I haven’t been talking about coronavirus much. What’s there to talk about? In April I tried to be optimistic, and well that didn’t work out. We’re not at worst-case disaster scenarios, but likely “excess deaths” of 200,000 don’t look good. The idea expressed by some (and which I really hoped for) that weather or decreased virulence would “take care” of coronavirus seems to have not panned out.
The two very positive things for me are:
– children seem relatively unscathed. The original age-trends hold
– the outdoor spread is very low. The “superspreader” events tend to happen indoors
A possible point of optimism, which I’m uncertain of, is that “herd immunity” may in some cases be lower than 70%. In many areas, it looks like “herd immunity” is really what’s going to happen, though treatments and vaccines may be important for some regions (e.g., Taiwan).
Anyway, I was curious about public and media concern about coronavirus, so I looked at Google Trends. You can see the public, against the baseline peak, tends to delay a bit. The American media also seems to have gotten bored with coronavirus into the middle of February, just like all of society (this is when some of the really stupid pieces making fun of coronavirus alarmists showed up in the bluecheck clickbait world).
I’m generally no big optimist, but I think the current situation deserves less than usual. Because there are now proven mid- and long term effects of the disease, even in the young, just very rare, which is indeed the good news part, and the pandemic is nowhere truly under control.
Vaccines and herd immunity seem to be not working, since we have new strains and even repeatedly infected people. The proven cases of such a re-infection add up and some of these cases even point to the possibility that the “second round” can be even harder to bear than the first in some individuals. So there is not even a guarantee that, if you did well the first time, you do well the second time. In this respect its really like the flu, which you too can take easily at one time, but which might hit you harder or even kill you at the next.
However, the numbers of deaths and seriously damaged among the healthier population and the young ones are very low, which is the best news we have.
Otherwise, since there is no easy exit strategy, it beame clear to me that both what the Oligarchy tries to make out of it (“societal restart”), as well as the consequences of the lockdown, especially in the social and economic sphere, build up to a landslide of historic proportions.
You can observe how commentators and news reported about demonstrations which the mainstream and Oligarchy supports, like “Black Lives Matters”, versus other public gatherings and even demonstrations, of which many where even prohibited or tried to by regional authorities everywhere.
Similarly, you see rules being made up for some places and activities, businesses, jobs etc., but not for others, even though the consequences will be the same epidemiologically.
We saw that those people which demand “discipline” and “social distancing” from others, on a regular base, don’t do it themselves or don’t care when it seems to be important for their interests. This creates a situation in which many people, even those really concerned about the virus and believing in measures being necessary to contain it, questioning “the authorities” and what they do.
I see especially in Europe a growing discontent with how things are going politically and this seems to start to spread to people which were fairly happy with the system we have before. Many start to question the mainstream politics and news, not just on this, but on other as important or even more important issues too.
Again others are like puppets which can’t think for themselves. Like I heard interviews with “adventurers”, or people I know personally, which travelled to tropical countries with improper vaccination and safety measures, saying that “they wouldn’t do it now because of Corona”. As if “Corona” is the worst they could have get in all these years! These are the same people which now want to keep the distance, which called others “hypochondriac” or “overcautious” in the past! As if there were or are no other diseases!
They are like children being led by “the authority”, similar to my daughter asking recently, not even completely serious, “did the other diseases all disappear because of Corona?”.
This is just another case of “most people are sheeple”, which, even with good education and a high IQ, seem to lack some kind of more evolved rationality. Actually, many are doing fine that way, being as naive as kids, since they don’t question many things or think twice about it, often combined with a lack of self-reflection. Seems to be easier sometimes to make decisions like that and simply don’t care for facts.
But again, at least here in Europe, people begin to question authority and how they say one day this and the next one that. They realise that “their leaders” often just improvise, have no idea, or are manipulative and led by powerful interest groups in the background. That’s the best thing, even if a lot go to far with their conspiracy theories, that they begin to question the mainstream.
Unfortunately for the USA, this being played out big time against Trump and in favour of “the woke” crowd, even though thats unjustified, because similar mistakes were made elsewhere too, even though he didn’t shine, he really didn’t.
Otherwise, looking at how the disease is absolutely not under control and every news seems to make it look worse, with the economic catastrophy coming closer and “the elite” just thinking about how they can instrumentalise the situation, there is, from my perspective, not a lot of justified optimism.
Here I’m just waiting for autumn, then everything will get worse again, because I think that the weather has indeed a small effect on both the spread and how serious an infection can become. People might say it still spreads in different climates, agreed, but it will GET MUCH WORSE once the weather gets colder and drier.
My position on the weather issue was: “If they can’t get it under control in summer, the autumn-winter period will become an absolute horror.” and that’s what we’re approaching. The last autumn-winter period will be seen as harmless in comparison.
Having looked at the results so far, I doubt that we will have a truly safe and effective vaccine any time soon. This pandemic might lead to a major turning point in recent history and whether the outcome will be positive, what I hope for, or not, the road will get bumpy in any case. I think we reached a point of no return for some changes and challenges and it will be impossible to simply go back to the time before the pandemic started, politically, societally and especially economically. Its no longer possible no matter what the political elite decides, and it seems they want to use the situation in their favour anyway, so risk even more in the big gamble.
For the disease itself, the best thing which could happen is that it mutates to a form which is less deadly and damaging to the human organism and that this strain replaces the more harmful ones – naturally.
obs, i think you are more right than not. i hope you are wrong
Razib,
Day by day I am getting more worried about the mental health issues which may be left behind after the pandemic. Upbringing of pandemic children (I have one of those now), the uneasiness in crowds – these reactions people have nowadays might stay with them a bit longer, now a lot know this is how Influenza and other viruses spread. I personally have been primed to avoid all unknown people as if all are contagious – it’s getting mad in the brain. I guess most r facing similar issues.
Economically we really can’t afford any more lockdowns – things r looking scary but atleast from the sero surveys in India – IFR is firmly below 1% – might be between 0.1 & 0.2 which is bad enough imo
On the disease level too I have had very close experience – even the so called “Mild Cases” are fighting fatigue and something like PTSD weeks after recovery. The Moderate cases are much worse off. India is really in for dangerous months. Maharashtra currently I leading but I expect others would follow soon.
On the other hand – masks are certainly working – I was curious to know what’s your take on the Whole Dose makes the poison chain of thought particularly what Siddhartha Mukherjee has been saying ? Could that explain the range of symptoms ? – from asymptomatic old people to severe youngsters ( After from Genetics) ?
And is it time to bury the Fomite transmission theory ? Especially washing every freaking thing you take inside the house. I couldn’t find good literature to support the Fomite hypothesis in the first place for Influenza and other resp illnesses.
born -> bored
There does appear to be an inverse relationship with humidity:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tbed.13766
On that, our disease specialists are warning us to expect a worse 4th wave in autumn/winter (we’re currently on our 3rd, which is now pretty much under control and dying down to single digits for new daily cases). I think Obs is pretty much on point about that – cold dry winter is going to be worse.
I found this interesting and somewhat informative:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-covid-infection-unexpectedly.html
Don’t get too worried by reinfections; they’re not common, and mostly not serious. I’m optimistic that at least some vaccines will work, just don’t know how well and for how long.
Something is going on in relation to herd immunity/ease of transmission. New Delhi seems to have pretty much topped out at 30% of the population infected, well below predicted herd immunity level. 30% is still a hell of a lot, though. And some villages in northern Italy reached much higher % infected. It’s very hard to figure out what is going on with that, although comparing Delhi to some isolated Italian village is really not valid.
My daughter recently returned to work in Guangdong Province, having worked from home since Chinese New Year on January 25, when everything in the Mainland was locked down. To cross the border from Hong Kong she needed to have a negative PCR test result time stamped to within 24 hours of presenting at the border. Once she crossed she was swabbed again, had to fill in numerous forms, then had to wait for a small bus (max. 8 people) to pick her up, whereupon she was swabbed yet again, then bussed to a quarantine hotel, where she was locked inside a very small room (but clean, and the food was OK, and she had WiFi) for 14 days, all paid for by her employer, who wants her there now rather than continuing to work from home. The day before her release, the quarantine staff guarding her/preventing her from absconding (as if) gave her a Customer Feedback Form to fill in, bit of a quaint idea, so she gave them a very ‘Mainland’ response, like: “Thank you for your hard work and patience! Thank you for continuously guarding [City XXXX]!” When in Rome…it’s a lousy job they didn’t ask for, and it’s necessary, so giving them a little morale boost is better than hating on them.
Since release she has been swanning around town with no mask (no need there, they have eliminated the coronavirus, at least for now), being spoiled rotten by our very indulgent Mainland friends, who dote on her. Makes me wish I was there. I have seriously considered it.
I have no idea when I will see her again, because she would have to do another 14 days quarantine in HK after she crosses the border again, which she obviously can’t do while she is employed there. My hope is that we will succeed in driving it down to zero in HK long enough to establish a ‘travel bubble’ between HK and the Mainland, such that only a negative test result is needed to cross the border in either direction, without the quarantine period, so she could come home for short visits, but that is at least months away. I guess the other hope, longer term, is that we will get a vaccine that works and can do away with the border controls. The latest news, just as I’m writing this, is that HK and Guangdong might agree to scrap the 2-way quarantine requirement if people test negative and wear a tracking bracelet, so I’m hoping that works out.
My daughter’s foreign work colleagues are all still stuck in their home countries where they have been since Chinese New Year, working from home and waiting to be ‘invited’ to re-enter China – no idea when that will happen. They’re all desperate to get back, and out of the USA/UK/Canada/Australia. My daughter used some of the time in solitary confinement to email them all a detailed account of the process she had to go through for re-entry to let them know what to expect, and translated the customs information and some of the forms into English for them. No one thanked her except her immediate boss. Barbarians, what can you expect? Well, no one likes the bearer of bad news, and the process is tedious and tiresome. But necessary.
HK is just about to embark on a big effort to test everyone over the age of 6 years in the space of two weeks, with assistance from Mainland labs and lab staff who have come here to help (BGI and a couple of other Mainland companies already have labs here, they just needed to boost testing staff and capacity). They are expecting to test 4.5 to 5.5 million people out of the total population of 7.5 million, but it’s voluntary, so it remains to be seen how many people register to be tested. Some of the Usual Idiots have been warning people not to do it because their samples will be sent across the border and the Chinese Communist Party will get their DNA. No they won’t – this constant bizarre background carping from the religious loonies gets me down, but at least the violence, vandalism and domestic terrorism we were getting non-stop last year has stopped.
Aside from that, we don’t get the pushback here against mask-wearing and other controls including the school closures that I see happening in multiple countries. Everyone just does it – they accept that it’s necessary. I really dislike wearing a mask whenever I leave home, but do it because the community here is self-policing and pretty vigilant, and I will cop shit if I don’t. Plus I’m satisfied that masks are at least somewhat effective if everyone wears them. The big clusters we have had here over the summer have almost all happened in bars and restaurants where people take their masks off to eat and drink, and lose their inhibitions and become less careful about distancing, I guess.
I don’t want to get into the economics too much, and politics not at all. The impact on the HK economy has been pretty dire, whereas the Mainland seems to have bounced back remarkably, but the China-US conflict is consuming a lot of attention. Everyone is very warily watching what happens between now and November.
Herd immunity is a red herring. Simply, many people are immune to this virus. And that has and still is causing the infection rates to plummet after a month or so.
That wouldn’t make herd immunity irrelevant, it would just set it at a lower % than the theoretical level for a population with no immunity. Where do you think some people get this immunity from – previous infection by other coronaviruses? There has been some talk of that, but I haven’t seen anything substantive (but then I haven’t really been looking too hard – I got fatigue from trying to follow all of the papers coming out, most of which didn’t seem to be saying anything very helpful).
One personal anecdote I forgot to add: my daughter has had to have all of the microscopes in her lab fitted with LCD screens, so people are not making eye contact with shared microscopes.
This is the new normal. We’re in it, and it’s not going away any time soon.
I’m pretty sure genetic factors are extremely important for the immune response.
Some people with a generally bad health status do well, others with a good one struggle. Its probably not one single genetic factor, but different ones adding up.
Concerning re-infection, in most regions the rates are so low, that its just unlikely to catch it several times regardless of whether you are immune or not. Only the future will tell.
And I really think that the outcome of the disease too can be influenced by weather conditions. So its probably better to get the infection in summer, rather than in a cold-dry environment, when your mucous membranes and general status are in worse shape. Didnt read too much in that direction, even less about concrete causes, so its primarily coming from my personal observation, but there are reports:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/covid-19-worse-in-colder-weather
I said to my wife in spring that it might be better to get infected in summer than next season.
The only chance of doing better was to eliminate the virus in summer, but after the lockdown was eased, numbers rose everywhere. No chance with that.
Its not just the infection rate which matters, but the rate of people being knocked out for weeks, how many needing hospitalisation, having long term damages to their health or even dying.
And its all these aspects which will get worse in a colder-drier weather. In hot-humid climate you may just have more “mild and silent” cases.
At the same time we already have an extreme recession and just postponed major economic depression.
Yet looking at the numbers,an even more severe lockdown will be needed. Bad alternatives either way.
I thought about why there is not enough media coverage on the weather issue and I think this has two reasons:
1st its because in the next winter season, the results can be validated.
2nd they wanted to guide people through summer, it was in part a political decision.
Because if telling people that the infectiousness is lower and even the outcome significantly better, especially the young ones wouldn’t cared about safety measures at all any more. They are fed up, they don’t want to lose another year of their youth to measures which they think won’t help them or probably nobody.
In the end, if looking back at the situation in some years, some might even come to the conclusion this right, because the next big wave being just postponed, with the numbers being nowhere low enough for the elmination.
In the aftermath of the next big wave coming in autumn-winter, I guess we will get many more reports on the weather effect and seriousness of infections in different seasons of the year. Probably the effect is quite small, every other factor of importance considered, but if you are at the tipping point, it can be a game changer. Especially for fairly disciplined countries with active social distancing and safety measures.
In some warm countries which have a significant death rate, these could disprove the theory to some degree. But its also possible that genetic factors and especially undertesting are the main causes for the different outcome.
Obs, your daughter is an insightful one: “did the other diseases all disappear because of Corona?” Yeah – no they didn’t, but they have been neglected, and there will be consequences. Not Covid-19 deaths, but deaths resulting from the pandemic never the less.
We should have a competition to see who can write the most long winded comment, just to irritate Walter.
@John: 😉
To comment your daughter’s experience:
I think China does the only right thing, because once you have eliminated the virus from a region or even your whole country, the best and actually only thing you can do is to prevent it from coming back. Controlling every movement of people and migration very strictly, with testing, testing, testing and quarantine. Its harsh, it sucks, but its the only way of doing it right. If the European countries would have done so immediately, when the pandemic started, they could probably have eliminated it, that was the best chance and all the Western governments failed on it.
Here in my macro-region we had many regions with no local cases any more, but because people travel, migrate and just move, it comes back again and again, leading to new clusters. Its like a ping-pong game and you never get it under control, even if your people are disciplined and have extremely low virus reproduction rates. Without isolation, you can’t beat the pandemic, its hopeless.
The bad thing for China is, that they can only dudge the waves from outside up to a certain point. Mid-term they too can just hope for an effective vaccine, or a lot of the efforts will have been – almost – in vain, because eventually an even stronger wave will hit China too if there is no medical protection. If China isn’t able to protect itself from the next winter-wave, nobody will I guess.
Yeah.
[I’m trying for the record for the shortest comment. But seriously, I think you have summed up China’s position exactly – most of the country is an unploughed field to SARS-CoV-2, and they are now in a very vulnerable position. If they have to do another big lockdown this winter, I don’t know what will happen.]
Fomites: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.30.274241v1
Perhaps it’s a matter of the proverbial glass being half-empty vs. half-full, but I think “optimism” has generally come out looking somewhat better than “pessimism” over the past ~6 months. The US typically has around 2.8 million deaths from all causes a year, so excess deaths from the coronavirus are still less than a 10% increase over the baseline. That’s certainly a much bigger problem than many other political issues, like terrorism, gay marriage, police killings or school shootings, (though the material measures taken to combat it have also been somewhat, though perhaps not proportionately, bigger than many policies in response to those issues), but it nonetheless seems somewhat modest in light of the extreme “crisis of the century” concern that it’s generated in politics and the media.
And that’s for the US, which, thanks in no small part to the apathy and incompetence of the Republican Party generally and President Trump specifically, has had an unusually ineffective response to the coronavirus compared to most other OECD countries, notably Canada, Oceania, East Asia and the EU. (And, yes, deBlasio and Cuomo deserve a large share of the blame as well, though a much smaller share now than they did in April.) The excess mortality in most of those countries is probably (quickly judging from Our World in Data’s Data Explorer tool) less than half of that in the US, so likely 5% or less.
Note that I’m not arguing that a suppression strategy towards the coronavirus was or is a bad idea. If there were empirical examples of polities that had successfully mitigated the coronavirus while also mitigating the damage to the economy, I could be convinced of that. But, as far as I can tell, the countries with the most consciously hands-off approach to coronavirus outbreaks, like Brazil, Sweden, the US, and Texas and Florida within the US, have seen significantly higher coronavirus mortality with no particularly noticeable concurrent economic gains. So, it seems like e.g. Sweden simply has not turned out as disastrously as coronavirus “hawks” back in March would have expected, but it has had significantly more excess deaths than its neighbors without much if any economic gain.
The economic crisis globalised to such a degree that every country being affected, even those with almost no cases and no drastic measures even needed.
There is just no easy way out of this any more.
If a country decides to not care for infection, hospitalisation, morbidity and mortality rates at all, the impact of the pandemic itself and the policy of the neighbours will cause similar damage with more disease victims.
Like so often, early hard measures would have saved the day. Now its just about reducing the impact with proportional measures.
But that would require decision makers which are competent and well-meaning.
Looking at the US, finding politicians and Oligarchs which are just one of this is hard, finding some which are both on a higher level at the same time is a nearly impossible task. Just not enough around on top of the US society.
Many are corrupt or incompetent or both. That combination is much easier to find…
Max Avar, Tx and Florida have considerably lower mortality than the upper eastern states. Why is a good question but they certainly do not have higher mortality.
Here in Illinois, positive cases are at 2/3 the peak level, but mortality is down from the peak of about 150/day to around 20/day. That’s a huge drop and again, we don’t really know why. My own opinion is that we have stopped dumping old sick people back into the nursing homes so the most vulnerable population isn’t being exposed any more. For a while there we were treating large numbers of mentally handicapped and elderly folks in the hospital, but now those patients are a rarity. I had my first covid+ patient in two weeks yesterday, whereas I was taking care of 5 every night a few months ago.
I also don’t get the continued pessimism. What really turned me was in June cases started spiking again and I was prepared for new apocalypse. But when cases peaked even before lackluster new lockdowns took effect I realized this virus was not as dangerous as I’d been told. And you still have people trying to convince us we need to stayed locked inside forever since 70% of the population is going to get it otherwise and 1% of them will die. Honestly if that were true then 70% of the population would have gotten it already. The lockdowns were never strict enough to satisfy the doomers but somehow always ended up working vastly better than anyone predicted. Seems only way to make sense of it is that Covid just not as dangerous as thought.
@T Bri: “Max Avar, Tx and Florida have considerably lower mortality than the upper eastern states. Why is a good question but they certainly do not have higher mortality.
Here in Illinois, positive cases are at 2/3 the peak level, but mortality is down from the peak of about 150/day to around 20/day. That’s a huge drop and again, we don’t really know why”
Of course, its now many more young and the treatment options begin to improve, but like I wrote above, you all will see, unfortunately, that the weather plays in too. If the weather is cold-dry, the morbidity and mortality will increase too. This might be not the main factor, especially if the affected age-groups are completely different ones, but it will be a big contributing factor among others.
And since the disease will become more infectious by the winter conditions too, the treatment options might also worsen, causing and indirect rise of negative outcomes in zones which are not under control and heavily affected.
The weather effect is real and the proof will come (unfortunately) once the environmental conditions change. We won’t know it for sure until the season is there, let’s just hope for the best.
Concerning vaccines, some people are quite optimistic just recently, including Dr. Christian Drosten, which is quite an important figure here. He also claims that re-infection will be exceptional and immunity is highly probable for the upcoming season, which would make vaccines more likely to be effective. Yet the evidence for all this is, from my point of view, “incomplete” at best.
That said, its by now hard to tell what’s worse, the surplus deaths, at least as long as the epidemic is not completely out of control, or the economic damage, because we are at a tipping point for the whole financial-economic system. I know practically for certain that the Oligarchy wants to abuse the situaton for their “societal restart” with many, many victims especially in the middle class and ending up in a new control state and economic reform. But if they don’t watch it carefully, it might spiral out of control even for themselves. Because if some dams are broken, to plug them in a controlled scenario might be much harder than some imagine. They really play with fire.
News I thought was interesting yesterday as an update on what deCode genetics and Iceland have been doing on Coronavirus lately (early on they did a lot of intensive testing stuff at scale in Iceland that generated lots of interest, then we’ve heard less of them since) – https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2028079 / https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2026116
Contraindicates against waning immunity, at least by 4 months – “A rise and early decay of antibodies was observed in the Icelandic study, but with limited loss of antibodies at later time points, a finding that points to stable SARS-CoV-2 immunity for at least 4 months after infection.” (longer than 4 months is of course a mystery until we get there).
I’m not aware that anywhere has really caught up to Iceland still, in offering unbiased sampling and total population % sampling over time of that population, even though others have long since exceeded them for absolute scale.
They’re still placing their IFR around 0.3%, but this may be very different on different age demographics and the degree to which different age demographics are exposed. In a simple, naive case of just adjusting by the relative risk for European subregions here (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X20302977?via%3Dihub) where relative IFR in Iceland is estimated at 80% of European average, then “true” average European IFR should be about 0.37%. With high end in the most aged regions of Europe, like Piedmont in Italy, about 0.6%. (US estimate purely on median age would then be 0.33%).
I’d still have guessed IFR higher (more like 0.7%), and there are questions about how the skew of infection within their population would affect their reslt, but its another data point. To some degree of course this doesn’t matter; the IFRs are still high enough that large scale general infection (if you get to that stage) leads to very high numbers of death.
Re; Max’s point, economic damage for “lockdown” vs counterfactual seems really hard to assess at this point in time simply because:
A) Quarterly GDP reduction, usually taken as the be-all-and-end-all indicator, just doesn’t tell the whole picture, since you’ve got some economies who’ve taken on relatively large debt to maintain economic activity.
Those economies are probably damaged in the longer term, relative to the baseline, simply because of the extra burden of debt itself, and the fact that much of their economic activity will have become “zombie” activity which is not really being aligned to consumer incentives (all those businesses that have temporary funding from goverments will probably not return to normal). But you wouldn’t know that from GDP headlines, which just tell you whether economic activity is being maintained, not whether its being kept on life support and the costs of doing so.
B) The fundamentals of how much economy depends on face-to-face activity and tourism and shopping probably determine how much it even matters to avoid stay-at-home orders. If your economy is not very dependent on restaurants, then, yes, perhaps it’s good for the economy to keep them open, but it won’t help that much.
It’s not just about economic gain though.
As well as the economy though, you also have to weight the fact that you’ve got the whole population having in many ways effectively lost out on a few months of healthy life expectancy and experiences. Each Covid patient that dies loses about 10 years life expectancy on average. So what’s the balance of that equation, purely in terms of lost healthy, pleasurable life experience?
This is difficult, because of course it seems wrong to compare deaths and lost life experiences. And it is not like normal life can continue at all. But to place zero value on lost life experiences in prime health, and lost time, of the rest of the population in weighting your choice also seems wrong.
More generally, much earlier in this thing, you had the stark dichotomy of “The Hammer and the Dance” being offered, where we simply had to be strict and austere and firm and disciplined with ourselves and impose temporary pain to quickly get it over with, and the only alternative was very high numbers of excess deaths, should most places have followed policies more like Sweden’s. The tradeoff was posed as a “no-brainer”.
But actually, when it comes to the stay-at-home “lockdown” orders, they are less important and do less for the R0 than thought by the likes of Imperial College and other “hammerites” (and this seemed evident really very early IMO, probably by April), so the tradeoff is fairly different.
More than “shelter in place” / “stay at home”, it seems to me like the initial actions in preventing local spread by early testing scale, border closures, and early social distancing advice were very important. And as well as this a bit of luck – being far away from Italy where spread seems to have by chance and unpreparedness become particularly significant early, not having high volumes of international travel at the time (helped middle-income countries that also aren’t major tourist destinations a bit), not being in winter/cool season, maybe “Dark Matter” immunity. And then specific care home protection policies.
(As an aside on the topics, people often compared Sweden to other Nordic countries + Finland, and also tended to say that the virus came to Sweden late, so the response must be more ineffective. But Sweden had its first case at comparable times to Italy, France and UK, and probably an early spread, and the population density and distribution of the country is argued by Anders Tegnell to be more like the Netherlands than other Nordic nations…).
And then a lot of what happens subsequently is just theatre in countries that failed to keep the disease from taking hold, where people have been reassuring ourselves that shutdowns, or orders for people to mask up, or whatever else will be a magic bullet to allow people in affected areas to return to normal life soon. This was not the case, and what happened was much more determined by earlier failure to understand how extensive spread was and shut down travel and issue advice aimed at breaking up social clusters.
@Matt: The debt issue is primarily a technical one, it depends on your financial system and political power how you can deal with it. In theory, you can simply buy up and vaporise debt, as long as you want. The main reason why this was never done in recent decades on a larger scale is, because thats just a huge redistribution of wealth from the middle class and small businesses to the large corporations and upper class.
So its being primarily done, indirectly, if its in favour of the Plutocracy, not for the state as such, especially not social and public spending as much any more.
The real problem therefore is not debt, but that money being pumped in the financial cycles, which doesn’t matter as long as it does just create a bubble on the stock and housing market – we have multiplied virtual money which never reaches the “real economy” for decades – but if such true “fiat money” spills into the “real economy” and leads first to a deflation and then a massive (hyper-) inflation. What we might approach, in a pretty bad scenario, is a scenario similar to the hyperinflation in Germany after the big strike:
“The blockade enforced by the French dislocated the whole economic life of Germany and sent the currency into a free fall. The mark depreciated to 160,000 to the dollar on July 1; 242,000,000 to the dollar on October 1; and 4,200,000,000,000 to the dollar on November 20, 1923. Commercial dealings were replaced by barter, and food riots broke out. The middle classes and pensioners saw their savings completely wiped out, and the drop in real wages devastated the working classes. Many businessmen and industrialists made large profits, however.”
https://www.britannica.com/place/Weimar-Republic/The-Ruhr-and-inflation
Now we have a similar situation, loss of production, loss of consumption, loss of orders, everything being kept alive by pumping money in. The critical moment will come if the “pumping time” has to be prolonged or once the “back to normal” starts, and suddenly all the surplus money being thrown one the market, but there are not enough orders and consumers out there any more.
In the US, the situation is particularly strained, because the FED didn’t just keep up a stable situation, but flooded the markets to create a boom & bust scenario. This might even work out, if they don’t want to abuse the situation politically or making mistakes, but its a dangerous strategy, especially because of their overcompensation. The financial market being now COMPLETELY decoupled from the real economy in such an extreme way, that it is truly extraordinary.
If the Oligarchy wants to abuse the situation or make unintended mistakes, even small ones, especially in the critical phase or if the downturn just goes on for too long, you have a bubble busting against which 2008 will be like a walk in the park and which might even dwarf 1929 by a margin.
To sum it up, the problem of debt is, for a politically strong & stable state – of which not too many exist any more unfortunately – a minor one, but the question is where the created money flows into. Does it create values and growth, or does it just create a bubble and redistribution of wealth.
And that its just a bubble and redistribution of wealth was probably never more obvious than now, in this time of the Corona crisis.
The financial centres London & New York (compare with this instructive documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zT9pa5AOuE ) can control a lot of the flow, with the money production centre in the form of the FED, yet this is the riskiest situation for the whole financial system – even though its now virtualised – minimum since 1945, probably for centuries.
Because of the virtualisation and political dominance, the financial Oligarchy has more tools at hand to keep things running or introducing reforms, including big scale money and economic reforms, to end a crisis if they really want to. But on the other hand NOBODY has the experience to be sure about anything, because nothing of this was ever done before and they might want to abuse it politically, in a va banque gamble, in which they risk more than just their position, but the stability of the current world system.
Again, nobody knows some of the rules which might be tested the first time and can calculate all factors which might play in, especially mass psychology and political reactions, but everybody which watches carefully can see how a tower being build, with thin air money, which is destined to crumble.
I mean how much of the money created and pumped in the current economy, even less so the stock & housing markets, is supposed to create enduring values? That’s the question everybody should ask himself.
The Corona crisis might prove to have been the decisive straw that broke the camel’s back, and its so convenient, so they think, because everybody can blame politicians and political groups they don’t like or just the pandemic exclusively, even if it goes very, very bad. So they already have scapegoats at hand, even though what’s going up now was ready in 2008 and was just expunched in the last seconds, on the back of the public welfare.
This time it might be too big for anything and the real economy is so badly hurt, really bad. I know from 2008, a time in which I had a lot of business contacts, how close we were from the meltdown in Central Europe. Many small, medium and even large business were very, very close to bankruptcy, with job losses and a breakdown of the supply chain being extremely close. We were very, very close from falling down and for many the recovery came just some weeks or at best months before they would have run out of money.
And this time its way bigger. So just a small mistake or bad gambling from London & New York and the whole world will be thrown into a depression we haven’t seen before.
Considering that, even if I would attest them good will, which I do not, the pandemic is absolutely unpredictable, still, we are at very high risk. This winter will be decisive as to where we are going and how big the downturn will become.
Many informative comments and an interesting article but what is missing is historical perspective. Even in the worst case COVID may kill 2 million mostly very old people.
If is does it will have drawn level with the Asian flu of 58-59 that was barely noticed at the time and judging by all the people call Covid the “worst pandemic in 100 years” has now been forgotten. Covid will be remembered though but it will be because we transformed our way of life but at the end of the day most people will not know someone who actually died from it.
Covid shows how much we’ve changed. We now expect that everyone born will live to a ripe old age–and anything that interferes with that is terrible.
No one in 1918 expected that. Rather the opposite.
@Roger: You are right in principle, but I wouldnt say it like that, since the comments from people of that time speak for themselves. The main difference was the lack of knowledge and alternatives, people just felt helpless and left alone.
We are used to have options nowadays, which is a good thing.
The bad aspect coming from this is that some people, even and especially those which speak about the environment and human nature in an estranged way, forgot about humans true position and dependencies from the physical world.
As if humans are not part of it. The whole “anthropocaen” crap and Cultural Marxism comes from the same spirit, as if humans are that special and cultural, decoupled from natural laws, which they are not.
I always wonder about how naive and silly most science fiction is nowadays. There is a lack of thinking out of the Box. Fukuyama was wrong, we are far from fixed.
A lot of people believe, wrongly, in a degree of continuity which is simply unjustified even if just looking at the current data. Surprises not included…
Re; Fukuyama, relevant piece I read on unherd this morn – https://unherd.com/2020/09/why-fukuyama-was-right-all-along/
Clickbait title might make you think it’s defending “liberal triumphalism” but actually making the point about deep worry of Fukuyama that liberal societies satisfy human psychologies, and that they promote “arete”, and that this may be their undoing.
(Not concerns I really share; threats to liberal societies seem other, mainly technological catch up by illiberal societies, age demographics and population size, environmental exhaustion and climate collapse, surveillance tech, etc. No so much about ennui or decay of excellence. But I thought interesting to see Fukuyama’s thought talked about in way which are at odds with the rote presentation trotted out.)