If you really want a number, theres a 1.7 trillion dollar cost of coronavirus this year to the United States at least. Im not convinced social distancing saves more than 50k people at most in the US. The vast majority of the people that are going to die would have died no matter what. So that's $34 million per person. I don't think a person's life is worth $34 million of public money. Not anyone, not mine not my parents not my friends no one. $34 million is just way too much money.

Source: https://anu.prezly.com/coronavirus-i...achment-171409

The virus is doing the killing, not people. Murder and death by disease that could be preventable with others financial support are two different things. You haven't given every penny you have to cure cancer and alzeihemers I imagine? So you must be killing those people then?

So, what is a life worth? You keep dodging the question. you have established that there is a definitive number that defines a cost at greate rthan the value of life. What is that number? What is the point at which we say 'You know, we could have saved you, but the bill was going to be $xxxx to society, and we have better uses for that money'

I don't need to calculate the exact number to know what policies are right for society. All I need to know is that its less than $34 million, because that's the cost to the American people in this present scenario.

Except that isn't what it costs. That is what you think it costs based on your estimate that only 50K lives were saved, which is based on air. most estimates put US dead, if no response had been made, at between 500K and multiple million. So, the cost per person goes down. Do we save your parents for 1 million? 500k? Or is your convenience and short term comfort still more important?

C'mon, man, you seem very definitive that there is a number at which we let people die, but you are terribly unclear as to what that number is. Perhaps it is best we err, then, on the side of not letting people die.

Quote your source for death estimates for no social distancing and social distancing, and consider Sweden in your analysis, the only country that did the right thing from the beginning. Probably about 250k - 500k people are going to die in the United States. And at most 10% of those people would get saved, the other 90%+ were going to die no matter what. This is based on 200 million people getting the virus and maybe .125% - .25% dying from it. This includes young people obviously. The vast majority of those that get hit with the virus will never know they have it because they are asymptomatic. But even if more are dying than im saying a human life isn't worth $10 million of public money either.

There's a govt agency that calculates what the average human life is worth, and it's something like $9-10 million.

and how do they arrive at that number? Source please? Just because a govt agency calculates it, doesn't mean I agree with their calculation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

and specifically from there:

https://www.transportation.gov/sites...20Guidance.pdf

Oh we know.

The problem with trying to quantify the amount of lives saved by social distancing is that the death rate would vary based on the amount of hospital beds that are available to nurse the sick. Without social distancing, the hospitals would be flooded with patients. That would also include all of the patients that do not have Covid but would need to go to the hospital for some other reason.

The idea that our economy would be able to function under those circumstances is absurd. In fact, more strict social distancing measures should have been undertaken earlier, especially in major cities. I strongly believe that New York's situation could have been avoided with stronger leadership. We also could have tested all the people that came back from Europe and China so that we could also do quarantines and contact tracing. We also should be doing more tests and contact tracing as well.

Any of those steps would have caused less impact on the economy and would have allowed us to open back up sooner. South Korea had great success with those steps that I showed above. They never even considered death rates or infection rates as high as the US and Europe as acceptable.

By the way, the Founding Fathers clearly disagreed with spino1i's conception of freedom. Virus coddling is unpatriotic and anti-social.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1775%E...rge_Washington

So, Sweden, which currently has the 6 highest per capita death rate for COVID-19, is also a country 3% the size of the US with a third of the population density of the US, with universal healthcare. At current, they are reporting almost 4k deaths on about 33K reported cases (the US is reporting about 99K deaths on 1,669K reported cases...this is an imprecise metruic because of the way the numbers are reportimng but it should show that Sweden is NOT doing better than the US with regards to handling the virus)

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

https://www.sfgate.com/science/artic...d-15289437.php

And Sweden is not immune from the economic impact of COVID-19, as youi seem to believe they are

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/...-soft-lockdown

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-soft-lockdown

So, if your ideal is to have a higher death rate without avoiding the economic impact, Sweden is your ideal model. Me, I think saving lives is actually not a bad thing.


Also, you CFR rates of .125% to .25% are pretty much made up (the early reports making those claims were based on incpmplete and inadequate sampling. Antibody testing is not yet to the point of being statistically significant to make those claims. For the rate to be close to what you are asserting, 80 to 90 percent of patients would have to be asymptomatic, and the numbers I have seen, whilse still premature, are closer to 30 to 40 percent)

Here is just one model

https://www.businessinsider.com/covi...entions-2020-3

The simplest estimation would be, though, to assume that without intervention, SARS-CoV-2 has an Ro of about 2.5, which means you need 60% for herd immunity. Because the infected rate grows exponentially, with a doubling time of between 5 to 8 days, you can expect the US healthcare system to be overrun within weeks, leading excess deaths directly from COVID-19 and indirectly, due to hospital unavailability. Assuming even a conservative CFR of 1% (in this situation, it would likely be closer to 2 or 3), you would be looking at excess deaths of about 2 million.

Much of the information regarding Sweden is being taken out of context. For example, they have a high mortality rate but up until recently have only been testing those with significant symptoms. Other nations are including stats from people who have moderate to no symptoms. Sweden also failed badly at protecting it's long term care facilities. Half of the deaths have been from these facilities.

Sweden's economy is being hit because the whole world is being hit. They are very reliant on trade. The idea wasn't that they were going to trade lives for the economy. The idea is that this virus is gonna be around for a long time and we need to learn to live with it. The W.H.O has actually praised what they are doing and see it as a potential model going forward.

Don't forget the mental impact that this is having on those who have been locked down.

I would hold off judgment of Sweden's response until several months from now. They are taking the long view.

This is exactly what they are doing in South Korea, New Zealand and Australia. And it is wroking very effectively.

Once somebody tests positive they track in both directions. They try to find out who they caught it from (and when) and they contact everyone who has been in contact with the infected individual since.

They then test every one of them and hold them all in quarantine until the negative test results come back. They also do the same for all family members.

Yes they won't ever be able to get to 100% of all contacted people but they easily reduce the rate of infection (R0) to much less than 1 which crushes the spread of the virus.

This is just untrue.

South Korea was rated number two after China in disease spread early on. The reason they limited the spread was that they shut down travel into and out of the region in question and ramped up testing to 10,000 tests a day so they could do tracing and reduce R0 to below 1.

This is the reason they had 11,000 cases total. They reduced the spread rate very very early on. Because they took this seriously from the getgo.

This is blatantly untrue.

They are crushing the spread of the virus easily. The entire nation wears masks.

Inevitably they will continue contact tracing and have very few deaths per capita.
Of course you are going to snuff it out if you do this. And nobody is quarantined forever. The quarantine applies only to people who are infected and lasts 14 to 21 days.

edit: The one caveat is that you test all travelers into your locale (whether that be city/state/country) to insure that if they have Covid that they don't spread it within your community. This is how New Zealand and Australia have crushed the virus.

What you are probably referring to is shutting down various parts of the economy where social distancing can't happen (like sporting events, concerts, restaurants, religious services, gyms, barbers, etc.). And yes in countries like the US where we haven't gotten the virus under control and don't seem headed in that direction, there is little chance we will be able to safely re open those types of gatherings until a vaccine has been developed.

But that is not true in countries like New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, etc. that have brought the new case count to virtually zero on a daily basis. Because they took this seriously very early on and are cooperating with the government in terms of the tracing, they are relatively secure in terms of deaths as a result of Covid-19.

Believe it or not I am in favor of phased re-opening of the economy where people get to decide for themselves if they want to risk getting Covid-19. I would imagine that most people my age or older would choose to not go to restaurants, theater, concerts, movie theaters, etc. until a vaccine is developed. I certainly wouldn't.

But then there is poker. I want to resume playing tournament poker. If the WSOP is indeed held in the fall of 2020 I would love to participate. But these are the conditions that I would need before I would consider doing it:
- The R0 in Las Vegas would have to be well below 1 per infected individual (that is the rate of infection would have to be going down) and hospitals would have to have ample number of beds available for potential Covid-19 patients. Similarly with ICU beds and ventilators.
- The WSOP would have to restrict players from entering if they came from States/countries that had high infection rates. This means that testing in the US would have to ramp up considerably - as has been happening - from present testing.
- Ideally I would like to see all travelers coming in to Las Vegas have to take Covid tests. And ideally by then the results would take minutes not days (like a strep test now). Any traveler who test positive would have to go into quarantine until they test negative.
- I would like all potential players screened each day for fevers.
- All players would have to wear standard N95 masks (masks are only effective in stopping the spread if people are forced to breathe through the masks. Ideally the WSOP would provide the masks on entry each day.
- The WSOP would willingly participate in contact tracing. So if any individual tested positive who participated in a tournament then all players who came in contact (same room or section of the room) would be contacted and tested. And all players would have to sign waivers to that effect.
- Similarly, a prerequisite would be that all States/Countries allowed to play be doing contact tracing so that if at any point somebody tested positive that their place of origin would be contacted so that contact tracing could be initiated in the event that they contracted the disease before they left for Vegas.

The one thing I don't want to see happen is to have Vegas and the WSOP become ground zero for the spread of the virus. As of now I haven't heard the mayor of Las Vegas say anything that would lead me to believe that this would be dealt with. But perhaps the governor, who has been an advocate of controlling the spread of the pandemic would make testing/tracing happen.

Another option would be if you don’t like whatever procedures they lay out you don’t come and then anyone who is satisfied with them can can play without having to listen to others go on extensively about why they fall short. Free society where people get to make their own choices about what risks they are willing to accept and whether to support (or not support) business that either meet or fail to meet those standards. And they can make those decisions after informing themselves from sources of information they trust rather than someone telling them what they think is best for them.

Is it me or are these arguments getting more and more surreal? This has nothing to do with a free society. By this logic I should be free to get stinking drunk and then drive down the street putting everyone else in mortal danger. At this point I'm beginning to hope the poker rooms never reopen.

There is a myth in a 'free' society that freedom goes in only one direction, that the individual has individual sovereignty, but not obligations. It really shouldn't take someone even five seconds of thought to recognize that this model of 'freedom' is mathematically impossible, if rights are a zero sum game. There is no way that I can live in a community and expect total freedom, and have other members of the community also have the same. It is a childish, adolescents view of 'rights' and 'freedom'

You are part of the community. Your actions impact communal resources, and present risks to others. I can't buy a house and then dump toxic waste on it because I am making my own decisions. I can't drive down the highway going 150 mph because I am free. Individual rights have always been weighed against communal good. This principle has been supported legally time and again.

And arguing that we should get rid of warning labels or counsumer caution advisories for products that present risks because people should be able to get their own information from whatever sources they want seems to be a foolishly naive notion.

It’s amazing how a simple post that suggests allowing adults to make their own decisions based on information they deem reliable sparks so much outrage from father knows best paternalistic types. We know what’s best for you. What if there is no vaccine for years or ever? Should we all just stay inside forever in this, our one chance to live our lives with limited time we all have? Or should we accept this is part of our new reality and something we have to live with? And that people should take their own personal situation into account and decide what is best for them and their families? Again people who are scared or have pre existing conditions can decide to stay inside if they want or not have others see them if they feel it’s a risk. This is bigger than poker — our country can’t really afford six months or a year of this forced stop in economic activity and it’s effect on people’s lives (look at the damage we have have in what ten weeks). This show will go on even if you believe you know what is best for everyone else. Just my opinion — I respect your right to a different one even I disagree with you.

And therein lies 99% of arguments...

The post may be simple, and the explicit proposal may be somewhat innocuous. However, the underlying principle is flawed, and has fueled countless misplaced and counter productive protests. Yes, to an extent, we should have the ability to make our own decisions. But that does not mean that businesses should not be regulated for compliance with safety regulations. You probably don't think that this is what you were advocating, but it was.

And while you may feel it is paternalistic, that is the trade off for living in a community with a strong safety net. You really can't have one without the other. You want to argue that we, as a country, should have smaller government, less regulation, and let the free market decide....well, that is a whole different argument, and I don't think America, as a country, is really grown up enough for that.

How often is that the reaction to things you say?

My hope was to help the casinos come up with a plan that would make it safer and appealing for people to come play. And with respect for the areas that people came from.

Why anybody wouldn't be open to hearing it is beyond me. If you disagree great. If you have better ideas great. But to not give a damn about the health of your community?

To act like doing anything but what you want to do without regard to others reminds me of how smokers (including my father) behaved in the 1960's. They had no regard for others. They were lied to repeatedly by tobacco companies so that they would believe that what they were doing wasn't harmful to themselves (or others). In the end we have laws that protect everyone from the self indulgence of smokers. And we let smokers smoke. If they want to kill themselves so be it.

I feel the same way about this crisis. As long as people take risks that involve only themselves I have no problem with it. And if I was in my 20's I'd be finding a way to work right now or have contact people who didn't live with older people. But if those risks involve the well being of others then it should come with precautions (like wearing masks, social distancing, etc.).

Requiring masks after 3 months into even an alleged pandemic...

... is like requiring condoms at the baby shower.

....I can't make sense of this even on two or three variations of how you can read into it....