“It’s April 1st, 2020. If only the headlines were a joke. Our nation’s leaders will soon be faced with a difficult choice. Hunker down for another four months and wreck the economy or let people out in two months and kill an additional hundred thousand people.

Professor Samir Bhatt, Senior Lecturer at the Imperial College of London, and his colleagues calculate that, globally, up to 43 million people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. They predict that if we’d gone about our normal lives, COVID-19 would have caused 7 billion infections and 40 million deaths this year. Shielding only the elderly may have halved the number of deaths, a strategy the UK initially entertained, but health systems would have been overwhelmed, so that tactic was largely abandoned.

Based on the advice of professional epidemiologists, most nations have adopted a stretch-it-out and hope it doesn’t return strategy. It seems to be working so far. Rates of new cases are declining in Europe and the US. If the current suppression strategies are sustained, then 38.7 million lives globally will be saved this year, the epidemiologists at the Imperial College calculate. 

But epidemiologists aren’t economists. We can not stay home for the rest of the year – the economic impact would be too high. We are three weeks into the shutdown and already factories are ceasing production, brick-and-mortar retail stores and restaurants are closed, unemployment spikes are unprecedented, commodity prices have plunged, and a wave of loan defaults is expected.

A colleague on a global pandemic response panel tells me the panel’s best estimate is that the US economy will rebound rapidly, but only if the nation returns to work in 60 days. After that, it’s anyone’s guess. No one, not even the experts, are willing to estimate the full economic impact of COVID-19. It will depend on how long it takes to get back to work and how many times we will be sent back home.”

https://mailchi.mp/lifespanbook.com/my-covid-19-update-2572786