COLUMN: Locking down Georgia, for the greater good

In 2018, the motor vehicle fatality rate in the United States was only 36,560. Less than 4,000 people drowned in pools. In the 2017-2018 period, roughly 61,000 people died of the seasonal flu. The government estimates that 606,880 people died of cancer in 2019.

It is true that the cure for COVID-19 should not be worse than COVID-19. It is also true that there is an acceptable level of risk in restarting the economy. But we have only just ramped up testing. There is still a delay. The virus is still spreading.

What is the acceptable risk here? If the mortality rate of COVID-19 is 1%, as Dr. Fauci thinks it actually is, and one person spreads it to 3 other people, if we let it spread like the seasonal flu, even I a non-math major, can do the basic calculations.

In 2018, the seasonal flu infected 44,802,629 Americans. One person is presumed to infect 1.3 people with the seasonal flu. Double that number for COVID-19 and keep a conservative estimate. But remember that there is no vaccine for COVID-19 like there is with the flu. Nonetheless, let’s go for the most conservative “it’s nothing more than the seasonal flu” comparison and we get 89,605,258 COVID-19 infections.

Again, remember, the number will probably be higher because there is no vaccine and we actually do now know 1 person infects 3 people. So the real number would be over 100,000,000. But let’s go with the super conservative estimate of what it would look like if we treated this exactly like the seasonal flu or the H1N1 flu.

The seasonal flu and H1N1 both kill between 0.1% and 0.3% of those infected. COVID-19 kills, conservatively 1%. That means COVID-19 would kill 896,053 people in the most conservative estimate possible. Please note that though COVID-19 gives “flu like symptoms,” it is not an influenza like H1N1. In other words, if we treat COVID-19 just like the seasonal flu, the virus will kill more people than cancer and the flu combined will kill and COVID-19 will do so in a few months.

Great Britain and the Netherlands decided to do exactly what some of you are advocating — going for herd immunity and continuing on with everyone’s daily lives. Now they are rapidly scrambling to shut down their nations and keep everyone at home. Why is that? Because they want to cause economic calamity or to hurt President Trump’s re-election or because they realize their hospitals will be overwhelmed and a ton of people will die?

There is a cost to keeping everything shut down. There are reasonable mortality expectations in life generally. We do business every day knowing someone is going to die from something. But we also know if we all stay put in our homes for 2 weeks, we could save close to a million people and then all go back to work.

The good news is that the nightmare scenario of deaths will not happen. It won’t happen not because the projection is wrong. No, it won’t happen because we all changed our behaviors. Georgia has locked itself down. It did not need Governor Kemp to order it.

Areas of the state that needed aggressive action took that action. Those areas untouched, remain untouched. The Governor’s regional approach within the state has worked. We will not see mass loss of life because we all did what needed to be done without the government forcing us.

Erick Erickson is host of the Erick Erickson Show on News-Talk 940 WMAC.