“10 000 domestic fatalities” and “severe disruption of social services” seem like a weird pair. The latter sounds much more severe than the former.
See “9/11, immediate fatalities” and “9/11, consequences” for comparison. I can easily see huge indirect impact due to panic and the like.
[edited to add:] Also: I wouldn’t be surprised to see a graph for the distribution of “disease fatalities” that has most of the mass around 10k, perhaps with a long, low tail, but the graph of “social disruption vs. fatalities” rising very sharply before 10k, but then growing only slowly.
Yes, in a catastrophe localized to a city 10k fatalities pairs sensibly with “severe disruption of social services,” but we’re talking about a pandemic.
10k fatalities, 100k gravely ill but not dying, the media confuses the two, politicians try to push lower numbers, real numbers are discovered and as a result much higher numbers are extrapolated, folk without the disease but similar or imagined symptoms overwhelm the hospitals, large scale quarantine (appropriate or not) tie up qualified personnel, actual or imaginary paucity of vaccines causes a few riots...
There’s lots of stuff that can get out of proportion. And anyway, “severe disruption of social services” is kind of vague. I mean, it sounds bad, but that might be misleading. For instance, the phrase as given does not say “country-wide”.
See “9/11, immediate fatalities” and “9/11, consequences” for comparison. I can easily see huge indirect impact due to panic and the like.
[edited to add:] Also: I wouldn’t be surprised to see a graph for the distribution of “disease fatalities” that has most of the mass around 10k, perhaps with a long, low tail, but the graph of “social disruption vs. fatalities” rising very sharply before 10k, but then growing only slowly.
Yes, in a catastrophe localized to a city 10k fatalities pairs sensibly with “severe disruption of social services,” but we’re talking about a pandemic.
10k fatalities, 100k gravely ill but not dying, the media confuses the two, politicians try to push lower numbers, real numbers are discovered and as a result much higher numbers are extrapolated, folk without the disease but similar or imagined symptoms overwhelm the hospitals, large scale quarantine (appropriate or not) tie up qualified personnel, actual or imaginary paucity of vaccines causes a few riots...
There’s lots of stuff that can get out of proportion. And anyway, “severe disruption of social services” is kind of vague. I mean, it sounds bad, but that might be misleading. For instance, the phrase as given does not say “country-wide”.