The headlines are alarming. The evening news is terrifying. There’s so much we don’t know or understand about the coronavirus except that it’s trying to kill us or our loved ones.
You read and hear about thousands of new infections every day. Death counts in some countries are doubling every week. Hospitals are being overwhelmed. People are losing jobs. Financial markets are dropping. Supermarket shelves are empty. Italy now has a world-leading fatality rate of more than 9 percent. The world is ending.
Except maybe, if you take a closer look at some of the details, perhaps the coronavirus isn’t really as deadly as the headlines are making it out to be. Maybe the coronavirus doesn’t really have a 9 percent death rate. Or 5%. Or even most of the fatality rates listed in this chart:
If a virus kills exponentially more people than the seasonal flu, like the ebola virus which kills about 50% of the people it infects, that’s definitely a cause for concern. If that same virus is also as contagious as the measles, it’s time to panic.
So where does the coronavirus stand and how does it compare to the flu?
If you take the midpoint of the estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they conclude that about 46 millions Americans get the seasonal flu each year (or about 14% of the US population) and about 41,000 die from it, which is about a 0.1% fatality rate (or about 1 out of every 1,000).
One projection published by the New York Times estimates that about 100 million Americans (or 30% of the US population) could get the coronavirus and using a 0.5% fatality rate (which is five times higher that the 0.1% seasonal flu fatality rate) about 480,000 Americans would die as a result (or about 5 out of every 1,000 Americans).
Its very difficult to estimate how many Americans could get infected by the coronavirus since there is so much health experts don’t know about it, but barring any better assumptions or models, having twice as many Americans get infected with the coronavirus (100 million) than the seasonal flu (46 million) seems fairly high to me, but we’ll go with that since they argue that unlike with seasonal influenza, the entire population is thought to be susceptible to the new coronavirus.
The 0.5% fatality rate used in the New York Times estimate on the other hand seems very justifiable to me, especially since that is the same rate Germany has today, which has tested for the coronavirus more earlier, frequently and widespread than other countries.
So let’s say the coronavirus is five times more deadlier than the flu and 480,000 Americans could die from it. What’s the government’s solution?
Assuming there is no vaccine or treatment widely available soon to control the virus, you either try to continue as usual as best you can by taking the most precautions possible to minimize causalities like educating the public, testing for the virus, imploring good hygiene and warning the most vulnerable, or you can try to restrict people from passing the virus by just locking down certain parts of society.
If the virus is very deadly and infectious, you definitely want to go with something draconian. But if it’s not as bad as the seasonal flu, then you probably don’t want to go with something harsh and severe because the costs and risks of instantly shutting down big chunks of our society and economy for an indefinite period of time can be more devastating than the virus.
But alas, this is 2020. The sky is falling and the headlines are alarming, so we go with the latter and here we are today. China imposed similar shut downs in their country for a couple months and are now easing lockdown restrictions after appearing to have largely contained the virus. China’s current death toll stands at about 3,300. As of today, about 1,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus. Assuming the U.S. can contain the outbreak in a similar fashion and time frame, perhaps we can expect about 4,000 Americans to die from the coronavirus by the middle of May. Presuming there isn’t a second large wave of infections and many more Americans don’t end up dying after it hypothetically becomes contained, then many people would probably call the shutdown a success.
480,000 could have died from the coronavirus but we managed to keep casualties under 10,000. Not bad.
But what was the cost?
That’s a little hard to quantify right now since we don’t yet know when this economic slowdown ends. Many people will lose their jobs for a while. A few companies will go bankrupt and some people will lose a lot money but we were able to save the economy by spending $2.2 trillion to help or rescue small businesses, the airline industry, unemployed workers and send thousand dollar checks to almost every American.
America wins again.
Except maybe that wasn’t really necessary.
South Korea is one of only two countries with large outbreaks, alongside China, to flatten the curve of new infections. And it has done so without China’s draconian restrictions on speech and movement, or economically damaging lockdowns like those in Europe and the United States.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/world/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-flatten-curve.html
So without locking down entire cities, out of a population of 50 million, about 130 South Koreans have died from the coronavirus so far. It won’t be a perfect comparison since there are many different factors than can come into play, but you can extrapolate those South Korean statistics to see how that compares to the United States. Since our population is six and half times bigger than South Korea, if you multiply the 130 South Korean coronavirus casualties by 6.5, you get about 850 fatalities.
One country gets the equivalent of 850 fatalities today by just taking preventative actions (South Korea) and another country (the United States) gets 1,000 fatalities by shutting down their economy.
Who came out better here?
