Spain should've kept the South America - Cadiz route on sailing ships. They'd have million trips under their wooden belts already, beat that internal combustion engine!
I had such a boss when I started work - best time ever, I never bothered with solutions and I didn't report the problems...year and a half of paychecks or almost 0 work done.
You do understand that the poor are the one that suffer from the lockdown and its side effects?
I'm making sweet sweet benjies while "working" from 3 bed home with garden and managed to gobble up stocks on the cheap when we were in sky is falling mode.
Do you have an example of any economic system in any country in the world, past or present, that could survive the majority of able-bodied people not working for a long period of time?
How do you figure—where would the threat come from? We can certainly still produce necessary goods while the majority of the workforce stays home. In that light—every industrialized country, probably. Certainly other countries every where you look on every continent seem to be doing markedly better at this than the US, including countries that are opening back up. Our best parallels are the goddamn UK and Iran, the former of which is trying to hang itself and the latter we've been trying to choke out for 40+ years.
Anyway, I can't even guess how you think the economy works if you think we need to open up or something bad will happen that nobody ever names. Oh no, a U shaped recovery and not a V shaped recovery? How will my 401k ever recover in the next six months?!? Think about all that risk to my capital! :'( How can this country ever recover from such a critical loss of portfolio value?
Instead of actually ensuring people can survive this crisis, we've bought corporate debt and told people to get back to work. It's a goddamn joke of any understanding of economics. Honey, every person that's ever read adam smith could do better than that. "developing countries" are putting us to shame, and good for them, because we're on the bus in Speed.
GDP shrinkage leading to a major decline in level of economic development.
> We can certainly still produce necessary goods while the majority of the workforce stays home.
Sure, I'm not claiming that we will starve to death en masse -- though that might indeed be a problem in India, it won't be in the US.
> How will my 401k ever recover in the next six months?!? Think about all that risk to my capital!
Not sure why you keep bringing up this strawman. Are you aware that the economy and the stock market are not the same thing? And that economic downturns cause real misery for real people, especially poorer people who don't even have 401(k)s at all?
I’m not sure why the GDP is a concern, frankly. How does this affect citizens in a material way? That is why I keep bringing up the 401k—to illustrate the absurdity of using an abstract measurement (GDP) to justify material loss of life.
GDP per capita is one of the most strongly correlated metrics to quality of life.
If you think people are living better in Denmark or Ireland than in Mexico or Turkey, how do you explain this other than GDP per capita?
Again, this has nothing to do with 401ks or the stock market. Some countries have been rich and others have been poor since well before stock markets were invented.
If you don’t think life is better in richer countries than in poorer countries, I’m not sure I can convince you of anything.
Not a surprise, COVID19 is pretty soft compared to the historic pandemics. I'm actually suprised that this continued for so long, I gave the lockdowns 4 week, but I guess the media propaganda blessed it with longer life.
Just to clarify about Covid:
-The highest deathrate from it is around 1%, CDC reports 0.30 lately.
-Hits predominantly the old parts of the population
-The death comes in a normal way - pneumonia -> death, nothing like the bubonic plague or ebola symtoms
Let's not forgot the poorer countries that simply cannot sustain a lockdown for long periods, as it will kill more people than save. UN is now predicting 130 million starving due to the hit to the global economy.
The problem was never the death rate alone. It was the death rate plus the high infection rate that was problematic. Even a low rate of .3-1 (which was always the estimated rate iirc) is going to kill a lot of people given how infectious COVID-19 has shown to be.
Not sure why you were downvoted as your statement that an IFR of 0.3 to 1 was always about the expected rate is completely right. E.g. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 published by Dr. Fauci and Dr Redfield on February 29.
Weirdly I’ve seen a lot of attempted history rewriting, I guess by people who in March didn’t understand the medical literature and confused CFR with IFR.
> Not a surprise, COVID19 is pretty soft compared to the historic pandemics.
Well, it isn't done and I'd say in terms of raw deaths it's pretty significant. Particularly when you recognize that a lot of those previous bad pandemics coincided with terrible water/sewage and insufficient healthcare.
Interesting because the CDC and NIAID were signalling well in advance of that they wanted at least 8 weeks of shut-down.. Anyone with their ear to the ground(actually reading articles from and watching interviews of epidemiologists and health officials) would have known everything was going to be shutdown well into May and that school was out for the summer. Marriott furloughed employees until end of June BEFORE the major March shutdowns.
Not really, no. You can go back to medical journal articles from early march and see they were using Chinese and Korean data and predicted between 0.1-1% death rate per infection (IFR).
> On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%.4 In another article in the Journal, Guan et al.5 report mortality of 1.4% among 1099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.2
Link to source? Current data on cdc is 1,920,904 cases and 109,901 deaths which is 5.7% (and it doesn't appear to be changing much). That's about 20 times higher than your figure of 0.3%.
Just to those who downvote - if someone poses a question or argument which you think is easily refuted, by downvoting or removing that question you remove the opportunity for anyone else with the same argument to learn something.
And maybe this is part of the problem with the whole covid discussion - labeling all these simple arguments from all sides as "wot a moron!" instead of presenting them clearly for people to learn from.
This is the amount of confirmed people that tested positive with Covid, not even including once that were discovered with anti-bodies. CDC has mathematical models to predict the actual death rate:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/05/fac...
