It was wrong to believe that 'saving the economy' was an alternative to 'saving people's lives’.
If anything it is the other way around and the two goals go together so that countries that kept the health impact of the pandemic lower suffered smaller economic consequences.
This isn’t a new insight, it’s just more up to date data.
It was obvious early on in the pandemic and has been said by many economists for months.
@jensspahn Für diejenigen die sagen, dass ein kleines Land wie Israel (8,9 Millionen) nicht mit Deutschland vergleichbar ist:
Baden–Württemberg hat eine Bevölkerung von 11 Millionen.
Während Baden–Württemberg 17,000 Menschen geimpft hat, hat Israel 1,000,000 geimpft.
Pfizer/Biontech said that they’d provide 50 million doses worldwide within 2020.
There are other vaccines too.
Now, one day before the end of 2020, we find in our global dataset that only 5.4 million people received a vaccine.
• More than 10,000 people die every day.
• Doctors and nurses work beyond their capacity.
• It costs us trillions, businesses are gone, millions unemployed.
Then scientists made the impossible possible and made a vaccine in 12 months.
We should really try to do this fast.
It isn’t impossible to do this rapidly.
Israel’s population receives its protection rapidly.
7.4% of Israel’s population has received the first dose.
Out of a group of 500 people over the age of 80 one dies within a week.
→ This means it will happen often that a person who was just vaccinated dies within a week.
Not due to the vaccine, but due to the high death rate of the people who are vaccinated first.
data in next tweet
The annual death rate for those over 80 is 10.75% in England & Wales
This means the chance of dying in any week is 0.206%.
[= 10.75% per year / 52 weeks]
So that out of a group of 485 people over 80 we have to expect one person to die within a week.
[100/0.206=485.4]
We will carefully monitor whether the various new vaccines have serious side effects.
But it's important to keep the high death rate of elderly people in mind as some might be tempted to conclude that a death on the next day was due to the vaccine even when it was not.
We live at a very unusual time. We are among the very first generations who can make progress against large problems.
If we want to make progress against the problems we face, then this fact – that we *can* make progress – needs to be absolutely central to our culture.
Some people are building this culture, but it is still a long way to go.
By and large our culture is still the culture of pre-progress times: our media is not drawing our attention to the large problems we face and our education system is not teaching us that progress is possible.