Coronavirus Won’t Kill You — THAT Is What Makes It So Dangerous

I went to a tiny college in rural Iowa (Grinnell). Whenever we had a home football game, the local pizza joint had a field day. It made more sales in one night than the rest of the week.

Here’s the thing: the visiting football team nor the fans (we didn’t really have “fans”) weren’t the patrons. It was the students who were displaced in the dining hall by the 60+ members of the opposing team. Rather than wait in line, these students bit the bullet and bought some pizza.*

Here’s why this matters insofar as coronavirus is concerned:

• The first-order (direct and immediate) consequences of the opposing team coming to town had no effect on pizza sales. The team didn’t buy anything.
• However, the second-order (indirect, one-step removed) effect was that existing students chose to buy more pizza.
• Incidentally, the third-order effect was that the bar next to the pizza place got more business those nights as well.

“There’s only a 3.4% death rate. I don’t see what the big deal is. That’s a risk I’m willing to take with you.”

That was a text I got from a friend when asking whether or not my family should return to Milwaukee from our isolated spot in the Costa Rican mountains.

And I’ll say this — it makes all the sense in the world. My wife and I are healthy and in our 30’s. Both of our kids are healthy, too.

Just as the football team visiting didn’t contribute directly to pizza sales, the coronavirus won’t contribute directly to many deaths. But that’s where the stats you see in the news are terribly misleading.

Consider:

Second-order effects

Even if not deadly, a high percentage of identified cases end up being serious or critical. Right now, 14% of identified cases worldwide are serious or critical. These people need hospital beds

What’s our situation look like — as far as hospital beds are concerned — here in the United States? While we thankfully have lots of ICU beds, the bigger picture isn’t rosy!

South Korea, which has almost 4X the hospital beds per capita, is already being stretched thin.

What happens when you’re running out of hospital beds? The people who normally keep a hospital busy — those with chronic conditions, accidents, sudden health problems, BIRTHS — have a difficult time being safely treated. This lack of treatment leads to suffering and death, even if it isn’t reported.

Third-Order Effects

As bad as that is, it’s not the worst. Here’s what is: because we’re all so woefully under-prepared for this, many of the doctors and nurses who are saving lives are themselves becoming sick with coronavirus.

It’s almost impossible to peg these numbers, but it isn’t hard to see how these problems can quickly compound.

• More patients than normal → Fewer beds and medical attention.
• More sick doctors than normal → Fewer professionals to help.

If any one of these things happened, it would be bad. For them both to co-occur is devastating.

Hopefully, this helps explain why the 3.4% (or whatever it might end up being) is the least of our worries. This is a dynamic situation and we have to consider second- and third-order consequences.

A morbid reason to be scared

Want to hear something really morbid? If coronavirus was more deadly, most of us in Wisconsin would have less to worry about. This disease started on the other side of the world — it takes time to get here.

The only way the virus can reproduce enough to reach us is if it doesn’t kill its hosts — or at least not too fast. That combination — high transmission and low [but higher than the flu] case fatality rate (CFR) — makes it deceptively powerful.

That’s why we need to go on lock-down AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. It will be painful, and it will also save lives.

*apocryphal