Posted by dino27 on 3/10/2020 1:36:00 PM (view original):
you cant catch heart disease or cancer.
what if everyone ignored advice and freely associated everywhere.
what do you think would happen with what we already know.
I think you're missing the point.
I think if everyone just keeps going about their lives... it still doesn't break into the top 3 causes of death.
It doesn't matter if you can't "catch" heart disease or cancer. You can still do things to prevent them, or prevent them from being fatal. There is always a competition for resources. The mistake that people habitually fall into making is treating each issue in a vacuum rather than looking at the bigger picture. Right now covid19 feels scary, so everyone wants to throw massive resources into it. That's probably correct. Like I said yesterday, it does look like there is a big opportunity for some intelligent public health initiatives and healthcare spending in the short term to save large numbers of lives. But that doesn't mean that anything you can do to prevent the spread of covid19 is a clear win. If you go too far on spending, those resources could be better used somewhere else. If you go too far on restricting activity, the collateral damage may not be worth it.
One very easy to describe, yet difficult to quantify, example of the limits of useful prevention is related to the weak but well-known correlation between economic stability and overall mortality rates. When the stock and job markets decline, particularly when they decline rapidly, life expectancy tends to temporarily decrease. In developed nations, this effect seems to be exacerbated when paired with social or political changes, so the fact that we're in an election year doesn't help. A number of models exist in the literature to predict mortality outcomes from economic downturns. It's not an exact science, but properly trained people (not me) could, in theory, make a realistic order-of-magnitude prediction of how many more people will die due to a decline in economic vigor. Which raises a question - at what point does restricting economic activity in the name of reducing the spread of a virus become a losing game? At what point are more lives lost as a result of the economic penalty than are saved as a result of limiting the disease? I don't have any idea what the answer to this question looks like. What bothers me is that nobody seems to be trying to answer it, or even have it on their radar that such a question might exist. We're so tunnel visioned on "let's contain this virus" that we risk missing the bigger picture.