It is now apparent that our initial information was incomplete. The pandemic is not what we all thought it was going to be. This is understandable. It was new. We all thought it was a dire threat and we all responded to protect the lives of our citizens, and our congregants, as we should have.
This is all true.
It is now clear that the stated rationale for these temporary, emergency actions, “to flatten the curve”, has been achieved,
This is true in most places in the US.
and that these temporary measures are no longer necessary.
This might be true in some places, but is certainly not a given. Certainly some of the measures are unnecessary at this point in time in some of the places.
If we continue on the current course of action of extreme mitigation, things may get much worse, as we fear they most certainly will.
Definitely true.
While Covid-19 is among us and members of our churches have been harmed by the disease, the much larger damage to our members has been done by cutting off the means of supporting the lives of their families. In our churches, we have few Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations or deaths.
This is precisely because the social distancing worked to prevent the disease from doing what it would have otherwise. I know I’m in the minority, but I don’t think it’s nearly as straightforward as this letter implies and most here seem to believe: that we just need to let things return to normal.
Normal means letting the disease run its course until we have herd immunity and it’s not a problem anymore. About 70% of the population must get it before that happens. The big question is what percent of people who get it will die. The original estimate was 0.9% Infection Fatality Rate (IFR).
330,000,000 * 70% * 0.9% = 2,079,000 dead in the US.
Thankfully, it seems the 0.9% IFR estimate was too high. The latest two estimates I’ve seen are 0.66% and 0.37%. That’s wide range, but let’s look at the lowest current estimate: 0.37%. What would that mean in terms of deaths?
330,000,000 * 70% * 0.37% = 854,700 dead in the US.
It’s true that the majority of those deaths would be people over the age of 60. It’s also true that even with the lockdown we’ve been unable to keep it completely out of our nursing and assisted living homes. However, the lockdown has kept the deaths extremely low compared to what they would be otherwise, even in nursing homes. I don’t believe that returning to normal right now we are ready to protect the elderly in nursing homes, much less the millions of people above 60 that don’t live in assisted living or nursing homes.
But let’s give this a bit more perspective. New York has only suffered 11,500 deaths so far. They would be looking at about 39,000 more deaths before they hit 0.37% IFR. In other words, they are less than a quarter of the way there. In New York. Where they are burying people in mass graves by the hundreds. Most other places in our country have hardly even gotten started.
Another way to look at it is simply to ask yourself what would it look like if the percent of people who have already died in NY state died in the rest of the country. We would be at 196,000 deaths total instead of 27,641. Or go even more local. Take Cincinnati, where I live. The greater metropolitan area has 2.1 million people. So far there have been only 59 deaths in the metro area attributed to Covid-19. On its face, shutting down the city when there have been so few deaths seems absurd, yes. But if we had people dying at the rate the NY state does, we’d have already seen 1,273 deaths, with more happening every day. The hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes are just as unable to handle that here as they are in NY.
I think this is something to be thankful for. I think that we are much better off having taken this course of action.
Do I have proof that it is the shutdown that has prevented all of those deaths? No, but I have a lot more evidence than those who assume that opening the economy back up would not lead to those results.
Yes, we probably know enough now and have done enough work preparing (producing more personal protective gear, for example) that we can start to make changes, and some of the rules in some of the states have been just plain dumb. Some of the rules (as always) have been abused, and a few of the rules have undoubtedly been wicked (such as allowing abortions to continue).
But a simple appeal to “open” the economy is foolhardy in my judgment. What I’d like to see is any evidence that the IFR is actually much lower than the current estimates. Failing that, we could decide that those numbers of deaths are acceptable and necessary to prevent worse problems. However, even then I’d like evidence that we know how (without a lockdown) to slow it down so that what is happening in NY doesn’t happen in the rest of the country. It’s bad enough having one state going through it that quickly. It would truly be terrifying if it was happening in 20 or 30 states at once.
