Are the social distancing rules in your area necessary?

[Hip]

Thus it's not as simple as 'these restrictions save lives'; it's 'these restrictions may save some lives at the cost of other lives.'

That may be true, but the immediate problem is getting tens of thousands of new ventilators built on an emergency schedule, and also setting up new emergency hospitals.

The UK has set up three new emergency hospitals at conference centers, which it calls the NHS Nightingale Hospitals. And lots of major engineering companies have responded to the UK government's request to make ventilators.

The new Nightingale Hospital in London has 4,000 beds, and is being readied for the tsunami of sick coronavirus patients that are expected in the coming weeks.

But these ventilators will not be available for around 2 months, because medical equipment engineering standards are high, and there are medical engineering regulatory rules which the equipment must pass. So the next 2 months are going to be grim, because lots will probably die for want of a ventilator.

I think once the medical system has geared up to dealing with the expected volume of coronavirus patients, and it will take 2 months or so to gear up, then we will be in a better position to see whether the medical system can cope, and thus whether some of the social distancing measures can be lifted.

You want to ensure that you don't lift the distancing measures too much, as then this may start to overload even the geared up medical system.

It's not easy to gauge this though, because there will be a lag of several weeks between lifting restrictions and the next wave of coronavirus patients that the lifting creates.

 

[Wishful]

The resources being spent arent just to extend the lifespan of the dying. They're intended to reduce the numbers of the dying.

Well, from what little I've read about the deaths, it seems mostly people who don't have all that long to live even without this virus. That's why I say it's extending lifespans--a small amount. The 'numbers of the dying' are not identical units, with identical lifespans ahead of them.

As for government allocation of resources to other areas, they may be low, but it's very likely that they'll use any decline in available resources to cut back even further. Thus wasting resources on something that doesn't make socioeconomic sense still affects everything else.

Simple example: imagine a 110 year old man, stuck in bed, kept alive by tubes, in constant pain, about to die. You can extend his life by a month for $100 trillion dollars. Is that a good use of that money for society overall?

Yes, it's an exaggerated example, but it shows that there is a decision society has to make. Just where to draw the line is more complex. Britain came to a value of 30K pounds (or was it dollars?) per QUALY. You can argue about the democratic process that came up with that figure, or the figure itself, but that is what the democratic process came up with. The article said that the British government was ignoring that figure and spending eleven times that amount per QUALY. Perhaps that will be a factor in the next election.

If you want total economic collapse, try running a country filled with unburied corpses,

If the death rate among the working segment of the population is only .1%, that's hardly going to fill the country with unburied corpses. Washington state recently allowed composting of human bodies. In an emergency, truck them to sawmills or other places with suitable composting material, and some months later, you can spread the compost (composting is good for destroying pathogens) on fields or forest lands. Lots of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

So yes, I think that a prolonged, extended active period, with fewer contagions due to self-isolation, might be a better thing than the exponential increases that we're seeing, like, every-effing-where, overwhleming things we always took for granted, like hospitals, doctors, adequate safety precautions, adequate amount of tech treatment machinery, etc ....

Of course, we want to slow this down and protect the health care system...I"m just wondering on a personal and selfish level.

If one successfully avoids it, but its still: existing.......its like the menace hanging over- those who avoided it successfully the first time it blew thru.

And i have gotten the "flu" in July when it was 116 degrees.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

If the death rate among the working segment of the population is only .1%, that's hardly going to fill the country with unburied corpses. Washington state recently allowed composting of human bodies. In an emergency, truck them to sawmills or other places with suitable composting material, and some months later, you can spread the compost (composting is good for destroying pathogens) on fields or forest lands. Lots of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus.

I would strongly suspect human bodies to be classified as a toxin....and their decay would do things like- contaminate ground water. But we can't even die without- leaving behind a chemical legacy.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

Simple example: imagine a 110 year old man, stuck in bed, kept alive by tubes, in constant pain, about to die. You can extend his life by a month for $100 trillion dollars. Is that a good use of that money for society overall?

This is part of an existing...issue which is concerning...that we often demand every possible treatment- when we are near the end. A coworker...at 88, goes in for triple bypass (did not make it thru the procedure).

Why would anyone do that at 88?

So folks consume vast resources which far exceed their lifetime Gross Production.....how can this pencil out?

Case in point: my mother- her last 18 years of care....cost over $800,000. And she never worked to generate that sum of revenue and resources. All we could contribute to offsetting this cost was: all the insurance money...about $150K.

 

[Wishful]

I would strongly suspect human bodies to be classified as a toxin....and their decay would do things like- contaminate ground water. But we can't even die without- leaving behind a chemical legacy.

No, composting of bodies--including human--has been studied in depth (yes, pun here). Composting has proven to be quite effective at destroying pathogens and organic toxins. It won't help if you died of heavy metal poisoning, but for typical bodies, the end product is safe compost. Burying bodies in graveyards, below the depth for fast decomposition, is much more likely to release pathogens or toxins at some later date. Cremation just seems wasteful of energy and organic compounds (stored sunlight) to me.

 

[Rufous McKinney]

Composting has proven to be quite effective at destroying pathogens and organic toxins

Thats good to know!

 

[Wishful]

Bodies do have to be buried in the composting medium to decompose properly. I left a vole body on top of my pile, for any bird that wanted it. When I went back later, I thought it had changed position. I thought jokingly of zombie mice, and just then the vole moved. That was a bit ... disturbing. Then I saw the scavenger beetle run around looking for a better place to pull. Amazing how they can move and bury a body much larger then they are.

BTW, proper composting is good at sanitizing feces too. Much more environmentally friendly than flush toilets and sewage plants.

 

[YippeeKi YOW !!]

Simple example: imagine a 110 year old man, stuck in bed, kept alive by tubes, in constant pain, about to die. You can extend his life by a month for $100 trillion dollars. Is that a good use of that money for society overall?

Specious and hypothetical ....

If the death rate among the working segment of the population is only .1%, that's hardly going to fill the country with unburied corpses. Washington state recently allowed composting of human bodies. In an emergency, truck them to sawmills or other places with suitable composting material, and some months later, you can spread the compost (composting is good for destroying pathogens) on fields or forest lands. Lots of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus.

It's hard to respond to this, since you only posted, and responded to, half my statement.

But we're not talking about the death rate among the working population, we're talking about the working population that can no longer work, so death rates that might have been handled without strangling the system are now overwhelming it, and good luck finding the truck-drivers to load, secure, and haul all those decomposing bodies to sawmills and giant composting piles. Multiple that by the expected peak rate, and you've got ...... enough. We all have plenty to worry about as it is .....

 

[Wishful]

Specious and hypothetical ....

No, it was to make the point that there is a decision that society has to make regarding appropriate spending on medical intervention depending on what result can be expected. Some people refuse to acknowledge this, and insist that no cost is too high to save a life. That assumes that there's no harm to society from spending that amount of resources, which is not true.

so death rates that might have been handled without strangling the system are now overwhelming it, and good luck finding the truck-drivers to load, secure, and haul all those decomposing bodies to sawmills and giant composting piles.

This problem has arisen in the past (Black Plague, various other epidemics with high death rates). As far as I know, the problems got solved, even if it was with horsecarts and graves dug by hand. With the latest pandemic, lots of people get only mild symptoms. I think today's problems just seem worse to many people because they've gotten so used to having problems disappear invisibly, immediately, without interfering with their rush to work or their scheduled TV watching time or meal delivery.

Dropping the preventative measures would cause some more expense due to amount/time, but would that cost more than the preventative measures themselves are costing? I don't know, but I expect someone will crunch those numbers too, and may find that it would have been cheaper to follow mostly business as usual. I also expect there'd be lots of heated arguments about the numbers.

 

[Booble]

I think of it as us having two wars to fight. The first being the virus and the second being the economic impact. I think we have to focus first on the battle against the virus. This virus spreads too easily and causes mortality (and we don't know yet what other kind of long term health issues) in too many people, even beyond the elderly and compromised immune systems. We're talking about A LOT of unecessary deaths. For example in my area, we have a young, 30-ish year old healthy, fairly fit young guy who is on life support right now. And now his mother has been diagnosed as well. This is not "the flu." The guy was/is a bartender in a tourist area so interacted with people from all over. So we have to take extreme measures now, so that we can to slow this until we get a vaccine in place. Battle #1. In addition we have battle #2. There can be some overlap in fighting the two battles but we must win battle 1, in order to win battle 2. Otherwise the pain is prolonged on both fronts.