Originally Posted by Duffman

WTF are you talking about? All that article says is that a vaccine would actually work and be a profitable long term endeavor, and it's most likely at least a year away if there aren't any setbacks. Pandemics spread like wildfire unless they're contained. If they can't be contained then they only "die out" when there's a herd immunity because most people have gotten it and survived. 2% fatality rate WITH PROPER HEALTHCARE. Italy's hospitals got overrun and their mortality rate went to approximately 10%: https://www.businessinsider.com/coro...y-ratio-2020-3

And apparently they just aren't treating people over 60 because they don't have the resources:

https://www.jpost.com/International/...over-60-621856

About 20% need hospital care to survive. To put these numbers in perspective, 2% of the US population is 6.6 million people and 20% is 66 million. There are like 160k ventilators in the US. To get "herd immunity" with a Ro around 2, it looks like roughly half the population needs to get the virus.

What is herd immunity and how many people need to be vaccinated to protect a community?

So that's 3.3 million (2%) to 33 million dead (20% from lack of medical care) likely long before a vaccine ever comes out in the best-case scenario. There's no way in hell over 3 million people will die from suicide or sleeping on the streets because of a financial depression. Granted, people probably will practice social distancing and take steps to avoid the spread of the virus on their own, especially when the death count starts really ticking up, which would probably bring down the total cases, but we're talking about a lot of lives from every age group and I'm pretty sure that many dead people would also negatively impact the stock market.