(04-04-2021 10:25 PM)BruceMcF Wrote: The fact is the countries that had a serious response early, whether a hard lockdown or near universal mask use with a soft lockdown for mass spreader events, were the countries able to get out of the lockdown in a much shorter period of time.
Maybe, but then a lot of them went back in to one. E.g., France, Portugal, England, Germany, and Italy all went in to nationwide lockdowns in early to late March. All of them are either in some kind of lockdown right now or just got out of one (e.g., Italy's latest one ended April 30). France just went in to a new one.
The countries that seemed to get out of lockdowns earlier and had good results in terms of cases and deaths seem to be countries like China, which mobilized communist state power to close regions to a degree not possible in the USA, or islands like Ireland, New Zealand and Australia that have obvious geographical advantages.
FWIW, I don't doubt that lockdowns can, generally speaking, help stop the spread of a virus. But so could all of us jumping off a bridge. You have to look at the costs and benefits, and IMO that was never really done. The advice of public health experts, who are trained to only look at, and are only experts in, disease mitigation, not the overall costs of preventing a disease or deaths, was prioritized, and yes, prioritized even by the Trump administration.
As for IFR, yes, it varies by factors and it is always an estimate, never a rock-solid number. As mentioned earlier, the big ones seem to be age and recognized co-morbidities, which is why the CDC has published data on IFR by age, as age seems to be a huge factor. You mention hospitalization capacity, and that was the Great Fear last March, and of course it never materialized. It's not clear how important that is anyway - Africa isn't exactly a hot-spot for top quality hospitalization access and care, and yet Africa has a continent-wide IFR of about .23%, which is better than we in the USA, with our cutting edge capacity, has.
Of course, at a certain level, each of us has an unknown "individual IFR" risk simply because no two people have the exact same health and age profiles. But that doesn't mean looking at average profiles from similarly-situated people isn't useful. To me, it obviously is. That's why I look at the CDC data on it.
And here's the latest CDC "best estimate" data, converted to a survival rate:
Age 0-17 ......... 99.998%
Age 18-49........ 99.95%
Age 50-64 ........99.4%
Age 65+ .......... 91.1%
As mentioned above, these have actually gotten slightly *worse* since last summer, despite hospitals and care facilities being ramped up and presumably having climbed the learning curve on how to handle virus cases since then.
And whatever the "true" only God knows societal IFR, we do know that it's not a black mamba bite. It's way way weaker than that. Sadly, most people think the risks are higher than they are. That's one of the big myths about the virus - that Trump inspired "virus denial" has carried the day in terms of people's perceptions. In fact, the misapprehensions have run the other way, people of all stripes, including Republicans, think the risks of a bad outcome if you catch it are worse than they are. IMO, this explains persistent majority public support for "keeping society significantly closed" policies, despite their tremendous costs.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-m...xb15fPzkaI