CV19 - Cure worse than the disease?

[grumbledoak]

silvagod said:

Wrong guess and your comment is based on what you thought I meant. I didn't, but if money can save lives, then it should be spent.

Then, for clarity, who's money are you volunteering to spend and how much?

[Blue62]

grumbledoak said:

The numbers don't look that way. 100,000 dead if we do nothing? Nasty, but only a few times what the flu does every year. The usual UK total deaths per year is 500,000.

What we are doing will affect her generation and beyond.

Odd making a point on behalf of another but I’ve banned her from PH. It’s the view of some of her generation, she’s a first year music student at Bristol Uni now home and pretty pissed off. She sees a future where the virus threat is the big one and will have ramifications for years to come. Hard to argue against that at the moment, my view is that we are going to be a lot poorer and that’s the price for taking our eye off the ball.

[Funny username]

Save as many as possible, and tot up how much it’s cost (plus the destruction of the economy cost) and send an invoice to China?

[964Cup]

There was no ball to keep an eye on. We've become used to the idea that people don't die. Of course they do, in vast numbers, but we think it's normal for emphysematic 85-year-olds to still be alive. And, frankly, for people like me with serious lung conditions to be alive. In normal circumstances we can throw the kitchen sink at sustaining them (and me). These aren't normal circumstances and we're running out of kitchens. We should be accepting that the very old and the very ill being still alive is abnormal. By all means let's try to preserve that abnormality, but not at the cost of our children's futures and civil liberties.

If this is a war, there will be casualties. If we were fighting against a physical enemy, I'd volunteer to fight to keep my children safe. They aren't threatened by the virus; they're threatened by our response to it, which is a desperate effort to carry on keeping the old and ailing alive.

We should absolutely ask the 70-year-old who's just seen her first grandchild what she'd like to do:

a) Accept a roughly 6% chance of death (based on Italy, where everyone I know of that age also has underlying health issues because they all smoke); or
b) condemn her granddaughter to a lifetime paying off the debt of one lockdown period after another?

At some point we might develop a vaccine, or find an effective antiviral, in which case people like me will be able to breathe a sigh of relief (see what I did there?). Until then we'll be going back into lockdown, and destroying everyone's quality of life, every time someone has a sniffle.

So yes, I volunteer for us to resume normal economic activity. I accept that I might get very ill, and that there might not be a ventilator for me (or that someone might deserve it more), and that I might die. I'm not a soldier, and I wouldn't want to claim the same honour, but that is how wars work.

[Tebbers]

Esceptico said:

Over dinner last night I was discussing CV19 with wife and teenage daughter.

Daughter’s assessment was very pragmatic but also focused on her and her peers. She questioned whether the damage being done to the global economy and the potential for a long recession or even depression like the 1930s was a price worth paying to defer the death of lots of old people with existing health problems (yes the virus doesn’t just kill old people but the mortality rates increase dramatically with age from 0.006% of 10-20 year olds to almost 10% of those over 80.)

Of course, the depression in the 30s was directly or indirectly linked to one of the worst periods in human history and many dead through war, genocide and political repression. If the economic chaos leads to anything similar the numbers killed could dwarf the potential deaths from CV19, the difference being that wars are much less discriminatory and tend to kill all and sundry (particularly young men of combat age).

In 5 or 10 years will we look back and agree with what is being done by governments globally (when a good chunk of those who would die now if the virus were allowed to spread quickly will be dead in any case from other causes) or will those still alive rue the decisions currently being made?

I’m not making predictions or giving an opinion. I just wasn’t sure how to answer her.

For what it’s worth, I agree with your daughter. There is now consistent evidence that COVID is not slaughtering normal people, but instead - perhaps not even causing - merely hastening the deaths of those who are old and/or have poor health already. This is of course not ideal, but such is life and Mother Nature.

I’m sure a cost benefit analysis has been done by the government, but as time goes on I think people will realise that the cost of all the disruption is simply not worth the number of lives that will be saved. There is a cost benefit analysis done to everything - from whether the NHS buys certain drugs to the planning of roads. People die as a result of all of these decisions and every life has a price. We’ve just judged each COVID life to be very valuable indeed despite evidence to the contrary, and we haven’t even taken into account those lives that will be lost to the disruption through suicide, alcoholism etc.

[anonymous-user]

We need to stop prolonging the lives of the endlessly sick and elderly as they are providing a nursery for diseases to overcome our limited medicines.

[stevensdrs]

The virus has won this battle already. We are self destructing our economy and our way of life trying to defeat it. Even if the measures being taken do eventually see it eradicated, there will be another and more potent virus further down the line. The very nature of a virus is to infect as many as possible and kill a percentage. How many years have we been fighting the flu and yet it still kills thousands every year. Even if you have an NHS ten times the capacity we have now you could not save everyone from what is a natural phenomenon. Ten years of suffering austerity and all the harm that did, is being made pointless with the current plan to delay the peak infection of this virus. Many of the old and sick will still die despite these measures. I wonder if we will look back at this in ten years time and say, yes the Government made the correct decisions.

[Pothole]

Blue62 said:

grumbledoak said:

The numbers don't look that way. 100,000 dead if we do nothing? Nasty, but only a few times what the flu does every year. The usual UK total deaths per year is 500,000.

What we are doing will affect her generation and beyond.

Odd making a point on behalf of another but I’ve banned her from PH. It’s the view of some of her generation, she’s a first year music student at Bristol Uni now home and pretty pissed off. She sees a future where the virus threat is the big one and will have ramifications for years to come. Hard to argue against that at the moment, my view is that we are going to be a lot poorer and that’s the price for taking our eye off the ball.

What was she planning to do with her degree?

[anxious_ant]

Let's not forget that it's not only the old that is dying. People who have health conditions are also at risk.

With no vaccine and cure it's very risky to not contain the spread.

The measures being implemented is unprecedented however it is deemed necessary to control the spread of the virus.

[JuanCarlosFandango]

I can't see how this isn't the case.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavi...

These figures are a couple of weeks old so maybe something has changed but according to the above the death rate for those without pre-existing conditions is 0.9%. If I'm reading it right that includes over 80s without existing conditions. A demographic for whom such a "death rate" would be quite normal anyway.

And that's of people tested. It could well be that thousands more people have brushed it off as a common cold, including elderly and ill people.

The response appears to be out of all proportion.

The panic, the concentration of medical resources and the economic disruption (it's not just about wanting more frivolous consumer goods) could all do far more damage.

I think this is the largest outbreak of collective insanity in living memory, driven by a surfeit of information and a complete lack of ability to digest or interpret it.

I don't claim any particular medical or epidemiological knowledge (unlike everyone else, who has seemingly become an an old hand at such unprecedented events) so I could be completely wrong, but I suspect that in a few decades people will see a world tilting at windmills.

[Uggers]

silvagod said:

Anyone that questions whether money should come before lives needs a serious talking to!

There has been several examples over the years of the NHS been unable to afford the necessary drugs to sustain peoples lives due to cost of treatment.

Once the economy is shot to st, tax take is down significantly and our debts double to what they were a year ago.
Do you think the NHS will be in a better or worse position to help those in the future?

It may sound callous but everything has a price or we would be throwing 100s of billions into eradicating malaria which has killed nearly 4.5million in the last decade.
But they're nearly all in 3rd world countries so that doesn't matter........

[Jiebo]

anxious_ant said:

Let's not forget that it's not only the old that is dying. People who have health conditions are also at risk.

With no vaccine and cure it's very risky to not contain the spread.

The measures being implemented is unprecedented however it is deemed necessary to control the spread of the virus.

This is a smaller group in comparison to the 70+ crowd that is dying. I agree that there will come a point where we can’t keep trying to save the elderly, because the cost is just too high.
The cost to the younger generation who will bare it until they retire. The cost to the younger people will be far greater than the cost to those that perish a few years earlier.

[Pothole]

JuanCarlosFandango said:

I can't see how this isn't the case.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavi...

These figures are a couple of weeks old so maybe something has changed but according to the above the death rate for those without pre-existing conditions is 0.9%. If I'm reading it right that includes over 80s without existing conditions. A demographic for whom such a "death rate" would be quite normal anyway.

And that's of people tested. It could well be that thousands more people have brushed it off as a common cold, including elderly and ill people.

The response appears to be out of all proportion.

The panic, the concentration of medical resources and the economic disruption (it's not just about wanting more frivolous consumer goods) could all do far more damage.

I think this is the largest outbreak of collective insanity in living memory, driven by a surfeit of information and a complete lack of ability to digest or interpret it.

I don't claim any particular medical or epidemiological knowledge (unlike everyone else, who has seemingly become an an old hand at such unprecedented events) so I could be completely wrong, but I suspect that in a few decades people will see a world tilting at windmills.

So you have no knowledge, just a belief that you "know" better? Interesting.

[kingofdbrits]

I had a similar discussion as the OP. It’s easy for me to say this as a fit, healthy 41 year old, with the analysis from Italy shows a rate of total deaths from people in my demographic is 0.8% of all deaths. If we do have what’s estimated to be 55,000 cases in the U.K. but only 233 deaths, at time of writing, I have more chance of being struck by lightening than dying from Coronavirus.
Now, that’s not to say I may have a thoroughly unpleasant illness, but it may be better to isolate the at risk group and give them all the financial assistance they need and let the young take the hit of the virus.

I fear the financial hardship with end up costing more deaths as the NHS will be so run down, economy shot to bits so we’ll be unable to properly fund healthcare for decades to come, never mind everyone’s quality of life.

This is likely the final nail in the coffin of my state pension too.

[knitware]

anxious_ant said:

Let's not forget that it's not only the old that is dying. People who have health conditions are also at risk.

With no vaccine and cure it's very risky to not contain the spread.

The measures being implemented is unprecedented however it is deemed necessary to control the spread of the virus.

I read a BBC article saying that if we did nothing to curtail the spread of the virus then 500k people could die. Annually, 500k people die in the uk, the virus death prediction is not an addition to those numbers, unlike Flu, around 8k deaths a year which is additional to the annual death rate. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654

So to the original question. It is important to throw funds at this as the normal annual 500k, predicted, folk who would die over the year will perish within weeks, this would ultimately increase the death rate of the UK due to overwhelming the NHS, young, will die due to no space in the wards, ICU etc.

[knitware]

knitware said:

I read a BBC article saying that if we did nothing to curtail the spread of the virus then 500k people could die. Annually, 500k people die in the uk, the virus death prediction is not an addition to those numbers, unlike Flu, around 8k deaths a year which is additional to the annual death rate. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654

So to the original question. It is important to throw funds at this as the normal annual 500k, predicted, folk who would die over the year will perish within weeks, this would ultimately increase the death rate of the UK due to overwhelming the NHS, young, will die due to no space in the wards, ICU etc.

I hope this makes sense, I'm drinking gin...(at home)

[JuanCarlosFandango]

Pothole said:

So you have no knowledge, just a belief that you "know" better? Interesting.

No specialist medical or epidemiology knowledge. I can read numbers and can generally grasp a concept if it is explained to me.

Care to explain either why I am reading the numbers wrong or what worse danger they are masking?

[Pothole]

JuanCarlosFandango said:

Pothole said:

So you have no knowledge, just a belief that you "know" better? Interesting.

No specialist medical or epidemiology knowledge. I can read numbers and can generally grasp a concept if it is explained to me.

Care to explain either why I am reading the numbers wrong or what worse danger they are masking?

Nope, not my job. I'm believing the experts, the ones I have to believe are experts, as there is no real alternative.

[peterperkins]

Survival of the fittest has served nature and evolution fairly well over the years.
Although it did lead eventually to us!?

If your older, with underlying health issues like me etc etc you know the answer.
Harsh but fair and probably in our own and our species at large's best interests.

Edited by peterperkins on Saturday 21st March 21:48

[Newc]

knitware said:

So to the original question. It is important to throw funds at this as the normal annual 500k, predicted, folk who would die over the year will perish within weeks, this would ultimately increase the death rate of the UK due to overwhelming the NHS, young, will die due to no space in the wards, ICU etc.

Do you believe that the long term impact on society of that short term bulge in the death rate would be worse or better than shutting down the global economy for at least three months?