Cost To The Economy?

[TheGooner]

The idea that this disease is more deadly to older people than young people has been dispelled by the rising death tolls among younger patients. California just reported the first death of a U.S. child. At least one other in Georgia is in critical condition.

Your ideas about this are almost unique. Do some more reading.

This is probably a good start taking data from China, South Korea, Italy, Spain and some US :
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/23/211900...-deaths-by-age

TL: DR ?
Anyone can catch it, but most under 20 only suffer mild symptoms.
- 10 years old - zero fatalities as at March 21st,
10-20 years old - fatalities are 0.2% to 0.4% of cases.
20-29 years old - fatalities are 0.1% to 0.3% of cases.
30-49 years old - fatalities are 0.1% to 0.5% of cases.
50-69 years old - fatalities are 1.4% to 2.7% of cases.
70 + years old - fatalities are 10.5% to 20.2% of cases

So kids, teens and twenty somethings seem to have very low risk of dying, but that doesn't means that the won't catch it, and/or pass it onto parents and grandparents as schools are a known vector for most communicable diseases.

After 30 - the older you get - the higher the risk of fatalities - based on tens of thousands of cases in five countries.

[TheGooner]

Anyone want to bet that Universal Basic Income gains a massive amount of popularity when this is all said and done?

I'll take that bet - or at least I'll take the bet that it's only popular amongst the mathematically illiterate and can't be implemented.

Here is the result of some very basic analysis of the situation in New Zealand :
- A UBI of just $200 per week ($10.4K per year) would cost NZ $51.5Billion per year - that's over half the total amount the Govt spends.

Simply unaffordable unless you drastically cut social services, benefits, pensions, hospitals, schools, free health care, free pre-school care, etc, etc, etc.

And the $200 per week (about US$120) rate - is nowhere nearly enough to live on. Pension rates are twice this rate ($21K per year), median salary ($52K per year).

There is no way that the tax take of any country slices down into a usable living sum (UBI) for all adults.
Turning taxes into a liveable UBI is an unsolvable maths problem if you have also provide health, education and infrastructure.

(and I'd love to see UBI implemented and all benefits / handouts ended to reduce the role of the state.
But the numbers never work. There'd be poverty and hardship. You'd end up with UBI + benefits)

[wonderpunter]

The idea that this disease is more deadly to older people than young people has been dispelled by the rising death tolls among younger patients. California just reported the first death of a U.S. child. At least one other in Georgia is in critical condition.

Both Italy and Spain are reporting that many critical and dying patients are in their 20s.

We can speculate on why early reports led to the erroneous conclusion that older patients are more at risk than younger patients but that would be pointless. The numbers are growing in all age groups.

There is no natural immunity to this kind of virus in human populations. Everyone is equally susceptible to the infection. Who lives and who dies depends on more than just how healthy you are. Some very healthy young people with none of the "preexisting health conditions" have already died from the disease.

The most aggravating factor appears to be whether the healthcare system can handle the patient load. Once the hospitals are overwhelmed, and the medical staff become too sick to care for the other sick, the system fails. Then even more deaths occur for lack of treatment. And you also see a rise in deaths from non-virus causes as those patients lose or miss out on medical care.

In Spain, one nursing home was abandoned by its staff who fled in fear. When the army arrived to check on the residents (who had no way to leave and nowhere to go) many of them were already dead and the rest were sick.

it's low for younger patients.. there have been a couple of cases in the same way you might find unknown nut allergy deaths, I dont agree with the whole scare tactic when one young person with asthma dies all the media splash it on front page to scare the young.

[Soplica]

In Spain, a 21 years old died of covid, he knew at the same time that he had leuchemia.

Many cases are like this...also there are Young people with the health of a 70 years old because of obesity, energy drinks bad habits etc.

[iso2009]

Totally agree, all younger patients had underlying health conditions. Exceptions are very low in numbers. Seasonal flu also kills (much) younger and healthy people, many times with no explanations for getting from normal symptoms to critical and death.

Covid-19 evolution seems to be a "gamble" so it should be taken seriously by age group, especially the elderly. Once you got it, anything can happen.

A vaccine will be made, a good treatment will be available. A lot of people will die, unfortunately. Some political leaders will lose, some will gain. Ideology will surely change.

Inflation will come, salaries will be lowered, we will stop buying every little crap we think it's cool. Economy will be FUBAR, but it will recover in the end (in 10 years?).

I think "enough profit margin" will be more like "breakeven" for a long time. I don't see good times ahead, but I think we'll eventually choose the best case scenario, something like a middle way.

[Michael Martinez]

Your ideas about this are almost unique. Do some more reading.

You're citing outdated information (yes, the Vox article was published on March 23 - the data has already been rendered obsolete).

Furthermore, the data coming from China has been challenged by every economist and epidemiologist in the world.

You need to understand that no matter how bright and positive you want to be once the hospitals are saturated everyone else suffers too.

And as the medical specialists fall to the disease the health care system is less able to deal with new waves of sick and injured people.

New York State has called for 1.2 million retired medical workers to come help them. So far 40,000 have volunteered.

Every medical ventilator in the world has now been purchased and shipped. All anyone can do is wait for the manufacturers to produce and ship more, and they will be scooped up quickly.

The cascade effect of this disease is completely devastating, as has become apparent in Italy, Spain, Iran, China, New York, France, and many other places.

If you want to look at data, then track the Johns Hopkins data.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/a...23467b48e9ecf6

This pandemic affects everyone.

This disease threatens everyone.

No one is immune to the effect because of their age. No one has a better chance of survival because of their age. People have a better chance of dying because of factors other than having the disease, but children and adults account for a significant number of both hospitalizations and deaths.

Their numbers will go up if people glibly assume they have some magical resistance to the disease that doesn't exist.

[Michael Martinez]

As I wait to see if my previous comment citing the Johns Hopkin data will be approved by a moderator (it was deleted), here are some other news stories that should help dispel the myth of "young people will be okay".

This is the 12-year-old girl in Georgia who went into intensive care. She is improving. She had no underlying health conditions.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/healt...ing/index.html

Young adults in Kentucky threw a coronavirus party. Now one of them has the virus.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ar/5076632002/

Four spring breakers defied the ban on using a Florida beach and now they have the virus.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/four-s...or-coronavirus

What these 34-year-old and 26-year-old coronavirus patients have to say to young adults

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/healt...rus/index.html

The coronavirus is sending lots of young people to the hospital.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...e-severe-cases

Nearly 40 per cent of U.S. hospitalized coronavirus patients are adults 20-54

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/h...ng-people.html

[iso2009]

Michael Martinez, there's a huge difference between "hospitalised" and "dead".

But I agree with you on the rest, this disease can be very serious for anyone.

[Michael Martinez]

Michael Martinez, there's a huge difference between "hospitalised" and "dead".

But I agree with you on the rest, this disease can be very serious for anyone.

The point isn't that being hospitalized means you'll die. The point is that when the hospitals are overwhelmed (as happened in China, as is happening in Italy, Iran, and Spain), more people die.

The projected mortality rates are optimistic because we've never been through this before. You can't compare this disease to other outbreaks, not even the 1918 influenza epidemic.

The mortality rates skyrocket in every city where the medical system fails to keep up with the patients. That's the danger.

The cost to the economy has already zoomed into the billions because of the work that has been done. Now the U.S. government is about to invest $6 trillion in keeping the country going for a few months.

And more stimulus bills are expected.

Worldwide the stimulus requirements will almost certainly exceed $10 trillion within another month.

But the health care costs and the subsequent losses to the economy are still incalculable. This thing hasn't even come close to peaking.

[Sherlock]

The projected mortality rates are optimistic because we've never been through this before. You can't compare this disease to other outbreaks, not even the 1918 influenza epidemic.

What you are writing here is simply a nonsense.

[Michael Martinez]

What you are writing here is simply a nonsense.

Not even close to nonsense.

Here is how it works. Suppose a hospital has 100 ventilators. There are no more to be had.

When patient 101 (requiring a ventilator) shows up, that patient's mortality risk increases because there is no ventilator available to help him or her breathe.

Patient 102 is in the same boat, right on up to patient 150 or whatever. Until another ventilator is procured or someone frees 1 up (either by recovering enough to be taken off or by dying), the next 1 to 50 patients are on their own.

There are no medicines known to be effective cures or treatments for Covid-19. Hospitals are throwing everything they can at this disease but if they cannot help these critical patients breathe those patients' chances of survival go way down.

It has nothing to do with age.

It has nothing to do with percentage of population. Those first 100 patients could all be in the 80s and the next 50 patients are in their 30s. The ones on the ventilators are the ones with the best survival chances (all other things being equal).

The idea that young people can survive the disease better was misleading from the beginning.

If 100 people over 70 end up in critical care and 200 people between 20 and 30 must wait on ventilators, you WILL see a higher mortality rate for those 200 young people than in another city where there are enough ventilators.

[Sherlock]

More and more random stupid stuff. Sometimes I think US president is the smartest guy in that country even with his level of random stuff.

It has nothing to do with age.

AGE	DEATH RATE confirmed cases	DEATH RATE all cases
80+ years old	21.9%	14.8%
70-79 years old		8.0%
60-69 years old		3.6%
50-59 years old		1.3%
40-49 years old		0.4%
30-39 years old		0.2%
20-29 years old		0.2%
10-19 years old		0.2%
0-9 years old		no fatalities

https://www.worldometers.info/corona...-demographics/

And those numbers are from people who were tested. Most young infected people do not even make it to the tests, because they simply have just the cold and they are instructed not to go anywhere. The difference between old and young will be even greater in reality than the table.

[Michael Martinez]

More and more random stupid stuff. Sometimes I think US president is the smartest guy in that country even with his level of random stuff.

The numbers you're quoting are misleading. Those are aggregated across the world and the disease is still rolling out. The percentage breakdowns are different for countries like Iran, Italy, and Spain.

And those percentages do not in any way represent a susceptibility to the disease on the basis of age. It only represents the aggregate breakdown of known infections to known fatalities. Epidemiologists have cautioned people not to trust these numbers because they are constantly changing and vary by region.

Any city where the hospitals are overload will have substantially higher mortality rates.

[MMM]

Either you are too much into it or just mixing things. The previous comments you maid are completely not correct.

And yes, if more people get sick the death rate will be higher due to lack of medical health, however it already happened in Italy so this also included in the statistics.

Anyway, you don't have to trust the numbers. Go with what you feel

[Michael Martinez]

Either you are too much into it or just mixing things. The previous comments you maid are completely not correct.

You obviously don't understand the situation.

You can't use aggregated statistics to predict what will happen in a city where the hospital system is overwhelmed with too many patients.

The ones most likely to die are those who wait too long to seek help or who (even if seeking it as soon as they feel symptomatic) arrive too late to receive whatever medical care is available.

You should really read further about what is happening because this is not an "old person's disease" and it is deadly for everyone. There is no natural immunity to it. Epidemiologists don't know what to expect next year if people become infected again.

Worse, the disease literally kills lung tissue and based on what is known about the four other coronaviruses there is no reason to expect anyone to retain a lifelong resistance to the disease after they recover from it.

Everyone is in danger, not just people over a certain age. When the hospitals cannot take any more patients then anyone who needs medical attention - including people suffering from drug overdoses, other illnesses, accidents - becomes a higher risk patient.

A typical influenza epidemic has about a 0.1% mortality rate. Covid-19's lowest mortality numbers are in the 3.2% to 5% range and in some places are still much higher than that.

This is no time to place faith in numbers that make you feel good.

[Michael Martinez]

CNN just published this article. Maybe it will help underscore the problem.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/healt...als/index.html

At first, patients skewed toward the 70-plus age group, but in the past week or so there have been a number of patients younger than 50.

"I don't think they understand the severity of this disease," the doctor said of the younger patients.
"Two weeks ago, life was completely different."

[MMM]

I fully understand what you are saying, that when hospitals are over flooded there are not enough machines for everyone in severe state and the death rate will increase. I agree.

Nevertheless, the % of deaths between people below 50 is not high. Much higher than flue but not like the Spanish flue and far beyond some past epidemics. Based on the stats from China and Italy, 31% don't even experience any sypthoms (which is actually a problem as they can infect everyone without knowing).

Anyway, we are not fully on opposite sides, just that your statement that it effects young as the old is not correct.

[Azureus]

31% don't even experience any sypthoms (which is actually a problem as they can infect everyone without knowing).

Yes, recent research in Italy was studying the virus evolution - how it spread and whether it mutated. It isn't 100 % confirmed but they came to conclusion that the patient zero in Italy could've got it as early as November or December (in Italy, NOT China!) which is much sooner than previously expected.

Also quite a lot of Italians on social media now mentioned that they believe they experienced the disease in or around January - problems with breathing, pressure on chest, dry cough; similar to flu but persistent and returning once or multiple times in the span of several weeks. Some say it was unlike any other cold/flu they had, of course these people weren't tested because tests weren't available then and if you test them now with PCR tests, they will likely be negative.

So one possible explanation that the exposure rate is much much higher in Italy than previously thought, maybe even 5 % or 10 % or 20 % of population got in touch with the virus. That is good news because it isn't as deadly as believed (of course you shouldn't be 60+ guy, smoker with diabetes, high blood pressure and BMI 30).

Also it is somewhat bad news because you cannot stop the virus by insane restrictions, martial law and quarantine. The humanity may have to learn to live with the virus - just like it learned to live with measles or the common flu.

[Azureus]

A typical influenza epidemic has about a 0.1% mortality rate. Covid-19's lowest mortality numbers are in the 3.2% to 5% range and in some places are still much higher than that.

You are confusing mortality rate with case fatality rate, these are two different numbers.
If the virus' mortality rate really was 3.2-5 % then everyone is completely ****** and the humanity is done.

[iso2009]

First of all, I was not a fan of lockdown. But...

There is an universal agreement that a lot more people are infected, much more than 400-500k worldwide. Therefore, the ratio between infected/dead will be lower in the end, probably towards 1-1,5%. Of course, an overwhelming amount of victims will be elderly people. It's statistics. Or younger people with comorbidities. In exceptional cases, there will be young victims with no comorbidities.

What is scary, assuming we are all young here (20-50s):

1. Once you got it, there's absolutely no guarantee you will not end up in ICU. You may require ventilation or you will have no symptoms. Or you will have mild symptoms. This "no guarantee" makes it potentially dangerous for everyone.

2. After talking to a doctor (friend of mine) who's now on the first line of battle, the following scenario seems to take place: you are in your 30s or 40s and you may require ventilation only for a few hours, just to help you breathe when things are worse. If the hospital has enough free ventilators, you're lucky. If not, you are now evolving from a "mild to complicated" case to a severe case. You might die. So they will unplug an elderly person, who otherwise might have survived. Or, just like in Italy, they will "plug" only younger people.
That's why mortality rate in Italy is insane and Spain and other European countries seem to follow, except Germany.

Lockdown and social distancing are simply trying (not saying it will succeed) to give the medical system a helping hand in avoiding inhumane decisions like unplugging or simply not treating at all the elderly, which are the most affected.

Otherwise, not only all older people will be ignored at hospitals, younger people with pneumonia will die because of lack of ICU/ventilators beds. Not because this specific pneumonia it's deadly itself, but because of lack of treatment. Since the disease is very contagious, no medical system in the world can deal with so many cases. It's really simple mathematics.

That's why we are trying to buy some time and not get sick all at once. It's really that simple. I am not sure the world will succeed at this. There's still one month ahead, minimum.

Bottom line, at least for me: don't take it lightly, because there are a number of factors that might get you in trouble, even if you are not in the risk zone.