If people haven’t caught on to the consequences of not taking this disease seriously by now, then there is no real reason in even trying to convince them now.

Amazing how a disease that is no worse than the flu has been able to paralyze the entire health care system in Northern Italy and required the construction of temporary hospitals in Wuhan. I guess China closing down the entire area had no effect on reducing the catastrophe that was in motion at the time... I’m sorry, I meant to say their little round of the flu...

For fuck sakes, some people really are dense / heartless.

It is good to see that so many places and people in charge are taking this seriously based on the information being supplied by experts that spend their entire lives studying and analyzing diseases, instead of a bunch of armchair experts on Internet forums.

First, the premise of "shutting schools saves lives" is unclear. At school the social circle can be stable, and compliance with hygene taught and monitored. Much could be done to keep kids separated by class or grade, shy of a full closure.

Closing the schools throws routines into flux, potentially creating new person to person connections (either kids or caregivers).

Second, I find the first harm (mass economic devastation) to be a a far greater threat to the planet than the second harm (mass overwhelmed hospitals). The first threatens every human being, the second threatens a small minority.

The idea that we need to destroy the global economy to avoid the potential for overwhelmed hospitals is like burning down your house to avoid a cockroach infestation. It's groupthink madness.

If that is your level of critical thought, then yes, your child might be better off without you as a dad.

In "Impact of School Closure for CV-19 on the US Healthcare Workforce and the Net Mortality Effects" pub. 3/13, Bayham & Fenichel est. mortality rates after school closures must reduce 15% to compensate absence of healthcare workers who stay home to care children <13.

The idea that there's a epidemiological consensus that schools must be closed and society needs to be shut down, is nonsense. Politics are driving these decisions.

It's hard to imagine a knuckle head that can balance a billion lives on one end of the scale and 3 months of schooling on the other but let's face it, there's a lot of fucked up people out there.

Wow, that's really nice of you. What an utterly pleasant person.

Yet another reason why populist groupthink is idiotic. You aren't even understanding the conversation based on the nonsense you're writing. It has nothing to do with missing school vs. dead people; it's about mass economic and social devastation vs. more dead people.

I’m with Crawford. The medicine is worse than the illness in this case.

Even if a million or more die in the US, most these wouldn’t be “extra deaths”, but rather people who would have just died of something else soon anyway.

There was a 45-year old who died of it the other day in the UK. Made headlines but then it turns out that he had motor neuron disease, and was given 2 years to live by doctors in June 2018. So this killed him a few months early, I suppose, if the prognosis was correct to begin with.

Cases or deaths?

20 million cases, with likely less than 1% being fatal and highly skewed towards people with very low remaining life expectancy, would not be worth destroying the economy.

Exactly. And if the premise is "we must stop any activity if it potentially results in deaths" then why open schools in September? Clearly there will be some virus transmission whenever schools open, whether it's next month or next year. So schools should never open again?

That doesn't mean we don't take severe precautions, but we have to weigh the consequences. A global economic depression will kill far more people.

Most interesting thing about this crisis is it has really let people show what their true colors are.

A lot of dense individuals out there who are underplaying the severity of this situation, but while they are bad, the real sickies are the ones who seem to be aware of the danger but want to throw up a middle finger to those it affects anyways.

Some real nasty people here.

Canada-U.S. border to close to non-essential travel, imminently.

Goods will still flow; and people may move subject to certain reasons (I expect employment will be one, at least for essential service workers).

But tourism, or what remains of it and casual travel will be prohibited.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...ential-travel/

^
Huge amounts of people are going to be unemployed soon, I would have to tend to agree that mass economic disparity will cause much much much more suffering and deaths in the long run. This is going to make the Great Depression look like child’s play considering most governments are seriously talking about shutting most stuff down for half a year now or more.

It didn't mean to be pleasant, you don't seem to even be aware of that.

Yes, why am I not surprised, that you would put me in a groupthink category.

I am not surprised because it's the kind of garbage lingo that is totally meaningless that leads people like you to believe the economy is a superstructure that must at all cost dominate ecology.

This is where societal safety nets, community, and strong government assistance programs come into play. We are all going to have to suffer a little for the greater good in the end.

Only in a shitty full on dog eat dog society will the fallout from this be worse than the disease.

Good luck to you guys down south!

Time for those at the top to pull their weight.

Your premise is that I should be dead because I don't want the entire planet to be in a global catastrophe, and because I think that 10x deaths due to economic collapse are worse than x deaths absent economic collapse. I'm well aware of your intentions. And, yeah, it's groupthink.

^^
This US government is going to do much for normal people like me and the most of us. They’re talking about giving everyone 1000 bucks, whoopdi doo. That will do a lot of good when we’re all unemployed for a year.

A photo from Mike Crawley of CBC.

This is Toronto's University Avenue at 9:30am this morning.

For those unfamiliar with Toronto this is an 8-lane (4 lane each way) road with a subway under it that forms the western edge of Toronto's downtown core.

It would, needless to say, normally, look a hell of a lot busier.

https://twitter.com/CBCQueensPark/st...642883/photo/1

Or people with the capacity for rational analysis and enough competence on the economic implications that they understand which is worse.

A rhetorical question - what is a life worth?

Different people will have different answers, but 3 things are clearly true:

1. It is not infinite and has a limit.
2. A life with many years left to run is worth more than one nearing its natural end.
3. A “life” doesn’t just mean continuing to breathe, but quality of life as well. Doing lasting harm to the quality of life of millions can be worse than ending the lives of thousands.

Are you capable of understanding that?

There is going to be a death toll at the end of this thing. It will be an overstatement, if anything, because Covid-19 will replace other causes of death among the very old for half a year or more. And I doubt it will be a number that justifies the damage being done by the attempts to curtail it. I also hope it isn’t, for what it’s worth.

There will be mass increases in suicides, accidents, and people drinking and drugging themselves to death. There will be millions of kids at risk of abuse. But as long as they didn't die of Coronavirus, no biggie.

Unemployed for a year with permanently impaired career prospects. Or small business owners who are bankrupted and lose businesses they have spent their adult lives building. Chefs and restaurateurs, especially, many of whom will never get back on their feet again. For what, to buy some unhealthy person in their 70s or 80s another couple of years?