nate5ks

4% of my friends and family who have contracted the virus would amount to a total of 0.

RAHkid94

Where’d you guys find a vaccine? You understand the projections are that with no intervention 60% of the population will get this right?

Whatever. Talk to me in a month.

nate5ks

Where are you coming up with 4%? You do understand that most people who are actually tested are showing symptoms severe enough to warrant getting tested right? At first, only people with the most severe symptoms were getting tested. As the tests have become more widely available, more and more people, even those with mild symptoms are getting tested and the fatality rate (of those who test positive) is falling. The risk of the pandemic must be weighed against the risk of spiraling into a deep depression. Those types of cataclysmic economic events have historically led to tyranny, famine, and war.

Duffman

I hope you're kidding, because I would 1000 times prefer a depression to millions of Americans dying literally for the Dow. Regardless, we can either listen to health experts now and avert a complete catastrophe with a quarantine that buys time until we can learn more about the virus and ramp up production of tests, PPE, containment measures, and establish safe protocols for the public that can hold us over until a vaccine can be safely produced and manufactured and accept that there will not be an immediate return to normalcy, or we can ignore what all the experts are saying because it's inconvenient and rationalize that a bunch of politicians, businessmen, and talk show hosts who've probably never even taken college-level biology class are more credible than epidemiologists and doctors who, on top of being smarter, spent decades studying how to solve this exact scenario. Nevermind that the doctors and epidemiologists are just doing their jobs whereas the politicians have vested financial interests in returning everyone to work, but I digress.


Italy is about 2 weeks ahead of us and you can see how that's playing out. It took martial law and mandatory don't-leave-your-house quarantines enforced by police and military to even begin to reverse the infection trend. And when their hospitals exceeded limits, they had a 10% fatality rate. You don't think the same thing will happen here? If we just try to power through this and act like "if I get coronoa, I get corona" then millions of Americans will die. I'm willing to bet the majority of people who are supporting the whole "let's get back to work" idea also think this whole thing is overblown, and that mentality will change real fast as soon as someone they care about dies, especially if it's because they couldn't get healthcare in an overburdened clinic. So what happens then? Civil unrest and another quarantine when the gov't has already blown it's load on a $2T bail out, it can't afford to keep people off the street in the midst of a pandemic that could easily kill more Americans than all the previous wars combined, and we really do end up with the worst-case apocalyptic scenario. So yeah, I think we should play it safe on this one, defer to the experts instead of loud-mouth politicians who know nothing about epidemiology or biology and have made an entire career on manipulating people into serving them, and accept that this is a necessary evil. But then again, I watch CSPAN because I think all the networks are garbage MTV for adults, so do with that what you will.

nate5ks

A depression is not another recession. The last one ended in a world war killing 75 million people. It's naive to think that the consequences of a severe depression couldn't compare with or exceed that of a pandemic.

Duffman

Did you read my post at all? We're going through the quarantine, one way or another. One is organized and controlled after we already pulled out all the stops. The Fed dropped the rates to 0 and the biggest stimulus package the world has ever seen. The other is after we don't have any more stops to pull. If you can see a military threat why can't you see a pandemic threat?

nate5ks

I see a pandemic threat that is steadily declining due to increased testing to draw mortality statistics from. A complete shutdown of the global economy is not necessary and could have more dire effects than that of this virus if it lasts too long. How long, I don't exactly know but seeing how hard it is to get the govt to cooperate on one single stimulus package I have little faith that we can weather a storm where 2 or more are needed.

Duffman

Also, there's nothing saying a depression always causes a war, especially considering our near-peer frenemy is already beginning to pull through this after successful containment. It's China, they had 1-child policy, and even they didn't just try to power through this. They need double digit growth in GDP just be "sustainable" and even they recognized that they need to lock everything down and contain the spread. Now we're actually mulling over undermining whatever quarantine efforts just so the Dow will have a slightly better quarter in an election year?

This video will literally answer any questions you have about why this virus is so dangerous:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWzbArPgo-o
TLDR, COVID19 has a Ro of 2-3, meaning each person infects 2-3 others. The basic math is "number of infected people" = (series interval)^(Ro). Series interval is basically how long it takes someone to become contagious and infect someone else, which is really fast with COVID19 (like 2 days). To put it in perspective, the flu has a Ro of 1.3, so assuming the series interval for the flu is 2 days after 10 days a flu outbreak that started with 1 person is now 8-9 people. After 10 days with COVID its (5)^2 or (5)^3 which is 25 to 125 people. This is absolutely more dangerous than doing a proper quarantine and accepting the financial fallout, that realistically, is the result of an act of God, not a broken system, like the Stock Market crash that caused the Great Depression.

Duffman

That's the point, we currently don't know who has it because there aren't enough tests. The virus spreads rampantly (reference last post) so we freeze everything with a quarantine until we have a way to isolate whose infected and contain the spread. Then and only then can we start trying to return to normal. But with the weight of a $20T economy being held hostage by COVID19 tests, PPE, very specific medical equipment, and CDC tracking logistics, the problem has near unlimited resources and a highly motivated capitalist economy to make it happen. It can get solved. As long as Wall Street doesn't screw it up by forcing an outbreak that can't be contained.

Also, 46% of the people who tested positive on the cruise ship were asymptomatic:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/...cid=mm6912e3_w
Even with those numbers, allowed to run rampant in the population, the 2% fatality rate (which is really the best case) become 1%, roughly 60% need to get the virus and survive for herd immunity, so that's still 2 million deaths, and 20 million that need to be hospitalized. So, even if we theoretically had enough beds to treat 20 million people, that would still come out more deaths than all US wars combined and it'd likely lead to a recession or a depression that could be solved economically.

nate5ks

I understand the math and I have read what the Ro of COVID 19 is compared to other variants of the virus and the seasonal flu. If you want to imagine the effects of a worldwide depression, look at Venezuela and apply what is going on there to the EU and possibly even the US. If you think we can indefinitely quarantine and cease production and come out on the other side without seeing conflict and famine you need to take a look at history. Too many people watch Star Trek and imagine a world where economic consequences don't exist but they are very real. You won't see it for a few months (hopefully) but when large percentages of the population can no longer pay their rent or their mortgage or have to choose between paying the utilities and buying food you will see what I'm talking about and it won't be pretty. We need to isolate those who are most vulnerable (we have a good idea who they are) and the young and healthy need to return to work. There is a finite time this can last because it is not physically possible to cease production and still have a functioning society. Between 3/4 and 3/5 of workers in the US live paycheck to paycheck. Let's assume this stimulus actually passes and one of those workers can afford rent for another month, that gives them until the end of the third month after the start of the shutdown assuming they paid their rent for the first month right after the shutdown started. If this thing drags into a 4th month you will start to see evictions and the beginning of mortgage defaults due to tenants not paying their rent (maybe a couple months after if landlords have any capital but who knows, maybe they lost their jobs too). People are now out on the street wondering where they are going to live and where their next meal is going to come from. The charities that normally support people in this position have been depleted because their donors aren't making any money. People who had spent their entire lives and fortune building a business see it crushed. Lives are ruined, relationships are broken, and people are driven to depression and suicide. This speaks nothing of the global tensions that might arise.