[AR] Re: FW: [NASA HQ News] March 19 Administrator Statement on Agency Response to Coronavirus
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2020 00:29:32 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 20 Mar 2020, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
I see the chief likely path to this becoming economically tolerable in
the meantime as being an effective antiviral treatment that reduces
severity to the point where death rate drops by a factor of ten or so...
I haven't run numbers on that - the 10x reduction was pulled out of a
hat on the assumption that we're able to tolerate other widespread
respiratory bugs with that ballpark 0.1% deaths/cases.
Which we are. 0.1% is about the average death rate from the annual flu
season, which not only doesn't panic people, but doesn't worry a fair
fraction of them enough to even get vaccinated. Airheaded celebrities
babbling about imaginary hazards of measles vaccination seem to scare a
fair number of people more than a well-documented 0.2% death rate from the
disease, enough so that maintaining adequate vaccination coverage has been
difficult in some places of late (admittedly the bar is set high here,
since measles is hideously contagious and near-total coverage is needed).
Mind you, I would say that the effective treatment needs to not only
reduce the death rate considerably, but also reduce the intensive-care
rate a whole bunch. Which is plausible.
Henry
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