being torn down. Navy hospital ships were sitting largely empty. I'm not taking away from the great losses but a certain segment of the population sees what they consider huge overreactions and there you go.
We are a diverse group. Jmo
I'm in your camp too. And I am in favor of taking baby steps toward opening (and some of my friends and family are aghast). I'm actually the oldest one in the group, so there's that.
This virus may very well not have a vaccine. AFAIK, no coronavirus has ever had a vaccine and people have been researching with it in labs for at least a decade. To get to herd immunity, a lot of people have to die. To put it another way, a lot of people will die. So I crunch numbers.
First of all (please don't shoot me), this virus doesn't kill even 1% of the people who get it (overall). It kills about 1% of people 65-80, and as many as 5% of people 80-90 and perhaps even 20% of people over 90.
In fact, I think all of those estimates are a little high. For people 40-64, it's probably 0.4% and I think for the 60-somethings it's really more like 0.6%
So, let's say that the overall death rate (since children aren't dying) is around 0.4% (which is what several bits of research say is the average). There are 8 billion of us, so that means about 30 million will die. No matter what we do.
However, if they all die this month, that will crash the economy worse than people on the front steps of public buildings can even imagine. It will include SO many doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, teachers, and others who will take years to replace. The amount of panic would be tremendous. The social consequences dire, especially in cities. All those isolated farmers will have product, but big gaps in the production that gets their product to market.
We can't have 30 million people dying at once without raising those percentages (just the body disposal problem would be heinous).
So...we want to space it out. Each of us needs to face the risks as we age. Currently jolly 40 year olds will soon enough be 55 and what then? One group that gets this virus (and dies disproportionately) are lab scientists. So research will slow to a crawl while the entire planet regroups.
Nope, it's gotta go more slowly. 30 million will still likely die - but over the next few years.
Or...maybe it's only 0.2% who will die. That's the optimistic view - we just don't know.
For the US (since most Americans are protesting about their own situation and not the Big Picture), this would be about 1 million deaths or a bit more.
1.3 million is what my calculator says.
1.3 million in one year is going to mean that no one can get treatment for any other thing (or we do what China did and just kind of lock the patients up somewhere and let them die).
The collateral damage of not trying to control this is tremendous. It will make what's going on economically right now, look like a walk in the park. It's very concerning that the US's disease curve is still linear and upwards (not exponential most places, but certainly still rising).
For California, we would have to endure about 800,000 deaths to get to herd immunity.
There is no other path through this, though. Eventually, we have to take steps toward a future where CoVid is always there (it's going to be around for a while, especially since we also have vaccination deniers and vaccines don't work as well in the very elderly). Life expectancies will be less. There will be fewer people over the age of 100 - anywhere. And as young people turn into older people, instead of planning to live to be 90 or 100, as so many do, it will realistically be 70 or 80. In 1900, average LE in the US was around 65. We will have lost a century of LE extension.
Which is fine, in the end I guess. The population will naturally contract due to this. BTW, if we just ignore this and 0.4% of the world's population dies, that's still not going to bring our global population into the range where everyone can have the resources they need for a healthy life. Our economy will naturally shift toward healthcare and health technologies. Huge amounts will go into pharma research, etc.
But we may end up closer to 7 billion than 8 billion, indefinitely. The premise of industrial capitalism is, after all, that consumer markets always expand. Not if people die off, they don't.
) and also the demographics of it.
