(06-26-2020 10:56 AM)ken d Wrote: To whatever extent that might be true, it is a number that can not be known, or even estimated. That 100K number was simply pulled out of someone's rear end. But even if it were true, if the number of deaths from the virus without any steps to prevent its spread were 300K, is the difference of 200K an acceptable outcome to justify playing football? ...
One point is that a lot of other countries have the case rate (per million people) down to a small fraction of the US new case rate per million people. The choice between 100,000 dead and 300,000 dead is also taking for granted a relatively incompetent response to the epidemic.
Another point is that while there ARE antibody studies that estimate uncounted light/asymptomatic cases at multiples of counted cases, there are also antibody studies that estimate uncounted light/asymptomatic cases at a similar percentage to serious/critically ill cases ... antibody testing is notoriously prone to false positives, both due to overlaps between an immune system response to different infections and due to overlaps between different immune system responses detected by the same testing agent.
So one has to be cautious about accepting the result of any given forensic antibody study just because it gives the answer one would like to hear. If the current best estimate of epidemiologists is an IFR of 0.5% to 1%, that's five to ten times deadlier than the flu with an IFR in the 0.1% range. We still would have hundreds of thousands of unnecessary fatalities and millions of unnecessary infections if we continue to choose to not get it under control as opposed to choosing to get it under to control.
And a third point regards the infections that do not result in immediate fatalities. We don't know what the long term effects will prove to be until the long term has had a chance to happen so we can observe the effects. An infection that can affect the lung, heart, brain, pancreas, and immune system clotting response, among others, is certainly a candidate for serious long term effects among those with initially mild cases.
And of course, young people have the longest time to live with long term chronic consequences. If I had it in the February time frame, and there's serious problems with the heart or onset of diabetes that crop up with high frequency ten years later, I'll likely have keeled over of a heart attack before the decade is out anyway, so that would be no real impact to me, while if my oldest grandson was in the same boat, he'd be living with it from his thirties onward.