Thought experiment

Please don ' t get me wrong. I ' ve seen other people try to put our present crisis in context, or discuss the costs vs. the benefits of certain actions, and be widely condemned for insensitivity or even sociopathy. I remember after the 9/11 attack, when people who tried to explain the motivations or sociological origins of Al Qaeda and similar movements faced the same sort of criticism. You weren ' t allowed to think about the problem, people weren ' t ready for any sort of moral confusion. In what I am about to say, I am not arguing against saving lives, on the contrary. I ' m just trying to explain something about where we are in history.Suppose this had happened in, say, 1890? In thinking about that it helps to refer to something sorta, kinda like it that did happen in 1918. The 1918 influenza pandemic occurred during WWI, which is important in some ways but doesn ' t much affect the analysis I ' m doing here. Because record keeping in most of the world was not good, estimates of global fatalities range from 17 to 100 million. Either way that ' s a lot, especially considering the much smaller population than today. Estimating the case fatality rate is even harder because we can only guesstimate how many people were actually infected. Those estimates range from 3.5% to 10%, but it might be higher. (I ' m taking this from Dylan Matthews.) The case fatality rate from Covid-19 is also subject to uncertainty, but it ' s definitely lower, probably at worst 2%.Another important ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs