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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/10/vladimir-putin-amendment-power-russia-2024

Old news, but DAMNIT PUTIN

Why is my school shutting down for 2 weeks over some damn Corona virus. The flu kills more people it isn't even THAT serious

GG @Butternuggetz, you just advanced to level 4!

GG @elizaaaa, you just advanced to level 1!

Trying to blunt the spike to keep resources from bei g overwhelmed

It's the best way to reduce the 1 million dead estimate I and others have predicted in each of US and EU

Also because schools are among the worst areas for a virus to spread in

This virus' death rate from confirmed resolved cases is 7% also, which is 70 times the flu's average death rate of .1%

We still don't know the denominator. There are a lot of younger cases that never get reported

Look at the Diamond Princess which is probably the most perfect numbers we'll ever see. 7 deaths and 325 recovered. That's about 2.15%.

If you look at total infected, it's 7 deaths for 696 cases, or exactly 1%

Assuming no more deaths

My best estimate all along has been 0.7% mortality as a conservative number. I'm sticking with that for the overall population. A cruise ship tends toward older people.

I also estimate 40-50% of people will get it. For the US: 327 million Americans * 0.45 contracting * 0.007 mortality = 1.03 million dead

That number may be lower if we can stretch this out through rational measures. The more we slow this, the more people we can prevent from getting it before we have a vaccine. The key is reducing the 40-50% infected rate.

Banning travel between countries and destroying our economy is not a rational measure, by the way

the Diamond Princess numbers are not perfect though, this is a very isolated case that had access to a number of health professionals. It's very unwise to treat this as some sort of baseline, since populations on the mainland likely won't recieve nearly as much care as the cases on the cruise did.

My numbers are for the US or another western developed country

How exactly is restricting travel from heavily affected countries not a good measure to take?

And they assume we can spred this out a bit for older people

Because almost no one under 60 is dying from this

We need to be isolating those over 60 or those with immunodeficiencies

The rest need to keep working to keep the economy going. It's going to be 18 months before a vaccine. We can't just shut the world down for a year and a half.

This is a marathon, not a sprint

I'm ready to get sick with this thing. Given my vocation, my duty, it's pretty much a given.

But I'm 50 years old and reasonably healthy, I'll be fine.

My parents are 75 and 77 years old. We've pretty much sealed them up. I won't get to see them for potentially a very long time. They've got two caregivers that barely see anyone else. They will be using precautions. It's unfortunate but they have cable and internet and will be quite busy yelling at the TV or computer as Biden and Trump rant at each other.

When they're vaccinated, we can return to some semblance of normality with them

The vast, vast majority of people under 50 have mild symptoms not much different from a cold. Kids don't even generally show symptoms. Why should we be cancelling classes?

You're drawing your numbers from the stats on the Diamond Princess though, which you should know still has about 300 active cases roughly- too many to make a final conclusion now even in spite of the other problems with using this. This assumes that the same amount of care given to those on the cruise ship will be given to everyone nationwide, which isn't going to happen because hospitals will become overburdened and because the U.S.'s response has been slowed. You already see this with South Korea, Italy, Germany, France, and many other countries.

I've acknowledged that more could die.

Besides, even though thew disease predominantly affects older people, this is not a justification to just take minimal precautions. We don't know if the death stats are truly reflective of reality, and no real idea if other age demographics die from this more than what's being counted. There have been autopsies done on people believed to have died from the flu when in reality it was Covid-19. And if you don't close down schools you're just opening up more avenues for those who are old to get sick from.

But based on the numbers right now, it looks like 1% for a population that was skewed older than the general population for most advanced countries

So we close the world for 18 months?

What other choice do we honestly have? There's more to the virus than death, as it can permanently scar the lungs and debilitate people for weeks or months. Would you rather everyone else remain exposed, get infected, and have at least 10% of the population with lung damage?

I'd dispute that 10%. In any case, though, will there be a world to resume if we shut down like you're proposing? Will we still be ourselves? I'd rather risk my 50 year old life as well as my 52yo wife's and my 20yo and 18yo kids' lives to this bug and still have life to live. My kids have a future to develop. It'll be tragic to see that delayed if they can't keep their studies going.

And for me, I still would like to visit my friends in Germany this autumn and it's looking increasingly likely that I won't get to see Hatsune Miku in concert next month which makes me very, very sad.

We will still absolutely have more or less the same world after the pandemic as we did before as long as we take precautions, and the world isn't going to just completely shut down. Yes it will be inconvenient for many things to slow down and be affected but it needs to be done; if we don't do this, then we will look more like Iran. Also something to keep in mind is that viruses are unstable and are prone to mutations, which Covid-19 has already done at least a few times. We have no idea if it will mutate into a less severe strain or become even deadlier, though the latter seems to be more likely as at some point the virus split into two variants, the deadlier of the two being the more infectious one (and the one the world is dealing with now).

According to Worldometers 10% of confirmed cases are serious, though there's no telling how many aren't known about or recorded (especially in Iran and China).