I think this argument is misdirected. It's not that we can't accept the number of dead. Even at the top IFR of 1-2%, society could "stand" seeing that many dead.
But that figure (the one you are comparing to the deaths from smoking) is with mostly functioning healthcare. It's with strict mitigations. Such mitigations aren't sustainable long term.
Without those mitigations you'd be likely to have healthcare overload. That would lead to extremely hard to swallow effects, such as healthcare workers walking out leading to even bigger shortages, or IFR of the disease skyrocketing because even moderate cases lead to death when there is no healthcare available.
As a society, having healthy middle aged people die in waiting rooms and parking lots from what could be prevented with some oxygen isn't acceptable. This isn't an "irrational fear" - this actually happened already in several places across the world.
Nothing but time and money prevents scaling. If we really really wanted to we could add a lot more doctors and nurses several years from now if they start training today.
Obviously a plan that doesn’t help the first few years. So not useful in this pandemic, but perhaps something to think about.
I think your link is very US centric, this problem exists in the whole world (although the US isn’t alone in having a doctor shortage that could be called artificial).
>Nothing but time and money prevents scaling. If we really really wanted to we could add a lot more doctors and nurses several years from now if they start training today.
Time and money are not the only factors. Political will power and incentives are also important factors.
Take World War 2 for example. Time was in short supply, but will power was not. As a result, manufacturing and training were scaled up quicker than ever before in history.
As indicated by the artificial doctor shortage, it would seem health care is politically and financially disincentivized to scale up.
> Political will power and incentives are also important factors.
Yes. I think people would rather take a vaccine that doesn't have 10 years of "long term effect trials" than together form the political will to pay a LOT more taxes for some war effort to scale healthcare because the vaccines are "too risky".
> manufacturing and training were scaled up quicker than ever before in history.
If 5 people can build a bomber in a year then a 100 people can build it in a month. But if training a doctor takes 5 years then training a doctor in an extreme hurry still takes more or less 5 years. Not to mention the time to build hospitals (or forming the political will to do so).
Basically: politics and healthcare scaling are interesting topics but quite irrelevant to the Covid pandemic response. Any healthcare changes (and the political changes preceding them) would have to take place in the early part of the 2000's.
>Basically: politics and healthcare scaling are interesting topics but quite irrelevant to the Covid pandemic response.
If politics and healthcare scaling capacity are irrelevant to the covid pandemic response, why are politicians basing their covid pandemic responses on their local healthcare's scaling capacity?
But that figure (the one you are comparing to the deaths from smoking) is with mostly functioning healthcare. It's with strict mitigations. Such mitigations aren't sustainable long term.
Without those mitigations you'd be likely to have healthcare overload. That would lead to extremely hard to swallow effects, such as healthcare workers walking out leading to even bigger shortages, or IFR of the disease skyrocketing because even moderate cases lead to death when there is no healthcare available.
As a society, having healthy middle aged people die in waiting rooms and parking lots from what could be prevented with some oxygen isn't acceptable. This isn't an "irrational fear" - this actually happened already in several places across the world.