(05-17-2020 10:34 PM)BruceMcF Wrote: The 99.5% survival rate depends on not allowing the epidemic to run through the population unchecked, at which point we have millions dead rather than hundreds of thousands.
The survival rate of 99.5% could be the same whether the virus runs unchecked or not. Sure, there could be some uptick if "unchecked' means hospitals are overrun and people are lying in gurneys on the curbside because of a shortage of beds and ventilators, but maybe not all that much especially as we have now ramped up production of a lot of those materials.
It's more likely that the difference between 2 million dead and 200,000 dead is more a function of "unchecked" meaning a whole lot more people getting infected such that deaths are 200 million x .005 rather than 20 million x .005.
All that said, the cold hard facts are that the USA, as a country, independent of our personal grief over loss of loved ones, can survive 2,500 covid deaths *a day*, or close to a million annually, pretty much indefinitely. We'd still have more births than deaths in the country. But we probably can't stand the economic depression associated with "lockdown" strategies for more than several months.
Given what we know about who is vulnerable, this suggests a more targeted approach - extreme lockdowns and sanitizing at nursing homes and retirement communities and hospitals to protect the elderly, and stay-at-home for people with medical conditions like cancer and diabetes and asthma, but out and about for others. However, given how the media coverage has scared even people with very low risk, this might not work because you can open things up but you can't make a scared 24 year old come out and patronize businesses, even if the odds say they have nearly nothing to worry about.