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Early Lockdown Lifting Will Prolong The Greater Depression
Despite the so called lockdown the number of new cases of Covid-19 in the U.S. is barely sinking. It is only because the heavy outbreak in New York is now in decline that the number sinks at all. In most other states the numbers are just stable or still rising. But the White House and many state governors are lifting the restrictions and want everybody to go back to a normal life. This won't work.
Source 91-DIVOC – bigger
Two weeks after the states declare that everything can be reopened the new cases number is likely to again increase.
But people need to believe that it is secure to go back to normal life before they do so. They will not consume more than necessary unless they feel that it is safe to do so. How can they develop that trust while the numbers and headlines continue to show bad news?
The fear is reasonable at least for everyone over the age of 50 and for the many obese U.S. citizens. Covid-19 spreads easily, there is no medication against it and the infection fatality rate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.3%, much higher than for the flu, even without accounting for New York County.
A good thing is that fear is the only personality-based variable that predicts virus-mitigating behavior. People who fear to get sick will continue their social-distancing and hopefully wear their masks.
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Some 80% of GDP and employment in the U.S. is generated by services. The economy depends on people feeling safe. Who will go to a restaurant, a theater or on a plane as long as the trust that it is safe to do so is not there? The people will learn about the risks in those places and avoid them. That behavior will prolong the crisis.
A better strategy would have been to increase the lockdown measures until the number of new cases goes sharply down. People would then have regained some trust. Lifting the lockdown only when the people feel it is secure to do so would have been much better for the long term economy then the current rush.
The U.S. now has an enormous unemployment problem. To solve that problem as fast as possible the people need security and peace of mind. Only then can the economy spring back.
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It is likely that the real unemployment numbers are some 25% higher than the official numbers. Economist Nouriel Roubini is right in calling this the 'Greater Depression'. It is now already larger than the one 90 years ago.
As the U.S. does not have a reliable social safety net the shock its economy will go through will be much longer lasting than the one in European economies. A lot of jobs will take several years to come back if they do so at all. Many people will lose their housing. General education and health will further decline. Crime will rise and more nutters will go crazy.
One current Amazon bestseller is by an anti-vaxxer who claims this is a 'plandemic', that Anthony Fauci funded the Wuhan lab, and that covering your mouth 'activates' the virus. The author is Judy Mikovits, a disgraced 'scientist' who has been caught faking her research and papers. She was fired from her institution when she was caught stealing its proprietary data.
That such a book sells at all shows the deep mistrust the people have in their government.
The U.S. needs a prolonged unemployment program to keep its people out of misery. It needs an enormous infrastructure program to bring the many millions of people back into work and to reignite the economy.
But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are calling for those measures. Instead they are busy shuffling trillions of dollars to those who already have too much money.
to Posted by: b | May 9 2020 9:59 utc | 119 and Posted by: ADKC | May 9 2020 9:49 utc | 118
Some people say (not b) “The idea that the origin of Covid-19 was man made in a lab have been debunked”, but this is not the case, and apart from some published research that show people in the I.V. of Wuhan were busy building chimeric coronavirus with GOF; the project granted by the NIH that ADKC sent the link says, in the “Project Information” page:
“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential”
link
If I have understood enough well what this means, for me they are going to make edition and changes in the genome of the coronavirus (using “infectious clone tehcnology”), they will use “in vitro and in vivo infections” (everyone knows “in vivo” is a much more dangerous approach), and they will “test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential”, for me this means they will alter the S protein sequence to see if these changes can have a “spillover potencial”; and that means a GOF strategy to “see what happens” when you alter the protein that make easy for the virus to infect humans. Once you know what alterations give a very infectious virus, you can predict future pandemics when it appears in natural form.
For me all the approach is delirant: they want to make many changes in the genome in order to define an “space of structures” that provide infectious characteristics to the coronavirus; to achieve this I suppone they need to do many many changes looking always for a more infectious strain, and you have to do it many times in order to achieve this “phase space” of possible infectious alterations of the S protein, so you can have a data base to compare in the case of natural occurence, and to know in advance if this particular strain could be, or not, very infectious for humans.
It is just crazy!, or only is crazy for me?
What I see is that after the prohibition of the GOF research in USA, they outsource them to China, all with very ethical purposes, it is NOT a conspiracy, in fact they were trying to avoid a pandemic and look for vaccines, all is OK, but anyway, as Nassim Taleb warns many times, the GMO world is a very very risky business with big “fat tails” probabilities of catastrophic results (ruin).
Anyway this is only the tip of the iceberg, to change the genome of infectious, dangerous or normal virus is a routine in hundreds if not thousands of labs aound the world (for vaccines, methods of diagnosis, nano-materials, etc…), and we believe all of this is “safe” and nothing could happens at all, but as Nassim Taleb says GMO’s are much more dangerous than a nuclear accident, because thanks to globallization and air planes, all the world, all the humanity, is connected in few days, and that could means “ruin”.
We, as civilization, have not very good prospect for the future
Cheers
Posted by: DFC | May 9 2020 20:45 utc | 176
@Caliman | May 8 2020 19:56 utc | 14
I intended to respond to the point below but I forgot …
We are already probably somewhere between 5% and 25% true infection rates across the country depending on location (in cities). This needs to go up to 50 to 60% over the next six months and before the next cold season.
In other words, you want herd immunity. Achieving that would kill a lot of people. Worse, it might not work; it certainly didn’t succeed against the 1918 Kansas Flu (which for some reason is widely known as the Spanish Flu, though it wasn’t Spain’s fault).
The deadly Kansas Flu came in waves. According to historians, the first wave’s “mortality rates were similar to seasonal flu”. After the first wave, you would imagine that people would have lots of herd immunity. In fact,
Reported cases of Spanish flu dropped off over the summer of 1918, and there was hope at the beginning of August that the virus had run its course.
However, a few months later came the second wave, and it was a killer.
In the United States alone, 195,000 Americans died from the Spanish flu in just the month of October.
Then in January 1919 came a third wave, which was just as lethal as the second. Fortunately, the Great War had ended, limiting the movement of troops, so fewer people died.
In total,
The [three waves] infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims–that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.
——
Back to the present. Perhaps you’re thinking that mutations usually make viruses less deadly, so the U.S. should take a chance on Covid-19 and try for herd immunity. However, that would be playing with fire.
It’s true that for an individual virus, a mutation is likely to make a descendent less deadly. However, the more people who are infected, the more billions and trillions of mutation chances the virus would have — to go around existing immunities and become deadly once more. That is why the Kansas Flu arrived in three waves. Not one, not two, but three waves.
That is what you risk in trying for herd immunity for hundreds of millions of Americans.
Posted by: Cyril | May 10 2020 2:40 utc | 183
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