Originally Posted by neoprufrok

My medical background. I'm a cardiac surgeon. I ran ECMO (life support device for people in heart or lung failure - exactly the last ditch life saving device COVID sometimes requires) for Stanford and do it now for a healthsystem covering 4.2 million patients. You can check out my analysis at https://medium.com/@richha. Because of this, I'm immersed in the COVID crisis planning and am a first responder - and having to make extraordinarily difficult decisions. In addition, I've trained in Trauma surgery at Oakland County. I live and work in Santa Clara County - one of the hardest hit counties in California (albeit we are avoiding the sadness and tragedy of NY).

Trauma and infection are two completely different pathophysiologies. You cannot equate the two. Driving has been made as safe as possible with the safety innovations. The risk of you getting on the road and dying is far less than 0.5% (best case scenario mortality right now for COVID). Imagine if getting into your car had that fatality rate. Would you feel good about the 1 in 200 chance you might die?

The exponential spread is another issue: one person driving on the road and causing an accident doesn't equate to 3 more people causing an accident and those those 3 cause 9 other accidents. It doesn't work that way. On the other hand, having a virus unchecked will exponentially infect the whole population. Even the best case fatality rates of 0.5% would equate to 100s of millions of deaths. Unchecked.

Also, you have to take into account the time course here. Without substantial social distancing measures we are looking at 100,000+ deaths in the US... in under 4 months. Total number of deaths for car accidents 2018? 36,000. If you don't social distance - this 100k? That will be worse, and you would have more deaths from one virus than a 10 years of car accidents.

Finally - injury/death related to vehicular trauma has been mitigated extensively over the years. If we were still bouncing around in no seat belt, no crush zone cars - with this many people on the roads travelling this fast - I'm sure nobody would drive until it was safer. We don't yet have a vaccine/treatment that is clearly effective. The only thing we can do is mitigate via social distancing.

My last plea here. The physicians I work with day and day out are putting their lives on the line. I've seen it. But they're not only putting their lives on the line. Their putting their families on the line. I've yet to see one single front line physician (ICU doc, ER doc, surgeon, etc) say - we should not social distance. We're smart enough to manage 4 adrenalin drips, a complex ventilator, kidney failure for 10 patients? We also are smart enough to know what's the best way to fight this. We see what this virus does day in and day out. I've seen some ****. But I've never seen anything like this on this level. And it scares me and everyone around me.

People on this forum are by and large motivated and intelligent people. I believe that. I also believe some of the stuff I'm reading about this virus comes from fear, denial, concern for economic self preservation - and those are all VALID feelings. I get it.

But trust me on this one, you don't want this virus.

Originally Posted by hf1

I see “unmitigated” and “unchecked” thrown around a lot when discussing these models. Is the models’ assumption that people are dumb animals unable to adjust the risks/rewards of their own actions to new information about their surroundings, and that they must be prodded by force like cattle to make these adjustments?

The analogy with car accident deaths is much more apt than many here acknowledge. It is a fact that lives would be saved if there were 90% less cars on the roads, if 35 airbags per car were mandated, or if traffic was banned outright. Why aren’t “we” mandating any of these things to “save lives” instead leave all these deaths “unmitigated” and “unchecked”? Why not do the same with every other aspect of these dumb animals’ lives?

Originally Posted by Manifold

There are plenty of historical precedents that people will do dumb things in response to a threat they don't understand, like an exponentially growing pandemic caused by an invisible enemy. It's also very well established that risk perception is heavily influenced by social factors.

Originally Posted by carz80am

I guess some rather be rich and dead than poor and alive. Money can always be made. Can't bring your family and friends back. Its a small sacrifice to make right now. Some people need to change the channel and not listen to the talking bobble head that lies on a daily basis. We're playing catch up and have to shut it down for a longer period since it wasn't done nationally earlier. Healthcare workers are dying from doing their job and people want to use "car accidents" and the flu to get back to work so more people can be infected and clog up a health care system that can't handle it. I don't remember health care workers dying by coming to work because of the flu. Once people can get face masks and easily tested, then we'll be able to go back to a semi normal society.

Originally Posted by SpeedyD

Reality is this. Due to massive social upheaval and aggressive mitigation efforts (stay at home being the one that really works) the actual deaths will be significantly reduced.

Absent these extreme measures, we would see death rates in the tens of millions (globally). These would be incremental, avoidable deaths.

The avoidable piece has a near-term economic impact. A severe one, sure, but a far, far smaller economic impact than incremental deaths in the tens or hundreds of millions in the economically advanced countries alone. This is what Bill Gates understands - and he has a pretty good handle on both global health and global economics.

Those who argue the cure is "worse than the disease" are either parroting unfortunate and ill-informed tweets, or severely misunderstand both the virus and economics.

The value of exotic cars in either scenario (mass deaths, or prolonged shutdown) will drop because at the margin this is bad for wealth and disposable income. It is also going to hit those carrying large amounts of debt, especially hard. In my worldview, however, it is better for someone's car(s) to drop in value than for a bunch of additional people to drop dead as well as the car market dropping in value.

Stay safe!

Originally Posted by TRAKCAR

A few of my colleagues probably had CV19 already.
As soon as they can get tested, they can travel freely without worries.

What a luxury ....

Originally Posted by TRAKCAR

A few of my colleagues probably had CV19 already.
As soon as they can get tested, they can travel freely without worries.

What a luxury ....

Originally Posted by Manifold

Hopefully. There are issues of false negatives with some tests, and the possibility of reinfection hasn't been ruled out. A lot of details not yet understood with this virus.

Originally Posted by basil2000

Marv,
was just talking to my wife about this. We have always listened to Dave’s advice and have an emergency fund. We only buy things with cash. Makes our life much less stressful at a time like this. I know lots of people that have been spending all kinds of money on vacations and cars. They are very stressed about paying the bills now. One added bonus is we are in position to help others like first responders, veterans and people at our church.