Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Fubarski... Does anyone actually know him?

Fubar,

Earlier you made some reasonable points. The "life money" trade off is one most people, and even more politicians, are uncomfortable having in public. The reality is, we can calculate the value we place on the average human life. One example is the application of work safety rules such as those administered by OSHA. We can calculate the costs, and lives saved as a data point on the curve. Last time I checked, current value was somewhere around 2 to 2.2 million dollars. Now keep in mind, that for the average working person still making a contribution to society.

You bring up the additional thorny issue of the "discounted value" of someone who is say, 85 with heart disease, and diabetes who costs Medicare 40K a real to maintain they low quality of life. It's a very pragmatic question, but those old people actually vote, so it's unlikely you will hear such a discussion lead by any politician. No one want to be the party "that killed the grandparents of an entire generation".

Yes, modeling is tough, and data sets can have unique peculiarities. It's important to closely watch the assumptions going into the models, and pay attention to when these assumptions change. Let me give you an example.

Some of the early models were predicting deaths in the range of 2 to 6 million Americans. (That number may not be right, but it's good enough for the sake of this discussion). Those models were based upon us treating this like we do the normal flu, not modifying our behaviors, thus leading to a very high level of transmission.

Well, that's not what happened. We changed our behavior, shut (most) everything down, significantly reducing the rate of spread. This new behavior is now modeled into the latest predictions, and of course, the results are much different.

When you look at the projections from healthdata.org, they call out their underlying assumptions right at the top of the page:



https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

These improved numbers assume full social distancing, but just as importantly they also have an end date. Now that doesn't mean everything goes back to full normal on that day, but there is a limit to how much we can stress this economy before we significantly impair our capital structure. After all, every dollar spent paying someone not to work is one less dollar we can loan to a new business, and businesses run on debt.

I think where you and I see this equation differently is in the transmissibility of the virus and the effectiveness of the shut down. Part of that probably comes from my level of comfort working with data and seeing how slight changes to key parameters can make sizable differences to predicted results. Additionally, this will often enable me to have a more objective view of data, how's it's being handles, and an understanding of the level of "data abuse" occurring.

Biased induced data abuse is a very significant problem for any politically important question. Fortunately, people place enough value on the lives of themselves and their loved ones that we have very rigorous peer review and a lower level of tolerance for BS within the medical field. I'm not saying it perfect, but medical scholarship is far superior to that of "global cooling/warming/climate change".

So in summary, I believe this virus is more dangerous than your estimate. For now, we are doing the right things to mitigate it's overall impact. The current state of affairs is temporary. We will incrementally reopen the impacted parts of our economy soon, probably with measures similar to those suggested by you, along with some other creative ideas that escaped both you and I.

There's a lot of really smart people working on this. They will find solutions, and I'm still predicting a viable vaccine in time for the release of the next flu season. We are already seeing experimental treatments using plasma from recovered patients, and the identification of drug mechanism with great potential, as well as proposals round identification of individuals whom earned their immunity the hard way.

We will lick this thing. A year from now I expect the markets to be higher, and providing our President wins this November and we hold at least one chamber of Congress, barring anything else stupid, we will continue higher for the next several years. Of course I reserve the right to change that opinion as new data points emerge.