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[Reelya]

https://www.newsweek.com/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-cost-122-billion-public-health-due-coronavirus-spread-economists-1530422

More of a reminder of how much damage people trying to rush things to improve the economy are actually doing to the economy.

From the url I thought that said $122 billion. XD still a lot as it apparently caused 260,000 infections.

[Starver]

$12.2 thousand million is definitely not small change.  (It's slightly more than half a Trump Wall, isn't it? By the original government estimate.)

[McTraveller]

According to the SSRN paper, the average cost of treating an individual who does not die as a result of contracting the virus is $46,000.

To me that's the real WTF.  On a couple fronts. One, that it takes essentially an entire year's median wage to "treat an individual who does not die."  Second, that they are applying that cost to every person who gets sick.  So either that means that the average cost of a person who requires treatment is even greater by an astonishing factor, or they are artificially inflating their number by multiplying the treatment cost by the infection count, not the treatment-required count.  (Consider I personally know 4 people who had the disease, none of whom required hospitalization or even any medical care beyond OTC medicine*.)

*Yes at least over the short term of now 2 months since they were sick. No new complications have appeared in that time. Maybe costs will be higher by some unknown amount in the future due to lingering effects.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If only there was some way to get billionaire parasites out of healthcare.

Oh well.

[Egan_BW]

Radiation, maybe?

[wierd]

It's called oversight and regulation.  The problem is that the parasites coopt the regulators, into regulatory capture. (because we allow lobbying to include drafting policy proposals, and allow lobbyists to become politicians and vice versa.) 


To fix this and a great many other societal ills in the US, we would need to fix the lobbying situation. But that will never happen, because that's a gravy train for politicians.

[Doomblade187]

I mean, there's more than one way to stop a train~

[Reelya]

According to the SSRN paper, the average cost of treating an individual who does not die as a result of contracting the virus is $46,000.

To me that's the real WTF.  On a couple fronts. One, that it takes essentially an entire year's median wage to "treat an individual who does not die."  Second, that they are applying that cost to every person who gets sick.  So either that means that the average cost of a person who requires treatment is even greater by an astonishing factor, or they are artificially inflating their number by multiplying the treatment cost by the infection count, not the treatment-required count.  (Consider I personally know 4 people who had the disease, none of whom required hospitalization or even any medical care beyond OTC medicine*.)

*Yes at least over the short term of now 2 months since they were sick. No new complications have appeared in that time. Maybe costs will be higher by some unknown amount in the future due to lingering effects.

Here's the source they're using:

https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/13632/the-forgotten-numbers-a-closer-look-at-covid-19-non-fatal-valuations

we estimate an overall non-fatal unadjusted valuation of $2.2 trillion for the U.S. with a weighted average value of about $46,000 per case. This is almost 40% higher than the total valuation of $1.6 trillion (using about $11 million VSL from the DOT) for all approximately 147,000 Covid-fatalities

So the total figure they calculate is $2.2 trillion, and $1.6 trillion of that is accounted for just by fatalities. But that $2.2 trillion is then spread over 47 million cases, to give the average of $46000 per case. It's actually conservative since they're spreading the $2.2 trillion in costs among 47 million estimated cases rather than just the 6 million confirmed cases. When you exclude fatalities and their direct costs, the remaining $600 million works out as $15 per person spread among 46+ million people. So the real story here is that the hospitalization cases are especially costly, enough so to mean $46000 each when spread over 50 million people most of whom don't even know they got sick.

[McTraveller]

Yay statistics - that IZA report is "economic losses", not the "cost of treatment"...  I can definitely believe that rough order of magnitude for total economic loss (or "reduced economic output" which is slightly different than a loss, even though the same word is used).

[Rockeater]

I was really out of the loop on the cases here, more then 140,000 infected, most recovered, but it's still a lot for a country with less then 10 Mil people.

[ChairmanPoo]

Holy shit, has anyone seen the first vs second wave comparison for Israel??? Its terrifying

[scriver]

No, can I have a link? (It doesn't matter if it's ok Spanish of its got graphs)

[ChairmanPoo]

Scroll down for the graph

https://www.eldiario.es/internacional/confinamiento-total-israel-aviva-protestas-comunidad-ultraortodoxa-divide-gobierno_1_6220713.html

[Jopax]

Oh jeez, that's surfs-up levels of second wave. Does the article state any possible reasons for such a massive surge?

I feel like my country is in a similar boat, but mostly because our first wave was like under 1k cases total, then as folks relaxed and the restrictions dropped (especially on travel) we've seen a massive increase (tho apparently, still manageable) in cases for most of the country, with few signs of stopping or slowing down. Tho, thankfully it doesn't seem to be massively speeding up either, but I'm not sure if that's due to lack of testing or simply slower spread as a lot of folks seem to still be rocking masks.

[Rockeater]

Similar reasons in here, at least as it seems to me, we past the first wave easily enough, restrictions relaxed and all, and then the second wave come with no sign of slowing down, and the issue with reinstating the restrictions is that the livelihood of people was pretty much ruined by the first ones without support from the government, so many think they couldn't survive another one and don't trust the government to help.