Not everyone who needs medical help for Covid-19 needs a ventilator. Some just need supplemental oxygen.
And people go to hospital with other conditions. If hospitals are 100% overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases, then they may struggle to treat strokes, heart attacks, car crash victims, cancer patients, etc...
Can we expand the capacity of the healthcare system for those treatments? Oxygen is not without danger, but it can be safely handled by non-professionals, and it's relatively easy to manufacture.
I've never actually heard anybody discuss any treatments besides ventilators, so I have no idea what's feasible.
If it was a case of just seeing if they need oxygen then it'd be trivial.
The issue is when they deteriorate, what do you do then. There are hundreds of ways for people in hospital to "go wrong" knowing when where and how to intervene requires both nurses and doctors. All of which take 3-9 years to train
Besides close monitoring of people on O2 to adjust amounts and intubate if that time comes, there are potentially other components of supportive care that might alter outcomes, like IV anti-virals (e.g. remdesivir) or anti-coagulants, e.g. heparin. Some anti-coagulants can be given at home, but the strong doses being discussed also come with high risk of bleeding, benefitting from bed rest and close observation. For a good slice of the sickest COVID patients, hospitalization is helpful and hard to replicate at home, even with our limited therapies.
That said, oxygen and heparin at home could be good for a lot of patients. Improvements in prognostication may help distinguish that group in the future.
Oxygen is very regularly given outside of the hospital for a range of ailments. There is a thriving industry selling home and portable oxygen delivery units.
Yes, but how many lives will it save? The answer is unclear but it seems to be lower than what most people would expect.
The basic assumptions were not well supported when the decisions were made. All the models we had were based on a very, very low level of testing and unreliable information from other countries.
I read the study and nowhere does it mention when or how ventilators were applied.
If ventilators are a scarce resource/bottleneck and ventilation is applied by prioritisation then I could see the mortality rate skewing up as a function of treatment being applied too late.
It is worth bearing in mind the mortality rate of non-swamped health care systems.
For every NYC/Paris/Lombardy/Wuhan there is a South Korea/Taiwan/Hong Kong with very different data profiles.
I would love to see the mortality rate for ventilation support in these countries/cities...
What's an acceptable death rate look like for you? Anecdotally does that number change if we're talking about your life, or the lives of people you are responsible for?
I’m not sure if it’s possible to have an earnest conversation about that when one party can easily claim the moral high ground by expressing outrage that the other party might not be willing to go to literally all costs to save a single life.
I do see some of that argument being made, however, I see a lot more false information coming from one side, as well as ignoring the advice of experts, and actively quieting people in the government who dare to publicly disagree with the president's statements. So, yeah it is pretty hard to have an unbiased discussion on this. I obviously have my own biases here :).
> What's an acceptable death rate look like for you?
We make arbitrage like this when setting pollution laws, or speed limits. The issue here is that we don't know the cost of flattening the curve. We know that GDP is strongly correlated with life expectancy, and the loss of GDP worldwide will have important sanitary impact, but it's hard to quantify this.
That being said, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to flatten the curve. Considering we don't have the data to make the right decision, we use a greedy algorithm. But I'm quite convinced that we'll be worse off in the long term. Incidentally, we choosing to save old people over poor people.
Most economists say we should listen to health professionals and not re-open to early. And that if we do re-open too early its likely to cause more long term damage to the economy
Most economists have stayed as far as humanely possible from evaluating lives vs GDP.
Which is a shame.
It’s like the one example where some back of the envelope yet informed numbers might improve public policy vs the status quo..blind panic and a livelihood crippling total lockdown.
To be clear, I fully support Strict social distancing and think the idea of their being a trade-off between government policy on the matter and economic performance is off-base. People will social distance whether the government tells them to or not, and if the pandemic worsens substantially then the economic impact will be even worse. That is to say that the best thing to do from both a lives saved AND an economic perspective is to contain the pandemic to a manageable level. </br>
All that throat clearing out of the way... this is a silly argument and one that is not applied in any other domain. Should we ban cars? How can you possibly say that the many thousands of people who die in automobile accidents each year are an acceptable loss of life?
To put it in perspective, approximately 37,000 people die per YEAR from automobile accidents in the USA
With all the measures already in place, and strong possibilities of under counting COVID19 has already killed more than 50,000 people in less than 4 months.
A better argument would be banning obesity. ~300,000 people die from obesity related diseases every year
Given the number of people who were working until the lockdowns were announced by the government, and how many customers were still buying nonessential services, I think the majority of those jobs would not have been lost.
I don't think the data supports that assertion. I don't have the link handy, but OpenTable published data showing that in Atlanta at least, restaurant bookings were down ~90% before the stay-at-home order was issued. The situation was similar in many other areas as well.
This might sound good as a sound bite but offers no thought behind it. One thing that is clear is that we cannot go to extremes on either end.
On one side - we cannot stop the economy to contain the virus, because that would turn into every person having to grow their own food and carry their own water with a bucket from the river. Many many people would also die.
On the other side - we also cannot ignore the pandemic and carry as if nothing is happening because that would over-burden the hospitals to the point that they will not be able to treat people with other issues. Many many people would die as well.
So there indeed has to be a balance. And the question "what price are we willing to pay for saving a life" seems to be on point.
A lack of jobs can create dead people, whether through crime or through an inability to afford healthcare or shelter or food.
I'm not convinced that such deaths outweigh the lives saved through these measures, but they're still worth mentioning if we want a full picture of the impact.
A lot of the jobs that were lost won't come back for years. It's not like we can flip a switch and all the businesses that closed will be open again. The small business economy has been destroyed.
True, but that outlook depends a lot on age, life experience and other factors; a lot of people will agree with you unless it's their own life/family.
Also; por qué no los dos? The USA has enough money and resources (and billionaires) to save the lives + not have the suffering (basic income/welfare). That they choose not to might not be the concern of the people who voted for those things but got Trump; they don't want their lives or loved ones to be chosen over 'jobs/economy' just because the people in power are overly greedy and short-sighted.
And people go to hospital with other conditions. If hospitals are 100% overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases, then they may struggle to treat strokes, heart attacks, car crash victims, cancer patients, etc...
Flattening the curve will save lives.