A lot of people are staring at economic ruin. We are staring at potentially multiple quarters of negative GDP growth. I don't think this has happened for a long time. And money printing won't fix it like it usually does.
Yeah. China covered this up at first, but it responded dramatically and authoritatively once the threat was understood. Being an authoritarian state, their power structures allow them to effectively restrict movement and manage the entire economy to limit the spread, and where they sit now is very nearly a best case scenario for what a response could look like barring that initial delay. And yet, even so, it will still result in countless second/third/nth order effects that will cause devastating public health and financial ramifications (the extent of which will only be slowly realized over time).
In comparison, the US is incredibly poorly situated. This country is a mishmash of loosely coupled quazi-independent governments, and its public health apparatus is mostly just de-facto run by the "invisible hand" of the market. The Federal Government has no ability to respond in the way China did, even assuming the people in control of it understood the potential severity here (which as yet they have not.)
We need to seriously reconsider the incentives of those who even if tested positive for Coronavirus would still not be able to miss work.
This is coming from someone whose nominal 401k portfolio is going down a Tesla per day. Why am I not upset?? — the infrastructure is still there; iMessage still works, AWS still works, there are still oil rigs in operation, it is just the amount of money we are willing to pay for securities has changed.
Wish I could do a RemindMe!3months.
As for inflation, I think we are little too early to point to one outcome as the likely one. Right now my view is that I can either let my mind go into full freak out mode or I can think about the fact that I do have fairly extensive contacts of people who are first responders, healthcare workers, research scientists, policy makers, innovators and I trust them. If I can trust them, then I can trust that the overall system is going to work imperfect as it is.
1. https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-respons...
That response will probably not happen until the current system is somewhat strained. 6 days after that point, there will be twice the number of cases.
I have no doubt we could respond to this given more time, but it is simply moving to quickly.
We need national quarantines now.
Better that than to prolong things, like Italy did, and then make everyone stay home anyway.
But if we don't do it, the thing spreads, and we're forced to do it anyway a few weeks later, like Italy.
Korea seems to be the best example of what has worked well, but I don't know a lot of the details. Seems like a good example to follow, but we're falling down in the US - we can't even test people.
Everyone is going to be rocked by this at basically the same time.
There are a lot of advantages to spreading it out, by reducing the peak strain on our health care resources and possibly letting a vaccine or drug come about. But a vaccine is likely months off at best, and we can't shut down everything until then. So a two-week quarantine might reduce the death toll, but I'm not sure it will dramatically reduce the number of people infected.
The initial wave of cases in a community is going to be a sucker-punch to the hospital staff. They are going to need time to regain their footing. If we can buy them that time, then we will all be much better off.
I'd love to read an actual expert's advice on this. I'm just going by what I saw happen in Italy. By the time they shut things down hard, it was too late.
How does that make any sense if you take a moment to really think about it? It's clear they are either deliberately not testing or skewing/hiding their numbers for political purposes. It's a bit similar to India's numbers. India (population 1.3B) has fewer cases than Iceland (Isolated island of 300k people), again, how does this make any sense? It only makes sense if they're not testing people or hiding numbers.
If China looks like they "fucked it up" then the people become more restless and start questioning the party. Also, they care deeply about their worldwide reputation and that the world sees that their "system" (top down authoritarianism) is seen as more effective than western progressive liberal democracies.
It makes them look a hell of a lot better if they can say to their people, "Look guys, look at how well we handled this crisis compared to the Western countries, this is why having an authoritatian one-party state with absolute control is better for you guys!"
Looking like the idiot country who totally fucked this up doesn't help the CCP at all, which is why they tried to silence the guy who was originally trying to blow the whistle on this whole thing.
But people not doing stuff basically means a recession, if not depression is guaranteed.
Only someone who had never visited China and seen the scale of the place woukd say such a thing. It's like saying I locked down all the termite colonies in Australia.
The U.S. is steering itself toward a year-or-more-long issue that has people fearfully avoiding stores, deliveries, workplaces, and the consequences of this will ricochet. A recession happens when people and businesses restrict spending and hiring, and that's exactly what this scenario causes in a chronic way.
But who knows? Maybe Gilead's experimental antiviral will be approved within a month or two, and maybe that will be enough to make people not fearful and regain economic confidence.
I do think there will be a point when going out becomes less of a concern and there will be a lot of pent up demand for travel. The recovery will likely be sharp (V-shaped).
To relate the strategy to that formal definition of a recession, if everybody stayed home for a month this quarter, we might lose 1/3 of the quarter’s GDP. But if that break is structured so that it’s expected and we resume normal activity afterward, then in the next quarter we would see the GDP “grow“ a ton, if only back to normal because people are working and spending for the full three months, and we would cleanly avoid this formal definition for a recession.
There was a theory that the virus doesn’t fare well in hot climates and that seems to be playing out.
A good example of this is Vietnam. Nearly all their cases have been in Hanoi which has quite temperate weather in the winter versus Ho Chi Minh City which is tropical all year around.
It’s not the only factor, but it does appear to have an impact.
Also consider that in India, there is not only a massive population, but access to tests per capita is probably quite low. Furthermore, the background noise of other infectious diseases is higher there, so many of these cases may go unnoticed or just attributed to common ailments. Death by infectious disease, while tragic, is somewhat more normalized there, and it might be hard to convince a lot of people not to go about their daily lives.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099662/china-wuhan-coro...
India: 1.3B population and right next to China. Greece 10M population and no close land links to China.
These numbers don't pass the common sense test.
In terms of Greece, it's more like Japan or China than a tropical country.
In early stage of Wuhan(Jan 2020), there's hiding numbers, and there's lots 'rumours' widely spreaded on social network, e.g. Lots messages from medical staffs in Wuhan, so we known the numbers of Wuhan is not correct. But in recent weeks there's no such 'rumours', the gov may have strong control on many things, but it's not possible to control all(most?) 'rumours'..
From WHO stats in the last day China has 50 new cases.
Let's take South Korea instead, they have tested more per capita than anywhere else on Earth by far and conduct over ten thousand a day. Since yesterday they've had 100 new cases.
Sorry to disappoint the doomsayers but all these big grandiose predictions seem far off the mark with a proper response.
It's exactly the argument that gets made here from time to time about doing maintenance and paying down tech debt.
The people that do it get called over-cautious and reactionary because shit never actually hits the fan.
Those countries were very well prepared because of SARS.
South Korea is sharing everything they can on how they've handled their response: https://twitter.com/HannahNamMD/status/1237618159840100353
I’m being facetious with this specific instance, but how would you know? If many worlds had disappeared after catastrophes many times before, we might have no ability to know.
This is “survivor bias”, no?
I wish the U.S. would test more people like South Korea did.
That seems optimistic, given the lack of significant action in the rest of the world so far. Personally I think the more likely scenario is that the world plays whack-a-mole with citywide outbreaks over the coming year and a half until a vaccine is available.
No, that's not an apocalypse, but I wouldn't put money down on this being over by the summer.
FWIW this is not uncommon with pandemics. For example, WHO[0] says "During the post-peak period, pandemic disease levels in most countries with adequate surveillance will have dropped below peak observed levels. The post-peak period signifies that pandemic activity appears to be decreasing; however, it is uncertain if additional waves will occur and countries will need to be prepared for a second wave."
For example, during the spanish flu, the second wave was far deadlier than the first. But there were additional factors (WWI and a mutation that made it more dangerous to the young).
This can continue until enough of the population has been infected that we have herd immunity. This is why there's long-term estimates of 20-60% of population being infected[1][2]
[0] http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/communicable-diseas...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/world/europe/coronavirus-...
[2] https://www.axios.com/congressional-physician-predicts-75-15...
However, China is motivated to resume society of other cities otherwise more people will get into economical troubles and it spirals.
You do not know much about China, do you?
President Xi's job (and possible life) is on the line if he fails. The CCP MUST be seen as perfect and Uncle Xi will ensure it is perfect by lying to anyone and everyone.
Edit: s/hosts/human or animal hosts/
At least for influenza that's partially the case and going around the globe.
I don't think you understand what you are proposing.
We think it came from some form of animal, and I've seen a report of a low level infection in a dog.
Edit: While I think the former is common knowledge, here is a source for the latter: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/coronavirus-dog-spread-humans...
China is lying.
The "Start-up Party" is over. Startups will need to plan make profits within 3 yrs. There will never be another WeWork or even another Uber.
The world is returning to normal. Capital will not be free. People will need to earn it.
"On Thursday, China said it had just 15 new coronavirus cases and 11 deaths over the previous day." See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/world/coronavirus-news.ht...
China has controlled the problem. By taking drastic measures the rest of the world will too. In a couple of months the virus will be under control. The stock market will not recover as quickly as it crashed, but it will recover! How do I know that? Because crashes have happened in the past, and the world didn't collapse and disappear. A single company can collapse and disappear but not the entire stock market.
The only question is, how long will it take to recover. I think it will take 2 to 3 years. People who sold during the financial crisis of 2008 did not get to participate in the recovery that followed. There isn't an email or a notification that goes out when the market starts to recover. Attempting to time the market is futile. Staying out of the market will only mean that you will miss out on the largest portion of the recovery.