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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

I see only doom & gloom comments here. Did people miss this positive note:

"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.

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So you're saying that a total shut down of the economy which could cause a depression is whats needed to deal with this virus. And thats no reason to be worried ?

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.

> So you're saying that a total shut down of the economy which could cause a depression is whats needed to deal with this virus. And thats no reason to be worried ?

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.)

I’m perfectly fine with our mishmash. The US has a strong economy, smart people and smart solutions will emerge.

Are you OK if we check back with you in a couple of months?

Of course. Keep in mind, I'm not saying that this situation isn't serious. I'm saying I have sufficient faith in the framework of the United States, even in light of the virus, that I'm not willing to trade it for the frameworks of China and South Korea. I'm also not saying necessarily anything derogative about either of those countries.

Not to be blasé, but its clear you're not a wage worker. Many people will be out of a job and be unable to pay rent. I have several friends who are ALREADY in the process of being laid off as businesses around Seattle practically shutter. We need a rent/mortgage holiday for both people and businesses in order to keep things afloat.

I’m perfectly fine with a >=50% loss in the market if it gets us to consider national paid sick leave and Medicare for all seriously.

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.

The primary organizing unit of the united states is the Business, not the family nor the individual.

The problems is those people who don't like paid sick leave and m4a are zealots and it will take more than a pandemic to change their minds. They mind agree that government should help out when it comes to depression era issues but otherwise they don't want anything like that in "normal" economic times. I think the progressive mindset that most people have on reddit and HN are really only 10-20% of the population.

No I’m just a business owner who hasn’t paid himself a salary in over a year despite paying the salaries of many others. But yes let’s just keep throwing out those stereotypes. I am deeply concerned both for myself, my family, my church (which has so many 80+ year olds it might cease to exist in 90 days), my colleagues who my ability to pay is rapidly dwindling, etc.

So you were correctly 'stereotyped' and decide that the best response is to complain about that?

If you aren’t paying yourself a salary it’s not a business, it’s a hobby. Which is fine, but it’s a different thing.

I actually really hope someone does check back in a couple of months and see if people still think their gloominess about financial matters was warranted.

IMHO gloominess about financial matters will be warranted, but probably not in the way people expect. I think the stock market will have mostly recovered, most people (who don't work for small businesses) will still have their jobs - but we're going to have very significant inflation, perhaps even hyperinflation. The Fed just injected what, $2T over the last week into a supply-side shock. Prices are going to go up anyway because of supply chain disruptions now facing 75% of companies, and then on top of that we have a massive amount of liquidity being injected. I think it very likely that that'll kickstart higher inflation expectations, which are hard to tamp down once they've started. Best case we get 1970s-style 15-20%/year inflation. Worst case we get 1920s-style Weimar hyperinflation.

Wish I could do a RemindMe!3months.

I did just read this [1] and do agree that the strategy in South Korea was productive. I think a variant of that where local hospitals provide testing could be useful here in the US.

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...

The part that frightens me is that every doctor I know is totally freaking out right now. If practicing medical doctors said it was going to be okay, I think I'd trust them. That's not what they're saying.

I'm fine with that. As I bet this all turns out to be a nothing burger in reality vs the sky is falling approach that's leading us into a bad recession. No one is concerned over the panddemic of obesity and I guarantee more people will die this year from heart attacks and other obesity related deaths and no one freaks out over those.

People who care enough about their life/health/wellbeing to freak out about being obese aren't going to find themselves waking up the next day obese. The same can't be said for corona virus.

I've seen this argument too. The thing is, we need a war time level response in manufacturing to prevent massive death.

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.

I’ve never been so tempted to violate the HN rules of polite discourse

I think a "rip the bandaid off" approach makes more sense. If everyone "stayed the fuck home" for two weeks, it would really help contain the spread.

Better that than to prolong things, like Italy did, and then make everyone stay home anyway.

https://staythefuckhome.com/

We should do that but the effects of that on the global economy scare me to be frank. Anyone who says that there's nothing to be worried about here simply hasn't thought through all the consequences we're facing.

It's going to hurt.

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.

To be honest, I don't think it will be too bad. Just speculating here, but events like this only really hurt when they occur asymmetrically (think 9/11 or housing crisis)

Everyone is going to be rocked by this at basically the same time.

What about an economic pause for 2 months? All rent/mortgage payments are paused, you only have to deal with the most critical costs (food, utilities) for a short period of time and then the economy resumes as best it can after the threat is gone? Of course, its not like it'll go away after just 2 months.

We told our tenants not to bother with next month's rent.

Would it help contain the spread? This started with just a small number of people, and so even a small reintroduction would reset the clock two weeks later.

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.

I don't know, to be honest. Seems better to stomp on it and then slowly relax and see how that goes?

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.

My personal feeling is that every day we delay mass-infection is another day that the medical community has to get a handle on this.

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.

that won't work. It still just delays it. Everyone needs to just admit they -will- catch coronavirus with almost 100% certainty this year as it is quite virulent and likes to stick around for a few days on surfaces and a few weeks in humans. By limiting very large gatherings and observing handwashing/some isolation the best we can do is stretch it out over time so that the medical system isn't overly taxed.

Does your happiness track GDP?

China's numbers make no sense at all. A country with 1.4B people and they at one point had 80k people with the coronavirus in the country which includes many big cities, smaller cities, and towns. Somehow they only have 15 new cases in the whole country?

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.

Why, concretely, doesn't that make sense? The CCP deliberately trying to hide things is definitely a possibility that should be considered, but I don't follow why you're saying it's impossible or what they'd hope to gain.

It's obvious what they gain? What does the CCP care about more than anything? They care about their image and the stability of their hold on the people.

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 if the virus isn't actually contained, how is lying about it going to help their image or stability? If Beijing hospitals end up stuffed to the brim with pneumonia patients, nobody's going to be fooled by a claim that there are no coronavirus cases.

No one is looking deeply or focusing on China right now. Due to their level of control they can easily hide the problem. But you're a fool if you think that in the last few days across the WHOLE of China that they had a handful of cases? Even with PERFECT lockdown of literally every person you would expect more than like 20 cases across 1.4B people.

India is a democracy with a free press; so the numbers are more trustable. India has low numbers because they are handling the crisis better. See: https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2020/03/05/kerala-earns-pr...

They locked the fucking place down. No movement = no transmission.

But people not doing stuff basically means a recession, if not depression is guaranteed.

Seems like they did but my suppliers have been back to work for over two weeks now.

I'm not sure that locking the place down for a little while per se will cause a recession. Numbers will take a hit for a while because people are prevented from spending and working, but the normal course of action after a snow day or staying home with the flu is to get up and go back to work and resume spending money. This is the path China could be on for its economy overall, if not for its economic interdependence with the U.S., which is handling things differently.

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.

A common definition of recession is a decline in GDP lasting for 2 consecutive quarters. It seems likely for this to cause a decline in GDP in Q1 and Q1 at a minimum, so a recession seems inevitable.

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).

I was speaking to the strategies that could be employed vs what we’re actually doing, and I am concerned that what we’re doing will cause a recession.

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.

Oh, I understand what you are saying now. I think the issue is that government officials aren't comfortable defining an endpoint right now. There are a lot of unknowns as to what could stop the spread at this point.

no vaccine will be approved at the earliest 6 months from now. By then the worst will be over. Most vaccines take 1+ years

No they didn't. This literally makes no sense. Do you understand how big China is? Do you understand how many people there are? Are you seriously telling me every person in China was "locked down"? How does that make any sense? Wuhan was "locked down" and one of my good friends who lives in Cali but whose parents are in Wuhan told me they live just outside the city and could leave their house easily and at will. So if they weren't locked down, are you telling me all the many hundreds of smaller cities and towns were "locked down" too??

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.

Not really, read any news stories about it. Sure they were tough on people they quarantined, but people moved around.

Climate.

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.

Again. Maybe climate has an "impact" but the size of the numbers makes no sense. Greece isn't exactly a cold place right now, it's massively smaller than India and yet has 30% more coronavirus cases.

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.

Agreed that the impact of climate is a big question mark.

In terms of Greece, it's more like Japan or China than a tropical country.

Right next China is a weak argument. There is an impossibly terrain dividing India and China called Himalayas. Other means of transport are restricted from the very beginning.

It seems far too early to judge the degree to which warm weather mitigates this. There have been a growing number of cases in Australia and South America.

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.

India also has a young population.

That would reduce the death rate, note the infection rate.

How do they know the infection rate unless they are randomly sampling and I haven't read of any country doing anything close to that other than Korea, and it wasn't all the random.

Data from the China CDC shows the mortality rate (not the infection rate) is strongly correlated with age, especially above the age of 50.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099662/china-wuhan-coro...

People coming from overseas have to go through mandatory quanrantine in India. Air travel is restricted. A ship with Chinese travelers was halted near coastline as per WHO guidelines recently.

It would be very surprising if they quarantined in time or strictly enough to prevent the virus from entering in significant numbers. Even societies with highly centralized control structures (Iran, Japan) weren't able to keep it out. I doubt a decentralized country like India with huge amounts of human movement without and within could do it, just as the US and EU couldn't.

Without seeing the numbers for tests conducted you're just wildly speculating based on personal opinion about the country.

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.

Proper response is key.

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.

From 20+ of my friends in Wuhan, the numbers most likely correct. And in my city, a small city in China with about 3M population, there's about 100 total confirmed cases in the past 2 months, there's news spreaded in local social network for every case before official confirmation. IMO, it's very hard to hide numbers.

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'..

I think the big gloom right now is that Trump has revealed that the US is not capable of a China or South Korea style response.

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

The reason for the doom and gloom is this weird system we have wherein the strength of the economy is based on human belief in the strength of the economy. Because of this circular relationship, positive feedback events can occur very quickly and result in the material effects of poverty, homelessness, and hunger.

> but it will recover! How do I know that? Because crashes have happened in the past, and the world didn't collapse and disappear.

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?

It's hard to take anything China says as the truth. If there's anything we ought have learned over the decades of lies coming from Chinese Leadership (and generally state controlled messaging) is that at the very least, that's not the whole truth.

If they had to lie, they won't release 80,000 cases. It is coming to an end for them. There is very little point in covering anything now.

I wish the U.S. would test more people like South Korea did.

Everyone lies - it's just a question of degrees. This isn't unique to China.

It makes China look better on the global stage if they do a better job containing the virus than democratic nations. I wouldn't call that a little point.

What's wrong with that?

Fundamentally? Maybe nothing. I was responding to the parent comment which claimed there's no real reason for China to under-report numbers.

I mean, if you look out the window and the market hasn't falling 8 percent in a day in over a week, it might be an alright time to buy.

No that's too late. You want to buy low and sell high, not the other way around!

Depends on how much of a discount you want and how fast the rebound will be. The S&P 500 has now given up 2.5 years of growth. I don't think it will spring within a week of bottoming out

> By taking drastic measures the rest of the world will too.

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.

Anyone who takes the current Chinese numbers seriously is incredibly naive.

And what if China is wrong, lying, or only temporarily correct, causing the virus to resurface when society resumes?

Then there are still some drugs in the pipeline which are proofen to be safe + helpful and only need official approval (if you trust China on that).

> only temporarily correct

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...

So here’s my question. China seems to have done a good job locking down Beijing and preventing an outbreak there. They did not do a good job in Wuhan. Per what you have described above, doesn’t it seem probable that Beijing will see a resurfacing given that relatively few people were exposed to it in the first bout?

Seems likely to me personally but only time will tell. In any case it probably won't be until after the initial panic & quarantine, when regular flights and travel and economic activity resume

Nobody knows if the virus will resurface or not, but China has no motivation to lie and just let people to have the disease since it's very costy to cure people.

However, China is motivated to resume society of other cities otherwise more people will get into economical troubles and it spirals.

>but China has no motivation to lie

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.

Genuine question, how does "lying to everyone" cure people?

They’re not lying. I live in Shanghai. Things are kind of going back to normal. The rumor mill says schools may open up again in April. If the coronavirus wasn’t under control it would be impossible to hide. Without public health measures it has a doubling time of four to five days. The health system here would be overwhelmed and it would be obvious to all that it was. I’m not saying the numbers the CPC are publishing are entirely accurate but the trend in cases definitely is. Given strong enough public health measures this can be brought under control. It’s now in over a hundred countries so there will be further outbreaks but with sufficient measures we can limit the deaths until a vaccine is developed.

What’s been going on in Shanghai? How serious has the lockdown been?

This is likely going to happen; right now things are shutting down, people are paying more attention to personal hygiene, etc. But once this settles down again, people will go back to their old habits. Come fall, it'll probably rise again fast.

Is a complete lock down, that isn’t a win. People are stuck at home so they cannot get infected. Think about it

The virus cannot survive permanently without hosts (human or animal). People are stuck at home until everyone (that's still alive) is clear. Then everyone can come out.

Edit: s/hosts/human or animal hosts/

> human hosts

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...

Not practical when you do it for a year. And don’t forget the world around you, you gonna miss cases when someone flys in? Or are you gonna block all borders? The question is how long you gonna let economy suffer. Die by virus or die by economic disaster

the lancet published that the amount of time you remain infectious after infected is usually 20 days, but can go as high as 40 days.

I don't think you understand what you are proposing.

I did not hear anything that it is not possible for a human to spread it while not being affected by it.

At least for influenza that's partially the case and going around the globe.

If you truly believe ANY Chinese data, I have a Great Wall to sell you.

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.

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