Median age of death in China is 75. Median age is 81 in Italy. This is around the expected life span of these countries.
Obviously a human life cut short is always worth mourning, but from an economic perspective, dying pensioners could actually be a stimulus.
expert epidemiologists are predicting billions infected and millions if not tens of millions of deaths
“Is 60-80% of the world’s population going to get infected? Maybe not. Maybe this will come in waves. Maybe the virus is going to attenuate its lethality because it certainly doesn’t help it if it kills everybody in its path, because it will get killed as well,” he said.
I think you're putting words in his mouth.
Lipsitch's comment in your own link begins with "if a pandemic happens", which is not the same as saying he's "predicting billions infected", so, again, you put words in his mouth as well.
Meanwhile, WHO estimates that only 0.5% of those exposed will develop any symptom at all... and not everyone will even be exposed.
Scroll down toward the bottom of https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1228373884027592704.html
Nobody wants it to turn out that way, but failing to prepare for that possibility would be a grave error.
FYI I am totally different person to jacobolus, who made the original post you responded to. I'm not the one putting words in people's mouth. I don't totally agree with jacobolus's statement, I think the final numbers will be lower [0], but I do believe there's merit to his claim and am more than happy to respond and provide sources.
> Re: Leung
Leung has made further statements, suggesting that billions could be infected. For example, in this recent interview, he stated: https://www.news.com.au/technology/public-health-expert-warn...
“Everybody is susceptible. If you assume that everybody randomly mix with each other, then eventually you will see 40, 50, 60 per cent of the population get infected.”
> Lipsitch's comment in your own link begins with "if a pandemic happens"
That's a moot point. Lipsitch is saying we're already in a pandemic, under almost any reasonable definition of pandemic. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00551-1
I think you'd have a better line of argument if you pointed out that neither of the two explicitly stated "millions if not tens of millions" of people will die. I'll conceded that's true, I haven't yet seen a top epidemiologist explicitly state so. However if you take one of the lower estimates of the death rate (0.5%), and apply it to their infection estimates, you'll get millions dead. If the WHO's official 3.4% CFR announced a couple days ago holds or increases, we'll see tens of millions dead.
[0] Once enough people have died (tens of thousands), countries will get their act together and start doing proper quarantines, social distancing, and hygienic controls.
As far as we know, it can only be transmitted by contact (including surfaces), only while the virus is active, and only from an infected person while communicable.
A huge portion of world population outside of the First World won't even be "in range." Its spread has been very constrained given that it was in the wild for months with most people taking no special precautions whatsoever.
Look how ridiculously transmissible measles is, yet it took centuries to get to some highly populated regions.
It also can survive pretty long on surfaces, I heard > 9 hours even. So you touch a pole on a subway car, and for 9 hours others are sharing the infection with you.
I've heard it may be airborne
Also, centuries ago this global phenomenon wasn’t a thing:
this number of days after outbreak
BTW you seem scared of inflation, inflation has been running low except the upper areas of the economy where the Fed has over low rates - so stock prices are inflated. What is really needed is injection of easier flowing money from below the economy.
If you invest in good programs then they deliver a positive benefit to the economy over time. Like more roads means easier connectivity, less time spent in traffic, or increased network flow. I'd suggest the biggest bang for the buck is universal healthcare and paying public college for all.
Plus, some common expenses like health care, college education, and housing have been increasing by way more than the Fed's target as well, and credible arguments have been made that the official inflation numbers don't take this into effect appropriately.
Central banking is central planning. Central planning has a bad name because it's so hard for planners to pick the right targets, fully understand the economy and not create side-effects worse than whatever problem they're trying to solve.
Economists have been penning articles for years about the 'mystery' of why inflation remains low despite high rates of money printing, whilst mortgages bonds and stocks soar around them. Well, CPI/RPI aren't complete measures of prices. They are excluding prices that matter a lot to companies, like the prices of financial instruments.
CPI does take into account healthcare and education costs, however. And some countries try to include house prices, albeit sometimes via indirect proxies of questionable utility like modelled "rent levels we think would be charged if people were renting instead of buying".
I think there's a lot of great economics journalism to be done on the exact nature of the inflation time series, because so many things are tied to it and there's just so much largely unexamined complexity sitting behind it.
It had a dramatically smaller infection and fatality count than COVID-19 already has, and COVID seems to be just getting started.
I understand why people want to be optimistic, but this is a really big deal. The markets aren't taking a multi-trillion dollar haircut for nothing. Governments aren't quarantining tens of millions and undertaking absolutely historic responses for nothing.
And if anything, the impact of this is being grossly under-considered yet. Travel is withering to nothing. Airlines are flying around a bunch of empty jets. As these start appearing on balance sheets the cascading effect will begin.
1. Significant quarantines in areas which have never seen them.
or
2. Mass infection and death.
Both will be remembered.
I'm not sure which is the worst option.