[LINK] O/t: “How can a disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States?”

[Stephen Loosley]

Linkers, the following is a reddit post for which I have no further references.

Just wondering, does the content pass the pub (Link) consensus for reasoning?

“How can a disease with 1% mortality shut down the United States?”

® Franlilln veaus - Updated 6h ago  Professional Writer

There are two problems with this question.

1. It neglects the law of large numbers; and
2. It assumes that one of two things happen: you die or you're 100% fine.

The US has a population 328,200,000. If one percent of the population dies, then that's 3,282,000 people dead.

Three million people dead would monkey wrench the economy no matter what. That more than doubles the number of annual deaths, all at once.

The second bit is people keep talking about deaths, "Deaths, deaths, deaths. Only one percent die! Just one percent! One is a small number! No big deal, right?"

But, what about the people who survive?

For every one person who dies:

- 18 more require hospitalization.

- 18 of those will have permanent heart damage for all of their lives.

- 10 will have permanent lung damage.

- 3 will have strokes.

- 2 will have neurological damage that leads to chronic weakness and loss of coordination.

- 2 will have neurological damage that leads to loss of cognitive function.


So now all of a sudden, that ‘but it's only 1% fatal!’ becomes:

- 3,282,000 people dead.

- 62,358,000 hospitalized.

- 59,076,000 people with permanent heart damage.

- 32,820,000 people with permanent lung damage.

- 9,846,000 people with strokes.

- 6,584,000 people with muscle weakness.

- 6,564,000 people with loss of cognitive function.

That's the thing that the folks who keep going on about “only 1% dead, what's the big deal?‘ don't get. The choice is not "ruin the economy to save l% if we reopen the economy,” it will be destroyed anyway. The US economy cannot survive everyone getting COVID-19.