Here's the thing
Even with the economic and human cost the quarantine is confronting us with, there seems no doubt that to abandon it would rapidly lead to the collapse of the healthcare system. It simply could not cope with the strain. That is what has happened to every country that has not adopted measures such as we have adopted in time.
The COVID death rate in the United States is 1.5%. The death rate for the so-called "Spanish Flu" pandemic was 1.2%. The death rate for seasonal flu is 0.5%. These are CDC numbers.
One variable is the quality and availability of healthcare. WHO statistics tell us that worldwide the death rate is currently between four and 4.5%. Germany, which acted quickly and decisively and was better prepared for some reason than almost anyone else, has reduced it to the rate of the seasonal flu. It's something like 7% in Iran and 10% in Italy. In both of those countries, the healthcare system has basically collapsed.
The healthcare systems of the Western democracies- and especially those with relatively dispersed populations- have so far been able to deal with the crisis. But in some, their capacity has been taxed. At home, in New York City, which is the epicenter of the outbreak, it is strained to the breaking point as it is.
As painful as they may be, the restrictions we have undertaken (compulsory in places like New York and Illinois and California and other places with huge concentrations of people in close quarters) are voluntary in most of the country. And they are all that are keeping our healthcare system from being strained to the breaking point. It the stress passed that point, it would mean that the mortality rate for COVID would probably approach that of Iran or even Italy. It's the availability of healthcare in the developed world that is keeping it down.
The collapse of the healthcare system in the United States would be catastrophic. It would mean that deaths would certainly be in the hundreds of thousands and almost certainly in the millions. Were we to reach Italy's rate- and it's mostly voluntary self-quarantining and the healthcare system it allows to survive which are preventing that from happening- we might well suffer 32 million fatalities in the United States. The population would literally be decimated- in the actual rather than the popular meaning of the word. One out of ten of us would die from it.
That doesn't count the patients on dialysis or with treatable cancer or other patients requiring life-sustaining or life-saving treatment. All of them would die, too. So would the victims of serious accidents who could not be taken to the hospital. The infrastructure of society would quickly break down. In many ways, we'd be back in the Middle Ages.
The near-certainty of a recession, and possibly a serious one, sucks. The human suffering it would inflict would be enormous. But those are the facts, and the real question we're facing is whether what I've outlined above is a price worth paying to prevent it.
Except- and here's another crucial point- it WOULDN'T prevent it. It would simply delay it and make it far more devastating and far more long-lasting when it comes.
We MUST "flatten the curve." Yes, that will mean that the pandemic will last longer. It will also mean that more people in total will contract the virus. But it also means that they will contract it with an intact healthcare system, which means that exponentially more who do will survive.
To give you a comparison that might illustrate the stakes, a prominent British epidemiologist predicts that a strategy of mitigation- the policy that follows from the logic those who minimize the danger of the virus- would result in the UK suffering between 250,000 and 500,000 thousand deaths from the virus alone. But following the policy of suppression being followed right now in the United States as well as in the UK, that drops to 20,000.
I, too, am already sick and tired of this self-quarantine business. In fact, I'm sicker and more tired of it than I can say. And yes, I dread the coming recession. I didn't fare very well personally in the last one.
But those are the facts as the people in a position to know tell them. Please don't accept so-called "alternative facts" from people who have opinions but not expertise, no matter who they may be. And bear in mind, when you minimize the seriousness of this virus or advocate loosening up our response to it, the consequences of what you're advocating.
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