OT: COVID-19 thread #2

[coldfish]

78% of US workers survive paycheck to paycheck.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2019/01/11/live-paycheck-to-paycheck-government-shutdown/#170d999e4f10

Yea, the virus sucks, and kills people.

People need to grow up and start working, The death toll from this virus is a far lower percentage than the results of a complete economy collapse will entail, it is mind blowing to me why some can't comprehend this.

We are not living in some fairy land where everything is even and fair. This is the situation we are in.

Another false choice presented by someone telling us to "get back to work" or else everything will collapse. First of all, you have no idea what the death toll would be if everyone carried on as usual, please don't act like you do. Second, can you show me your calculations on "complete economic" collapse? I see plenty of parts of the economy open and working. I work for an enterprise software company with 100,000 employees, we never stopped working and haven't laid anyone off.

One of the great things about the land we live in is that we get to make the rules. If we want it to be more fair, we could absolutely pass legislation to do that. Brushing it aside in extreme times implies you don't actually care about the 78% of workers living paycheck to paycheck. If you did, you would want to help them right now; not force them back to work in dangerous conditions. New Deal legislation was passed during the Great Depression and was successful.

What are your thoughts on expanded healthcare access (public option), increased minimum wage and guaranteed sick leave? Those are three things that would absolutely help that 78% stand on firmer ground.

Right now, the US has printed trillions of dollars to cover debt payments. A huge percentage of our workforce is not creating anything of value. We look like Zimbabwe or Venezuela or countless other countries that have economically collapsed with runaway inflation, goods shortages, etc. The end results of those situations were catastrophic. Average lifespans literally shortened due to all of the secondary effects. Thinking "it can't happen here" is the type of thinking that got us into this mess to start with. Hell, it *has* happened here with the great depression. Some people look back at the great depression with rose colored glasses and think that public works projects will save us. They didn't back then. The depression lasted until we had a world war.

Its great that you are working but we simply can't tax you enough to cover everyone's unemployment, health care, etc.

I'm not on the "let's just open it up" bandwagon by any stretch but the "let's keep it closed until . . . something" side has its head in the sand.

[Dresden]

More bad news for chloroquinine:

An anti-malaria drug has been ineffective on virus patients in New York.

An experimental protocol using the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine on New Yorkers seriously ill with the coronavirus showed no effect on recovery rates, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday evening.

...
The results have been sent to the federal Food and Drug Administration for review, Mr. Cuomo said, but the initial data has not been promising.
”It was not seen as a positive, not seen as a negative and didn’t really have much of an effect on the recovery rate,” he said on CNN.

[Dresden]

Starting today, Georgia is going to be running a test with it's residents on the effects of re-opening the economy. We'll see what happens there. They already have a fairly high rate of infection.

[moorhosj]

We look like Zimbabwe or Venezuela or countless other countries that have economically collapsed with runaway inflation, goods shortages, etc. The end results of those situations were catastrophic. Average lifespans literally shortened due to all of the secondary effects. Thinking "it can't happen here" is the type of thinking that got us into this mess to start with. Hell, it *has* happened here with the great depression. Some people look back at the great depression with rose colored glasses and think that public works projects will save us. They didn't back then. The depression lasted until we had a world war.

Its great that you are working but we simply can't tax you enough to cover everyone's unemployment, health care, etc.

I'm not on the "let's just open it up" bandwagon by any stretch but the "let's keep it closed until . . . something" side has its head in the sand.

You are creating the same false choice. It isn't "closed" or "open", there are different levels of economic activity. Groceries, logistics, warehousing, software, IT, healthcare, military and more are all parts of the economy that are functioning today.

No, we look like every other civilized society who is deciding that human lives are more important than GDP growth (South Korea, US, China, Australia, Germany, EU Central Bank, France, UK, Italy, Japan, Canada, Russia, India, etc.). https://www.investopedia.com/government-stimulus-efforts-to-fight-the-covid-19-crisis-4799723

There is no evidence to prove WW2, alone, is what led us out of The Depression. It's been an academic disagreement for decades. We can, however, say that increased social programs created with the New Deal didn't stop the economic expansion, as it directly preceded 30 years of prosperity. This is counter to the orthodoxy we have lived in since the 1980s, where a belief in less government, fewer regulations, and empowered businesses would drive prosperity. Coincidentally, the US middle class has been decimated in recent decades, starting in about 1980.

You are arguing that deficit spending will put our country in a death spiral, while simultaneously arguing that the deficit spending of 1941-1945 is what got us out of the Depression. Which is it?

[TheSuzerain]

Coldfish hitting all the idiotic austerity talking points.

Wehrmacht Republic, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.

[Dresden]

The TARP 1 and TARP 2 programs drew heated criticism from republicans (esp. TARP 2, which was Obama's plan) that It would massively increase the deficit. But it resulted in the govt. actually making a profit when it got paid back from those companies it bailed out (in return for stock). I know this is a much different scenario, but all those scary scenarios that were painted by groups like the tea party back in 2008 never came to fruition.

[coldfish]

We look like Zimbabwe or Venezuela or countless other countries that have economically collapsed with runaway inflation, goods shortages, etc. The end results of those situations were catastrophic. Average lifespans literally shortened due to all of the secondary effects. Thinking "it can't happen here" is the type of thinking that got us into this mess to start with. Hell, it *has* happened here with the great depression. Some people look back at the great depression with rose colored glasses and think that public works projects will save us. They didn't back then. The depression lasted until we had a world war.

Its great that you are working but we simply can't tax you enough to cover everyone's unemployment, health care, etc.

I'm not on the "let's just open it up" bandwagon by any stretch but the "let's keep it closed until . . . something" side has its head in the sand.

You are creating the same false choice. It isn't "closed" or "open", there are different levels of economic activity. Groceries, logistics, warehousing, software, IT, healthcare, military and more are all parts of the economy that are functioning today.

No, we look like every other civilized society who is deciding that human lives are more important than GDP growth (South Korea, US, China, Australia, Germany, EU Central Bank, France, UK, Italy, Japan, Canada, Russia, India, etc.). https://www.investopedia.com/government-stimulus-efforts-to-fight-the-covid-19-crisis-4799723

There is no evidence to prove WW2, alone, is what led us out of The Depression. It's been an academic disagreement for decades. We can, however, say that increased social programs created with the New Deal didn't stop the economic expansion, as it directly preceded 30 years of prosperity. This is counter to the orthodoxy we have lived in since the 1980s, where a belief in less government, fewer regulations, and empowered businesses would drive prosperity. Coincidentally, the US middle class has been decimated in recent decades, starting in about 1980.

You are arguing that deficit spending will put our country in a death spiral, while simultaneously arguing that the deficit spending of 1941-1945 is what got us out of the Depression. Which is it?

Good reply.

Random comments:
- South Korea jumped on this early, controlled it and is doing contact tracing. I wish we had done that but its likely well past the time it would work in the US, if it ever could have in the first place given our size and diversity. Their economy was never shut down.
- I think every country that is currently shut down is going to eventually face the same dilemma. The US isn't alone in this.
- The US middle class has been decimated since we changed our trade rules. It was predicted and expected. Now that we are losing 10's of thousands of people and having trillions of dollars of economic activity wiped out due to a disease started in Wuhan, I would seriously question if it was all worth it.
- I'm arguing that there is a point at which ludicrous deficit spending combined with drastically restricted production will lead to economic collapse. It has happened with some degree of regularity, just never with economies as big as we are talking about.

Overall, again, I'm not saying "open it up regardless of the consequences." I'm saying "make a good plan for opening it up and accept that the disease won't be completely eradicated when you do". I'm also saying "take a ton of risks on vaccine development. Now is not the time for standard safety practices because standard safety practices weren't calculated when a disease was killing 2000+ people per day."

[Dresden]

On the topic of bailouts, Andrew Cuomo had a smart comeback to Mitch McConnell's comment on having to bail out "blue states":

Cuomo criticizes McConnell’s remarks on state virus aid:

“NY puts in to that federal pot $116B more than we take out ... KY takes out $148B more than they put in.

Sen. McConnell, who's getting bailed out here? It's your state that is living on the money that we generate”

[Dresden]

Interesting article in the NYT today suggesting a program of doing nationwide random testing- similar to methods used to conduct political polling- that would give researches and policy planners a much better sense of how the pandemic is spreading, and it's mortality rates: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/opinion/coronavirus-testing.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

There point is that we are making policy in the dark because our lack of data is forcing us to make too many guesses, which often turn out to be wrong, and that when we do get data, it is often not soon enough to take effective action.

And they make the following point, which some here have been making:

"To illustrate, suppose we were to learn that true cases are 10 times currently reported totals. This finding would imply that Covid-19 fatality rates and hospitalization and I.C.U. rates are a 10th as high as reported. Moreover, such differentials are probably far greater (even than is currently believed) for younger adults because their predominantly asymptomatic and less severe cases are much less likely to be tested.

Data from Imperial College London already indicate that symptomatic individuals in their 20s and 30s have roughly a one-in-1,000 need for critical care. If random testing revealed that the true number of total cases for this age group — symptomatic plus infected but not symptomatic — is actually 10 times greater than just the symptomatic cases, their acute care needs would be under one in 10,000 — so perhaps these tens of millions could be sent back to work safely, without inundating hospitals. If 50 million working Americans in their 20s and 30s eventually became infected, 5,000 across the entire country would need critical care, and not all at once."

[Dresden]

And by the way, nationwide testing done this way might only require a few hundred thousand tests to be accurate, which is within our current capabilities.

[Dresden]

A good article on testing (although it was written a week ago). The biggest problem has been the lack of a nationally coordinated effort to roll out mass testing:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-testing-must-double-or-triple-u-s-can-safely-n1185881

...
"The problems cropping up in the supply and use of testing kits, experts said, are mainly the result of a vacuum at the national level, with no guiding hand in Washington setting out a clear strategy for testing, setting production targets for industry or setting criteria for who should be tested and how the data should be shared and analyzed.

Other countries, such as Germany and South Korea — which saw its first COVID-19 case the same day as the U.S. — rolled out large numbers of tests quickly and as a result appeared to have limited the spread of the virus. In both countries, the testing was managed and organized at a national level.

Kenneth Bernard, who advised the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush on infectious diseases, said the federal government should take charge and "pour resources" into a massive effort through the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Department of Health and Human Services to expand testing by the millions through private and state test production facilities.

"They should ship the tests free to all point-of-care and public health institutions in all states with the requirement that anonymous data be shared in a national database so public health decisions on changing social distancing and other lockdown actions can be rationally rolled back."

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University has called for a federal pandemic testing board, similar to the War Production Board during World War II, that could secure supplies directly from manufacturers or order companies to produce reagents or other items needed for testing kits.

Trump, however, has mostly been reluctant to wield federal authority during the COVID-19 crisis and has tended to portray the federal government as playing a supporting role for the states.

Strong leadership and hands-on management from the federal government are "what's required," said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "But obviously that's not what we're seeing so far."
...

[moorhosj]

Good reply.
Random comments:
- South Korea jumped on this early, controlled it and is doing contact tracing. I wish we had done that but its likely well past the time it would work in the US, if it ever could have in the first place given our size and diversity. Their economy was never shut down.
- I think every country that is currently shut down is going to eventually face the same dilemma. The US isn't alone in this.
- The US middle class has been decimated since we changed our trade rules. It was predicted and expected. Now that we are losing 10's of thousands of people and having trillions of dollars of economic activity wiped out due to a disease started in Wuhan, I would seriously question if it was all worth it.
- I'm arguing that there is a point at which ludicrous deficit spending combined with drastically restricted production will lead to economic collapse. It has happened with some degree of regularity, just never with economies as big as we are talking about.

Overall, again, I'm not saying "open it up regardless of the consequences." I'm saying "make a good plan for opening it up and accept that the disease won't be completely eradicated when you do". I'm also saying "take a ton of risks on vaccine development. Now is not the time for standard safety practices because standard safety practices weren't calculated when a disease was killing 2000+ people per day."

I think we are in general agreement. In my opinion, all of this other stuff (injecting disinfectants, protesting Governors, President vs. Governor tweets, general trolling) exists explicitly to take the spotlight off the failures of our Federal Government. For example, here we are discussing a "disagreement" of when to open the economy (even though 70-80% of America is on the same page) instead of asking why there isn't more testing available.

The reality is that almost nobody is saying "open at all costs" or "stay the course forever". That is a fake argument we've been fed to distract from the failures that led (and continue leading) to dead bodies across our country.

Note, the Spanish Flu started in Kansas and spread around the world before trade rules were changed. That said, we do need to re-asses our critical supply chain. I'm not sure how the trade laws of the 90s impacted economic activity in the 80s. middle- lower-class wages stopped growing well before these trade agreements were signed, let alone implemented. They may have made things worse, but you're assigning decades long trends to individual actions (WW2, trade deals) the reality is much murkier.

[coldfish]

Coldfish hitting all the idiotic austerity talking points.

Wehrmacht Republic, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.

Not fair. I'm not recommending austerity. Austerity would be a terrible idea right now.

I'm just pointing out that that shutdowns can't last forever. The reason why those are common talking points is because their citizens got crushed. It really did happen and it was very bad. You can't just call real world scenarios "idiotic" and then walk away.

Its almost like if you had a president who said "hey, a pandemic isn't going to happen. It will just go away. That's just idiotic democrats trying to play politics." and then not try to plan for it and prevent it. I wonder how that would go?

[coldfish]

Good reply.
Random comments:
- South Korea jumped on this early, controlled it and is doing contact tracing. I wish we had done that but its likely well past the time it would work in the US, if it ever could have in the first place given our size and diversity. Their economy was never shut down.
- I think every country that is currently shut down is going to eventually face the same dilemma. The US isn't alone in this.
- The US middle class has been decimated since we changed our trade rules. It was predicted and expected. Now that we are losing 10's of thousands of people and having trillions of dollars of economic activity wiped out due to a disease started in Wuhan, I would seriously question if it was all worth it.
- I'm arguing that there is a point at which ludicrous deficit spending combined with drastically restricted production will lead to economic collapse. It has happened with some degree of regularity, just never with economies as big as we are talking about.

Overall, again, I'm not saying "open it up regardless of the consequences." I'm saying "make a good plan for opening it up and accept that the disease won't be completely eradicated when you do". I'm also saying "take a ton of risks on vaccine development. Now is not the time for standard safety practices because standard safety practices weren't calculated when a disease was killing 2000+ people per day."

I think we are in general agreement. In my opinion, all of this other stuff (injecting disinfectants, protesting Governors, President vs. Governor tweets, general trolling) exists explicitly to take the spotlight off the failures of our Federal Government. For example, here we are discussing a "disagreement" of when to open the economy (even though 70-80% of America is on the same page) instead of asking why there isn't more testing available.

The reality is that almost nobody is saying "open at all costs" or "stay the course forever". That is a fake argument we've been fed to distract from the failures that led (and continue leading) to dead bodies across our country.

Note, the Spanish Flu started in Kansas and spread around the world before trade rules were changed. That said, we do need to re-asses our critical supply chain. I'm not sure how the trade laws of the 90s impacted economic activity in the 80s. middle- lower-class wages stopped growing well before these trade agreements were signed, let alone implemented. They may have made things worse, but you're assigning decades long trends to individual actions (WW2, trade deals) the reality is much murkier.

Agreed mostly. Just have to point out that the Spanish Flu was moved around the world in troop carriers.

As far as trade laws,


This is a weee bit over my head so forgive the simple explanation. Before 1970, trade rules were set up so that the US had to have a balance of trade. You give me something, I give you something of equal value. Some time in the 1970's, rules were changed so that a lot more could be exchanged, including iou's. This allowed trade deficits to occur and corresponds directly with when the middle class started getting hammered.



Notice a connection? We did this to ourselves and we have the US federal government to thank.

[Dresden]

Other things were happening in the 70's, too that contributed to those trends- manufacturing starting to be moved overseas was the big one. A decline in union membership. Good, well paying factory jobs that you didn't need a college degree for were leaving what are now called the rust belt states, to move south, to non union states, and overseas. And competition from foreign manufacturers also had an impact, as those economies recovered from the aftermath of WWII. The formation of OPEC and the resulting sharp increase in fuel costs sparked a round of inflation, and once Reaganomics with it's trickle down theories of growth were introduced, the middle class decline began in earnest.

[Susan]

Read on Twitter

Projecting 9.5% unemployment at the end of 2021.

[Dresden]

I know it's hard to prove casuality in these things, but can it really be just a coincidence that the 3 biggest meltdowns we've had in the past, I don't know, 50 years, have all been with a republican administration in charge? 9-11, Great Recession, and now this? And if those are related, how? Are republican administrations just less willing to act soon enough when a crisis is unfolding? Are they not good at picking up warning signs? Are they more likely to deny warning signs when they do flash? I do think Bush and Trump were/are particularly weak presidents (and most presidential historians agree on this), so maybe it's just the persons, and not the political party involved.

I'm asking this not as a political barb towards republicans, but just on a theoretical basis, how do you explain that?

[Chi town]

Not much talk about how Sweden is doing.

They didn’t shut down. Just smart precaution.

[Dresden]

Not much talk about how Sweden is doing.

They didn’t shut down. Just smart precaution.

How do their death rates compare to other European countries? Last time I checked, they were doing worse than all the other nordic countries.

[Dresden]

Deaths per 1M of pop:

Sweden: 213
Denmark: 70
Norway: 37
Finland: 32

So having a death rate 3-5x higher than nearby countries is not a good argument for how they are doing things, I would say.