Italy has the oldest population in the 1st world with over 20% of their people over 60. They literally pay you a salary to move to certain towns because they're all old people and dying out. Also the death rate is about on par with the flu, 4k so far in a country of 60 mil. We have about 14k dead this season from the flu here. Yes of course it's worse, any new virus that hasn't spread yet will be, but we're talking about decimal points here vs. crashing the economy and halting life for the rest of the billions of people.
Trigger warning:
If anyone reading this is prone to anxiety or wants to avoid negative news/the possibility of panic, do not read my explanation below. Skip my post and move on, save your sanity.
However, if you think that the novel coronavirus is not much worse than the flu and we don't need to shut down cities because of it, and want to understand why you're dead wrong, please do read my reply.
Those "decimal points" are tens of thousands of human lives, likely much more, and without these extreme measures could likely have resulted in deaths by the millions. What are millions of human lives worth?
This is not about Italy, nor is it merely about the age of people who are most at risk. While the situation in Italy is extremely dire, with
mayors in thirteen different towns confirming that the actual death toll is likely four times higher than has been reported because many people are simply dying at home alone, without being tested before or after death, it has become clear that this is not simply about age. The
most current CDC data shows us that
38% of all hospitalizations due to COVID-19 were of people under the age of 55.
So why is that significant? Length of hospitalization appears to be about 11 days,
double that of seasonal flu. Modeling based on existing data estimates that 5% of all cases require hospitalization,
2% of all cases need to be in the ICU and 1% require ventilation. As there is no vaccine for COVID-19, all hospital workers taking part in care need full personal protective equipment and each case requires 3 healthcare providers (sorry, I lost the link for that one). A lot of those supplies cannot be re-used and
hospitals in the United States are already desperate for more, even turning to
craft stores for makeshift supplies and
asking the public for donations.
All told, this means that the true danger is not in the actual mortality rate of COVID-19, though it is still estimated to be ten times greater than that of seasonal flu, it is in how it
completely overwhelms medical systems due to the length of time and requirements of care. Avoiding
exponential growth of infection rates is critical or patients will begin to die simply because there aren't enough ICU beds or ventilators, health care workers will become sick because there isn't enough protective equipment further straining systems that won't have enough doctors, and patients requiring other types of care won't be able to get it. People will die in droves simply because
the care they need to survive the disease won't be available due to overstressed systems, even
one of the best medical systems in the world (Italy is ranked number 2).
There are two ways to combat this -
containment through aggressive testing, tracking, and quarantining of the first cases, or attempting to
flatten the exponential curve through suppression of the population (e.g. lockdowns, shelter in place) so that we spread out how quickly people get sick and need hospitalization, reducing the stress on the system at any given time. The US is well beyond the containment phase, and
even New York hospitals are already feeling the strain with the peak estimated to be
weeks out, if not a month and a half away,
long after NY hospitals think they will run out of supplies.
If anything, we locked things down/crashed the economy/
halted life for billions of people
too late.
