“I'm not sure there is an acceptable solution to the problem we are facing”
twitter.com
twitter.com
The reaction in the west: masks are not protecting 100% and also we don't have any and we are too lazy to produce them, although they are much cheaper than the economic impact covid-19 has.
1. you go out, you wear a mask
2. you are not allowed into a super market without hand sanitizing
3. you clean your hands when coming home or going into your office
4. wear any kind of glasses
We know the transmission vectors but the whole response in the west is solely based on quarantaine - like we would still not know what viruses are and how they are transmitted.
Reducing social contact is one thing, reducing virus dispersion is the other and it is cheap.
You have a sewing machine? Go start making masks.
To be fair, many people in Bangkok already wore masks because of the pollution. So there is no stigma. But it seems that the Thais started taking Covid-19 serious right away, so maybe that's why Thailand, which was on the leader board in number of infections early on, has reached only 114 confirmed infectinos with 1 death as of yesterday. But only time will tell if all the precautions can slow down the spread since it only takes a few infected but symptomless highly social spreaders to really blow things up. And it looks like that may have happened in the last few days.
We don't have nearly enough masks, and the authorities are trying to ensure that as many masks as we have can go to a healthcare setting.
It's why they're giving us incongruous messages: both "masks don't help reduce the risk of transmission", AND "we need to save masks for health care workers". Obviously, since we're trying to preserve the supply for health care workers they do have some utility in reducing the risk of transmission.
This is a large contribution for containment. Masks should be worn by anybody at this point.
Is that proven?
> Secondly the mask only help avoiding spreading the virus from yourself to other and it doesn't protect from receiving the virus
Doesn't this contradict your first statement? In fact the statement contradicts itself, stopping spreading the virus from one person to another by definition protects from receiving the virus.
Reducing the likelihood of infection by ten percent can make the difference between eradication and an epidemic.
No, the masks are not 100% virus tight. Yes, they prevent spreading of diseases. That's why they are worn by surgeons.
They are 20 cents a piece, that's nothing compared to the current economic costs of useless social distancing as long as people still go to work. Unless we stop the economy, masks and hand sanitizer are the way to go.
"If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection."
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
"If you are not sick, do not buy a face mask. If you have one already and you are well, it is not recommended that you use it."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the-compr...
Is this in your opinion "false information"?
If you're sick but don't know it, your coughing/breathing is spreading the virus.
So everyone wearing a mask prevents the infected, including those that don't know that they're infected, from spreading the disease.
And for those who are not sick, it may offer small protections.
Tiny downside for a large upside.
So, some protection is better than no protection. Consequently, It's difficult for me to understand why discouraging people from using face masks is a good idea.
Use it properly and keep social distancing, while regularly cleaning your hands.
If there were an infinite supply of masks the advice would be entirely different.
I mean, maybe they're going for the social dissaproval angle - you can stop people from hoarding masks by making it socially bad to wear a mask, but that seems misguided if true.
I noticed this when I was wearing one during a flu infection. My fingers were frequently surprised to touch the mask instead of my face, and I went "oh, right, don't do that!"
Regardless, most reputable source for advice is probably from WHO, even though my gut feel/logic would tell me otherwise.
The specific question that is relevant is, given droplet exposure containing COVID, are there any differences in infection rates for people wearing a mask (use different levels of mask protection for comprehensiveness, from bandana to N95) versus without a mask?
A mask can be only 10-20% effective but still show a clinically relevant result. If you think about the effectiveness of washing your hands to prevent getting sick, it is probably a low reduction but it is still highly recommended.
People do not argue against hand washing just because the virus can still get into your system through other means. They support hand washing despite its imperfections.
So if you are sick, wear a mask. Here in Germany you still get publicly ridiculed for it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
The question was who's officially claiming that they don't mitigate, even moderately, this risk vector.
The problem is that there are not enough masks to go around. But if there were, i would recommend everyone wears them. Just so it would make it socially acceptable to wear one if you are sick.
The virus is not airborne, it is spread is small droplets. Those are effectively reduced by all kinds of masks.
This isn’t Tokyo, where everyone was wearing masks before this crisis and you get one for 400 yen at any convenience store, even inside the rail station.
Authorities in a democracy work mainly by persuasion, and they have a limited budget of how much they can educate and bend people’s behavior. This is what you would expect a system that takes citizen feedback into account, where citizens have a very strong prior that is inappropriate to the current situation.
Note most people in a democracy are strongly against government propaganda, but propaganda is basically state-owned tax on citizens’ attention. Think about how much attention it would take to educate people until they all voluntarily wore masks, whether that education would be politically popular, and also how many dollars in ad revenue that would have cost in the private attention market (ads).
Sure, say that don't hoard masks, but don't say that it doesn't work anyway. Say that it would only work if everyone would use them. (Because you don't know when you are contagious anyway, so saying only sick folks should wear them is again a bad message.)
Also, saying that everyone should wear them is consistent with don't hoard them. (After all, if doesn't help you if you have masks but don't distribute them to others to protect you and "your loved ones".)
Part of the problem for the West is that we wear masks when we don't want to get sick. Masks don't really work for this (the rest of the mask-wearer still gets covered in virus). And if we're diagnosed sick, then we stop wearing masks. Again, that's not how the mask thing works, because this is when masks are most useful. Both as a social signal and practical way of reducing infectiousness.
To use masks effectively, we need to stop wearing them when we're scared, and start wearing them when we're infected. But I think the social change to do this will be difficult.
They do, they decrease the chance to get infected. They don't guarantee it. The previous poster wrote about exactly this.
If the Infected Person is wearing the mask, all good. Cough contained in mask, no virus spread anywhere, everyone OK.
If the Non-Infected Person is wearing the mask, they're still covered in virus-laden cough mess. All they have to do is touch their face once in the next 3 days to catch the virus. Washing their hands will remove the virus from the hands, but not from their clothes, hair, etc.
Also, they're now covered in virus. Everything they touch will be covered in virus. Virus everywhere, infecting everyone. Everyone not OK.
It's possible that a non-infected person wearing a mask might prevent a tiny bit of infection, but it's MASSIVELY more effective on the infected person.
Surgeons wear masks in case they cough on the patient. They don't put a mask on the patient...
Like we said several times, masks provide some protection (decreased risk) for a healthy person, they don't protect from getting infected 100%.
No one ever said that mask is more effective on healthy person than on the infected one, I am not sure who you are arguing against. But it is the popular for some reason notion that a mask does not protect a healthy person at all that is plain false as has to go away.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/14/8116090...
https://www.chemistryviews.org/details/news/10608438/How_Lon...
"The viruses remained detectable for up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard, and up to 3 days on plastic and stainless steel."
Different surfaces are, well, different.
And don't forget the social signal part; if everyone wears a mask all the time, then we don't know who actually considers themselves to be infectious. Whereas if just the infectious people wear masks, then we know who they are and can act appropriately (being grateful that they self-identified as infectious and kept the rest of us safer, for a start).
I think the point is that you have no idea whether you're healthy.
If ONLY sick people tend to wear masks then masks will make you a more visible target of fear and hate, which would lead people who are sick to not wear masks.
It's a much better idea to destigmatize the act of mask wearing so we can get larger coverage of sick people with mask s.
In Asia, the feeling is gratitude - thank you for wearing a mask and protecting me from your illness
Not exactly. Just make it mask season and make everybody wear it. You don't know when you are contagious/infectious, and it might not be at the same time when you are feeling sick. So just make sure everyone wears it.
I know H/N loves binary thinking, but the either/or fallacy is harmful and dangerous, especially in this scenario. People fall into it with the age-based impact of the virus too: young people feel completely immune, so why care? The same with masks: they don't protect you 100%, so people just mentally consider them worthless, and then there are dozens of HN posts repeating the misinformation in short order.
If you can get a mask.
The mask manufacturers in the West are not going to ramp up without a significant amount of money up front. The last time they did with SARS they almost went bankrupt after it fizzled out and demand collapsed:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavir...
So, you need the US government to either command or fund the manufacturing ramp up.
Unfortunately, that requires people in charge who actually don't suffer from cranio-rectal impaction.
If mask producers could charge enough that the masks weren't quite fly off the shelves, we would be swimming in masks made and kept in storage for times of pandemic. It is pretty obvious what happens; producers are shamed into not making a profit when demand is high so they don't bother to produce.
And a further thought, I wonder how many surgical masks we'll find floating in the great garbage patch in the next few years. At my work they also threw out all the plastic cutlery so assuming there is a massive trash surge happening. I'm interested in the environmental impact of this outbreak.
Just make sure you wash and dry the mask as soon as it's off your face so bacterial colonies don't have time to multiply.
People who walk around wearing masks but not gloves are making a fashion statement. People who are serious about the issue (including health-care workers) wear both.
So no, gloves are entirely useless for protection from this kind of virus. They are much more useless than masks, which could at least temporarily prevent some amount of virus-filled water droplets from reaching your nose.
Let's say you're unknowingly infected, like all of those people who were hanging out at bars as though they're invulnerable this weekend. So you have virus on your skin already. Are you more likely to pass it on to others via surfaces if your skin is bare or if you put a glove on it? The answer's pretty obvious. If you touch your face then the probability of infection either way increases again, but (a) people touch their faces less often with gloves on and (b) every time you change gloves the probability drops back to near zero. So yes, gloves do protect you somewhat, and they protect others even more. Just as importantly, there's no sane scenario in which they'd make things worse or deny resources to those who need them more (as with masks). It doesn't make much difference whether the surface transmission route is directly on skin or via face touching. That's why health care professionals use gloves even when dealing with respiratory diseases like COVID-19.
It's not particularly obvious to me how gloves are all that different to hand-washing.
In both cases, your hands are disease-free until you touch something that isn't disease-free.
Only in the sense that hand-washing is more effective. In fact, most recommendations to use gloves also recommend hand-washing immediately after removal. However, it's not practical to wash hands every few minutes, literally hundreds of times a day. Gloves can provide protection between less frequent washings.
Is that true? I would assume people usually touch their faces because something itches or to adjust glasses/hair/a mask. I would expect gloves to have a minimal impact on this compared to just paying attention to never touching your face. I am open to seeing numbers on this, but don't know where to look for any.
> every time you change gloves the probability drops back to near zero
I think that's only true if you handle the gloves somewhat carefully (not that it's hard to do, but you do have to pay some attention). But washing your hands or using hand sanitizer also achieves the same. So the question comes back to "how often do people wash their hands/use hand sanitizer compared to how often they change gloves?", which is an empirical question I have no clear intuition for, but do expect for differences to not be that large.
> That's why health care professionals use gloves even when dealing with respiratory diseases like COVID-19.
I think healhcare professionals wear gloves for a number of reasons, chiefly because, if you're used to it, you can be more efficient when changing gloves than when washing your hands: medical professionals normally put on a new pair of gloves before touching you, then throw those away after they are done. Most people are not used to it, they do not constantly change gloves, and do not have to deal with moving from patient to patient. So just as I don't think it's useful to tell people to wear surgical overalls and change them every hour, I don't think we can tell them to use gloves the way they are used in a hospital.
I would admit that I would probably feel safer with a mask on though, despite the problems with wearing masks as well.
Gloves, even if they do nothing else, act as a strong reminder not to touch your face. Breaking that habit alone can strongly reduce your risk of transmission.
A face mask.
I was more responding to the person about gloves, but what you say is also true.
Disposable latex gloves are cheaper and easier to access in China than masks and yet China prioritized masks.
Why are they not effective? Because they don’t contain the aerosolized moisture from your breath. Most masks, unless properly sealed against your face and not impeded by moisture in the mask, will bypass the mask entirely and vent out the sides. How long does it take for moisture to impede airflow through the mask? About 30 minutes.
So, unless you are replacing your mask for a new one every 30 minutes, and are ensuring that its properly fit every time, wearing a mask is a placebo at best.
Can a mask block you from spitting on everyone? Sure, but so can your arm or hand when you’re coughing.
A coronavirus is about 0.1 µm while surgical masks start to become effective at around 200 µm and up.
So a coronavirus is about 2000 times smaller than what a surgical mask can filter.
I imagine a chain link fence which is pretty effective at stopping basketballs.
A pollen spore is about 2000 times smaller than a basketball.
Chain link fences are useless in stopping pollen spores, just like surgical masks are useless in filtering coronaviruses.
The only benefit to a surgical mask is to prevent the infected person from spraying large drops of saliva and mucus onto surfaces, there is zero benefit for the uninfected.
If you're uninfected, you don't need a mask unless you're caring for sick patients. And even then a surgical mask is pretty useless, you'd need a quality N95 or N100 mask and eye protection.
Masks stop people from constantly touching and/or itching their mouth and nose.
Think about that for a second, before you tell people how useless masks are.
Anyone have sources for this?
I've been skeptical of the rumors about reinfection, because they seem to be based on tests coming back positive after recovery, but the tests are rt-PCR based, and your body will be shedding leftover bits of RNA as it flushes out viral remnants long after recovery, so this seems expected.
As far as I'm aware, immunity to most viruses is long-lasting or permanent, with the obvious exception being if the virus mutates enough to look different to your immune system. Is this assumption wildly off?
As far as I'm aware, antibodies don't stick around after they're no longer needed... They're produced by B cells when an infection is detected, and after an initial infection, some B cells that learned how to make effective antibodies stick around in your body as "memory B cells" - these will produce the same antibodies again upon reinfection.
Counting antibodies a few years after a SARS infection doesn't seem like it would tell you much about immunity.
SARS-CoV-1 completely disappeared after two flu seasons and hasn't been seen in decades now.
This variant of CV is fairly infectious and makes some people very ill. It also kills a non-trivial percentage.
So the worst case is an incredibly dangerous virus that mutates every season. We'd have to get used to taking extreme measures, or losing around 1% of the population every year.
But the usual trend is for viruses to mutate in a less dangerous direction. And immunity isn't binary. It's more like molecular pattern matching with variable memory. So the population as a whole wouldn't be starting from scratch every season - any more than it does with colds or flu, even though they both mutate quickly.
Short term we're likely to have the equivalent of a few years of very bad flu seasons, and longer term that would settle down to a less dangerous cycle - still lethal for some people, but not a perpetual state of danger and crisis.
Or develop drugs to treat the people who become very sick (up to bilateral interstitial pneumonia) to avoid or reduce hospitalization. On the medium term this looks like a possibility (vaccines, if they work, would help long term). If that happens, I believe your scenario of a "less dangerous cycle" will likely materialize earlier. People would still get sick, but at least we'd be able to treat them.
This trend is for viruses that are in danger of killing their hosts before spreading.
This coronavirus is so infectious that it's nowhere near that. Hence it can even mutate into more lethal form without risking its ability to spread.
I am thankful that we do not have a global ground war in progress right now. I believe that political pressure to keep the healthy isolated on the front lines, with the sick going home to society -- this reverse version of containment -- was 1918 society selecting the more lethal mutations for increased reproduction.
From this standpoint, the herd immunity and flatten the curve approaches are no different. Both put severe versions of the mutated virus in an a hospital, which is an environment where eventually most hosts will have the virus, effectively deselecting virulence.
That said, not overwhelming hospitals probably means having more healthy doctors available for the virus to infect-- a slight selective pressure for virulence. This would be in contrast to herd immunity -- letting both a massive spike of people die along with doctors and then turning hospitals into simple pre-death, low-R_0 isolation wards.
The issue there though is that overwhelming hospitals via the herd immunity approach would decrease our ability to learn about the virus scientifically. Our ability to learn about pathogens and modify our behavior accordingly is probably our best hope for survival as a species, I think, so perhaps we should not overwhelm the hospitals with the herd immunity approach.
Which is great because that's the same thing everybody selfishly would like to do just to have access to healthcare when he needs it.
Everybody in the world seems to understand that except perhaps Boris Johnson.
People over ~50 have a ~50% chance of not showing symptoms, under 50 is ~10%. I wonder if there was a flu/cold epidemic 50 years ago that is causing the difference?
I know that some flus have different effects depending on age group due to cohort exposure decades ago.
Though it is a preprint, so could be all sorts of sampling reasons for that outcome.
That would be ridiculous if you get to millions of people infected, because that would effectively destroy all economic activity. Even during the 1918-1919 epidemic with high mortality rates people did not stop going to work. Our strategy to isolate ourselves is fine if it's short term but it can't continue more than a few months.
The productivity loss only happens when testing is inaccurate and entire communities are told to stay home for months just because it's hard to identify exactly who is coughing out germs each day.
However you're right that you can't maintain that long term, so what's the off-ramp? South Korea has proved you can do mass testing and tracking which, combined with voluntary and state-enforced control of movement, lets you keep infections at a low level. What I'm contending is that, if the situation is bad enough, all countries that can will implement similar controls, and those controls will a permanent situation, not a temporary one. People will still be able to go to work, just not if they're potentially sick or infectious.
So this will never work in the United States.
Snark aside, every time I ride a BART elevator with a pool of piss on the floor I wonder about this country. Somehow the idea of someone peeing without paying is so offensive that we would rather stand in piss than provide public facilities.
You can still go clubbing in Shanghai with certain restrictions.
But if we had a system such as this, we could have prevented the first patients from spreading it around, and so we wouldn't have had to have millions of people stay at home.
I imagine that within a few years of rolling this out, common colds might be a thing of the past, and overall worker productivity higher rather than lower.
Yeah, no thanks. Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.
So the idea is good - test people for something bad they will do - but the ability to test reliably for all the bad things is real low. I think we shall just stick to past crime not FutureCrime for now.
And honestly, using "bad authoritarian governments do bad things with good tools so we should not use those tools" does not make a good argument. it just means we need to double down on democracy.
As someone indicated in another comment, the proper way to do this is through personalized incentives and social encouragement, not through authoritarian state action.
However, that wasn't the primary idea in the OP, which was specifically about tracking and restricting people based on their test results.
In a world full of Covid19 mutations, some even more lethal than the current one you actually might need external authority to tell you if you can leave the house because you yourself will lack technology to asses the risks involved and your decision making even if you have the information might be very dangerous to other peoples freedoms.
You still might not want that because people's wants are not necessarily reasonable.
> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.
The authoritarian response of shutting everything down, locking people in their homes and instituting all-but-in-name-martial law seems like a massive lack of creativity to me. Plagues are not a new phenomenon. We can come up with better solutions - as Taiwan and Singapore seem to be doing. Throwing away the rights and benefits of a free society should be the last solution.
Obviously this is a massive violation of privacy...which is exactly the same issue.
But when you go to the doctor to confirm pregnancy you can be sure you'll be tracked, because it's easy and it's reasonable thing to do.
Your definition of reasonable seems to be pretty warped. The historical abuses of "this opinion is reasonable and scientific" are too heinous and numerous to even list. Thankfully we have (but still need more) consumer privacy laws.
Historical abuses are vast and many in all the fields of human culture. Proportionally to the power of given part of the culture. Abuses don't automatically make given thing completely worthless. Historical abuses are just things that we need to be on the lookout for.
Everyone should do the scientifically proven swab test every morning. The test has very strict requirements that were created by politicians and industry professionals working together! As it happens, only one company creates a rigorous enough test to fit the criteria. Thus every test is bought from said company. Is the test actually any good? Of course! Who has ever heard about bs being published as science before?
Yes, it can be. But you still should do what science says because relying on science is the only way you could make knowledge base decision, because science is the only way we actually know things.
If you decide to act other way to what science dictates and it leads to better outcome, then you were right by sheer luck and can't really claim that you made the right call. You made the wrong one which by sheer luck turned out well.
Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science. Should we believe them too, because they claim it's science? You can't verify every single thing whether it's "based on science" or not. You need to use heuristics and sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something different that ends up being the better way to do things than what science at the time entails. Taking away people's choice means that this happens a lot less.
As an aside, I would like to contest the idea that science is the only way we know things. Most science that ends up in practical use has a lot of handwaving of details in it. We describe some parts of it, but everything else is filled in by our instincts and knowledge. Few sciences are as pure as mathematics, where you can reason over things on paper without needing an extra assumed context. In most cases when science says we "know" something it is meant in a narrow context. We extrapolate based on that into other contexts and most of the time it works fine, but we often don't know.
I'm doing it for the feeling of freshness and believe it's good for me because of what I believe to know from science and personal expeirience about existence and influence of microorganisms.
I try to avoid putting qtips in my ears even though people are doing it because science says that it has higher probability of doing harm than good.
> Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science.
That doesn't make it science and you should base your decisions on science not things passed as science. You should use your critical faculties and knowledge of scientific process to tell what science is and what is not.
You definitely should verify every single thing that informs your decision proces if the decision you are about to make is an important one.
> ... Sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something different that ends up being the better way to do things than what science at the time entails.
Science offers heuristics to guide your decision process. If scientific heuristic exists and you are using your own instead, you are doing wrong (even if by chance it ends up well).
If there's no scientific heuristic for given problem ( you need to check! ) then by all means make up your own. You won't be wrong unless you make "let's ignore what science established" a part of your heuristic.
You'd be amazed how much of the things you consider instincts filling gaps in science was actually researched for very practical fields. A lot. When money is on the line people suddenly get very interested in actual reality and they do the research. Some of those instincts get confirmed, some get thoroughly debunked. There was no knowledge untill science properly investigated it. Just self propagating ideas, right or wrong.
If there exists a home test that can test you for dangerous infectious diseases, and you are forced to take that in the morning before you go out, then this is comparable to not being allowed to drive while under the influence.
I agree. The internet doesn't need to be a surveillance state dystopian nightmare, but the free market brought us that.
Checking if someone has the flu isn't dystopian. Full sick pay isn't dystopian. You don't even need the fine if that offends you so much.
A false negative (someone going about their day despite being infectious) is just the status quo, and has served us well for centuries.
We have a nice wooden fence that was (properly) built around/over the roots of a city-owner tree. The city later removed the tree and the fence now looked dumb where it had been trimmed around the roots. A neighbor stopped by and advised me that I should call the city and have them pay to replace that section of fence. Said it shouldn’t be my responsibility to pay for it. I asked her if she thought it was her responsibility to pay for it. “Of course not; that’s ridiculous!” “Well, that’s why I’m not asking the city to pay for it...”
That's a really dumb argument. I can list a thousand things where I shouldn't pay (all) of it, but I should pay (1/10000) of it as part of having the city pay for it.
You're playing a cheap rhetorical trick, not winning a real debate.
When employers suspect employees of fraud they will investigate. They can ask for a sick note but most do so only after a few days. Three days is customary. When a case is handed over to insurance, the insurance company will tend to involve its own doctors to assess the claim.
I don't understand the meaning of your story.
Easy to remember that there's no I in it, because the letters are the letters used in our DNA. (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine)
Everyone has access to those swabs, either for free, included with their health insurance plan, or at a marginal cost. It's not mandatory to use it every day, but there are incentives such as automatic sick pay and discounts on health insurance. On the other hand, there will be serious legal consequences if you test positive, decide to go to work anyway, and end up infecting other people. If it was your employer who told you to come in, your employer bears those consequences instead.
Money speaks louder than common sense. One of the reasons law exists is to tweak the incentive structure so that they align better with common sense.
We do need a better standard of privacy, though, than what South Korea is currently offering to the unfortunate souls who are infected. The tracking data is supposedly anonymized, but nobody gives any thought to the fact that anonymized data from multiple sources can be easily combined to de-anonymize them.
Until the first economic downturn, when the ruling party throws it all out the window, cuts taxes, and cuts interest rates. And the rich people will eat it up.
In the absence of heavy testing, broad quarantine seems to be effective.
The answer at this point seems to be heavy, widespread quarantine until testing infrastructure is sufficient to closely track every active case. Once that testing is in place, most quarantines can be lifted, and any second wave can be managed.
There are numerous promising treatments as well in development. HIV drugs, Ebola drugs, and Malaria drugs are all showing promise in pre-print research. If any of those pan out, it's likely that the mortality rate will go substantially down so long as we can suppress the spread until treatment infrastructure has scaled up.
Is it conceivable or (borderline) impossible?
We need to amplify some molecules and run a process called PCR on them for which you need a full lab setup. It would take nothing short of a revolution in detection to achieve this.
Where are you getting near infinite qualified and trained lab personnel from? Machines that can mostly automate the process cost $500k - $1m easily.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P-jaC3_d3o (Roche commercial!)
There is no other acceptable solution. Countries hoping to avoid the short-term economic cost of suppressing the virus will find themselves paying a greater economic cost over the long-term along with a massive cost in lives.
The question is now: which countries will adopt the correct approach before it's too late?
So the first attempt does not necessarily work. But I hope it does, and if not, I hope they quickly iterate to find one that does.
I've seen this said before; this is not considering correlation vs. causation. High per capita GDP correlates exceedingly well with technological and scientific mastery.
A global economic collapse would lead to some lives lost and be very painful, obviously. But if the economic damage is in the tourism industry or entertainment that will be far less damaging than if the food supply lines collapse or the oil stops flowing. One of those is inconvenient, the other would lead to militaries being deployed.
Also: there's this 'oh well' attitude afoot here in the UK that we can't enforce curfews etc. because the people won't have it. To this I say: we lock people up here for hurty words on the Internet. The only reason it can't happen is because some people in power don't want it to happen.
1. Working from home.
2. Ordering online and getting takeout.
3. Using self checkout.
4. Collaboration and socialization via phone and internet.
You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. People don't get sick due to some random number generator. You have to have a vector.
We already know a great many ways to disrupt the spread. The antidote to a global crisis is not a global solution. It's a local solution.
When Ebola was initially a problem, the epidemic was stopped by African tribal elders, not advanced Western medicine. They told their people "Don't go to the white man's hospital" because you would go for something fixable, like a broken leg, and die of Ebola.
They blockaded the roads and stopped letting outsiders in. They quarantined those who were infected and left food on the doorstep to take care of them.
If the food stopped disappearing, they burned the hut down.
We know a lot about how to stop this. What we currently lack is some means to get people to do all the basic stuff we already know works, like wash your hands, stop touching your face and don't lick your fingers to separate bags.
I'm disappointed in seeing this handwringing, angsting piece at number one. It's not really factual. It's someone being emotional.
It isn't 1918. We have vastly better technology and information these days.
We just have to deploy it and leverage it. This is mostly about shaping culture. The primary question is "How do you get people to voluntarily comply instead of blowing it off as usual?"
Here you go. This should be it.
I watched it just last night.
Annoyingly, this got disrupted in my area. I was hoping to do all ordering online instead of cherry picking some of the things like before. Unfortunately the shop is overrun by customers so all staff are busy. On top of that, because of many items are out of stock, online orders have been disabled. I'm really disappointed in those decisions - not only we have more people waiting in lines in the same area, you're not allowed to order even the fresh produce which is not missing. It changed a 5min pickup into 30min shopping + 15min checkout wait.
Meanwhile, their "pizza portal" sits completely unused. You could theoretically order online and pick up without interacting with anyone.
I suggested this on the local Reddit for my area. I got snarkily asked when I became the manager of the local Little Caesar's.
We have the technology. We just aren't using it to solve this.
We could.
Washing hands and not touching our faces will slow it down, not stop it. There are numerous recorded cases on transmission with no physical contact, and virus concentrations in throats and saliva are ridiculously high. This is an aerosol disease, you get it just by breathing and many of the masks out there aren't very effective against it. That's why so many health care workers are getting it. Yes we should do these things, but they won't solve the problem, only slow it down a bit and the guy writing that post knows it.
The problem isn't the short-term; the problem is the long term. Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives?
One of the biggest questions in this thread is specifically what kind of immunity we can have from the virus. If catching it gives you 10-year immunity, then slowing things down might work. But what if catching it only gives you a 6-month immunity? The only way to stop it would be for the entire world to manage be SARS-CoV-2 free at the same time. Otherwise, we're looking at a situation where the thing might just keep going around the world indefinitely.
Seems perfectly fine to me. Some essential jobs require manual skills but I think those can be organised to avoid most of the physical human contact.
Some can be phase out by more automation.
And we have so many inessential jobs in this economy that shedding them might be beneficial to us all.
Do we really need new snowboard clothes every season?
Really think hard about it; it's pretty easy to take a whole bunch of stuff for granted especially when you work in high-tech areas. I'm extremely fortunate that I can work from home, but what if my fridge breaks down or I just run out of milk and my Internet happens to be down?
Uber drivers are entirely other thing. Maybe driving people should be only allowed if you have a car that has completely separate spaces for the driver and the rider and where spece for the rider can be fully vented and disinfected after each rider, which maybe again should be mandatory.
A lot of people can't do their essential jobs remotely. But very few of them can't do those jobs not in groups and not in contact with other people.
The world before covid looked how it looked not out of necessity, but just because we didn't have to pay attention to some things.
Solitary confinement is a torture not because of the solitary part. It's because of the boredom part. How unpleasent do you think would be solitary confinement for nearly all people if it was done in a library with internet access and netflix account instead of small dark empty cell?
Touch could be also culturally restricted to closest family with ill effects milder than caused by mild infections you get through that, let alone ncov19.
Some human cultures are less touchy some more. All survive.
Chemical responses to anything less than touch are way less documented and I suspect easily replicated with good quality audio-video connection.
Historically, humans lived in small, close-knit family units or small villages. The human mind is optimized to deal with a social group of about 150 people, not a city of thousands.
A lot of our loneliness and similar problems could be largely resolved if we returned to a pattern of small, close-knit communities as our norm and we could improve germ control at the same time.
It's a general human norm that most cultures promote a long-term, monogamous relationship as the standard. Sex is vastly less dangerous if two people are only intimate with each other and neither of them sleeps around.
Reducing casual social contact in no way means we simply can't get our social needs met. It can mean the opposite. It can mean a return to meaningful social bonds instead of casual hookups from grinder.
No, of course not.
But some people who are especially vulnerable can work from home permanently.
We can permanently crack down on things like cashiers licking their fingers to help them open bags.
I have a compromised immune system. The gross behavior of cashiers is one of my single biggest headaches in life. If we recognized how critical a link they are in transmitting disease and took that threat seriously, I imagine people would generally be healthier.
We also can design public bathrooms without doors so you don't have to touch the handle. Walmart has that mastered.
We also can make it more the standard for public bathrooms to have no-touch technology, such as hand dryers and faucets that are motion activated.
We can permanently move to bowing instead of shaking hands. Several older cultures have such practices.
We can more widely adopt the practice of removing our shoes at the front door when we get home rather than tracking dirt all over the house. There are plenty of cultures that do that.
We can move away from wall-to-wall carpeting in most homes in the US. It is not the norm in other countries.
We can move to passive solar design and away from forced air HVAC systems.
I'm suggesting that this isn't a situation where we need to throw our hands up and just be resigned to it being utterly futile. There are many things we can do to reduce the transmission of disease without simply calling a halt to life. And for a professional scientist to suggest otherwise is basically being alarmist because they are stressed out or because the solutions don't fit their mental models of "just pop a pill" or whatever.
They are boring and a lot of them are basically the purview of what housewives historically did. And no one wants to admit housewives did anything of real value.
American culture acts like homemakers and full-time moms are losers and leeches and not actually contributing anything of real value to the economy. A charitable reading of that is that it's a blind spot and people just don't get it.
A less charitable reading is that it's misogynistic BS rooted in intentionally being disrespectful of women and of the value and importance of "women's work" and that people would literally rather die than admit that women's work has real value on par with what important men do, like doctors and scientists. And to whatever degree that is true, the world can now either get over its crap or die due to clinging to it.
A lot of people may die over that. Change tends to occur one funeral at a time because most people stubbornly cling to their ideas and refuse to change.
This can either be an age of enlightenment or a new dark age.
Ain't no big thing. We're all dust in the wind anyway. But the dark path is not the only option.
Including American and Canadian cultures. Every home I've been in across Canada and the northern US has practiced this. Granted, most of the many people I know are descendants of people from the nordic countries, but is it common for people to wear shoes in the house?
I associate the practice of removing shoes with Asian and Middle Eastern cultures.
Those all sound like good ideas[1]. But exactly how will those affect the R0 of the virus if we all keep going to the pub, and the club, and church, and the office, and schools, and concerts, and sporting events? Particularly if we ride the bus and the tube and trains and airplanes to get there?
Fundamentally, not enough to keep it from saturating the population at least once. And if immunity doesn't last long enough for it to die out after that, not enough to keep it from saturating the population over and over.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't do all the things you suggest. But simply slowing things down isn't our ultimate goal. Going back to some semblance or normalcy is our ultimate goal: Perhaps with tiles instead of carpet and bowing instead of shaking hands, sure, but not everyone holed up in their homes permanently. And towards that goal, there's not a clear path.
[1] Except for "move to passive solar design", which I didn't really understand.
It actually results in a more comfortable home and higher quality of life. It's more environmentally friendly. It's more sustainable. And it doesn't actively promote sick building syndrome.
Please note that Legionnaire's Disease was originally transmitted by the air conditioning system where it was growing. I hate forced air heat with a passion.
I currently live in a hundred year old building with a radiator in my unit and it's a huge improvement over most living arrangements I've ever had.
Normalcy:
For someone in the 1800s, there's absolutely nothing normal about airplane flights, much less for ordinary individuals. There's nothing normal about computers. There's nothing normal about the internet.
These things are all basically magic for someone from 150 years ago and we take it all for granted and feel like our lives are being utterly ruined if someone suggests we should maybe curtail our use.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis. I've made a lot of the changes I'm talking about.
I'm a social creature. I would love to have a "normal" life. The way I live didn't come naturally at all. It was a shotgun wedding.
But it was better than the way I had and I am no longer in constant, excruciating pain and I'm no longer on boat loads of drugs and I generally sleep better, I'm more productive and I'm happier.
I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the world's worship of some arbitrary concept of normal. Life routinely adapts or dies.
The people telling me that making permanent changes to our current lifestyle in order to not die is some unthinkable and harsh burden may well be among the dead in the near future. And the ones who remain can choose to adapt or die in the next round.
It doesn't much matter to me. I already live the life of a germaphobe thanks to my genetic disorder. And I long ago gave up on ever being taken seriously, cared about, etc. So I have enough anger, bitterness and baggage over the past decade of being treated terribly by the world at large that I will be perfectly happy to see some folks go and I've got a mental list of "Hey, universe, maybe you can make sure Coronavirus gets these people soon. Thanks."
But go ahead and cling desperately to your ideas about some "normal" life and how amazingly important that is. Maybe someone will mourn the loss of people doing that. But it won't be me.
You have a good day. This is probably not a conversation worth pursuing.
Very unlikely it happens. At some point people/countries will decide to take the risk rather than letting their own economies collapse (which is in the interest of absolutely no one, even the patients at risk).
The Spanish Flu accidentally had an inverted forcing function--we sent the worst cases back to their home countries which helped spread the most severe cases rather than the mildest.
For Covid-19, the cases most likely to spread are going to be the mildest. The worse you feel, the more likely you will pull yourself out of circulation. And, if you are obviously unwell, people are going to force you home.
If we are vigilant then the only thing that the virus might be pressure toward is having even longer asymptomatic spread and even higher survivability in the air and on the surfaces.
Threader's version (if you want to read it without ads and fake news recommendations): https://threader.app/thread/1238837158007447558
But if it leads to the collapse of monetary systems, the collapse of civil society, looting, rioting, the rise of nationalism, and WWIII that's most certainly going to lead more death and destruction than the virus itself.
It will cost us dearly but I wouldn't say it's going to lead to rioting and WW3. If anything, this is a global problem for which we need global solutions and not fucking nationalism merely 100 years after it already screwed our societies.
Let's hope that China will enforce prohibition of wild animal trade/use as much as possible. It's not in the CCPs interest to let that kind of instability rain down on it.
Could this mean that covid-19 is here to stay? Is it the new common cold, but more serious?
* Mao Zedong killed 40 to 80 million people during his rule after WW2, but "only" in China.
* 2-5 million died in the Second Congo Civil War between 1998-2003, but to a first approximation only Congo and its immediate neighbors even noticed.
* The US response to 9/11 killed around 500,000 people directly (war violence) and a lot more indirectly (health, economy, etc).
The direct death toll of COVID-19 is unlikely to get anywhere close to this, but the indirect economic impact will clearly be global and massive.
IMHO, we're already well into reorganization to a war economy in many countries, USA included. Meaning, truly exceptional circumstances where the status quo is suspended and different, urgent priorities are taken.
Also, at this rate I wouldn't be surprised if Trump tries to postpone the elections in November.
Even if the death toll is going to me more limited than other big events (we don't know that, though), it is absolutely massive and truly global.
As for the potential death toll, if half the world gets it and 2% of them die, we're looking at a 80 million death count.
Just multiply half of the world population by mortality rate of 1%.
40 to 80 million is absurdly large and just as fictitious as the numbers pushed in the "black book of communism".
This is a good article which dissects those numbers: https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-mil...
1) Post-WW2, most of the Eastern Hemisphere experienced famine and underemployment for a decade. (Britain had food ration coupons for 9 years afterwards.)
2) The Cold War was pretty scary and greatly impoverished the Eastern Bloc, Cuba, N. Vietnam and N. Korea. China had the Great Famine from 1959 - 1961, killing "tens of millions."
4) Polio was a scourge until vaccines were developed: 2 to 5 percent of children and up to 15 to 30 percent of adults die
5) USA has a serious crack and meth epidemic, and Russia lost a lot of men to vodka poisoning.
We'll see about Covid-19, but the next famine will dwarf it by 10x or 20x in total fatalities.
Famine due to global warfare is not localized, and each one listed had tens of millions of fatalities.
The Great Famine fails the "world" part.
Your first item is sort of arguable, but I'd say it's half not an event, and half not independent enough of WW2 to count.
This is probably the worst event since WW2, IMHO, yes. It is going to be as bad as the 1918 flu. Its effects will be more far-reaching. Unlike WW2, this will affect every single corner of the globe.
This will change society forever.
Economic deaths from both are huge.
But everyone seems to have forgotten HIV, which says a bit.
What do you mean exactly? If you mean locking people up in their homes for a whole year, I think this will have not only economic, but also deep social impacts.
In particular the latter is important IMO because not everyone can endure being basically closed in their homes for too long.
This is talk that really drives up any resistance against sensible health support. And the worst part, the resistance is more or less justified.
You don't even know yet if the quarantine worked. We currently have data from countries without it that don't fare any worse. 2 weeks incubation period probably makes the tool worthless, but we don't have any conclusions yet.
Let's talk about action against climate change now...
What do you mean exactly by "talk"? People have been "talking" about it for decades, what are you proposing or predicting will change now?
Starting with an overblown healthcare admin system in the US, IMHO, but also including less inflammatory non-essential things like yet another range of plastic toys and luxury perfumes and and and.
Essentially in this scenario, we should take this as an opportunity to prune all Bullshit Jobs [1] and focus on things securing social, mental, and healthcare subsistence.
Oh and maybe just don't move troops all around the planet to fuck up other people's place. It wasn't a good idea before, (both during the 1918 influenza wave and after that) and it's certainly not a good idea now. Save that money and manpower, put it to use for something constructive for a change.
There you go, I guess I just pissed on every holy cow this crowd has. You know where the downvote button is.
Maybe, but what do you do with people whose livelihood depend on those superfluous bullshit jobs?
Until we have a system that guarantees a right to life even if you do nothing productive, those busyworks are used to justify giving food, shelter and healthcare to those people.
There was the choice what to focus on, and we decided we wanted uncontrolled immigration. Fair choice, but the consequence is that UBI won't work anymore.
The US definitely has an immigration policy. Not to mention that no serious politician today (despite what some media outlets may claim) is running on a platform of open borders.
What are you referring to here?
I am certain that you know what I am referring to, but want to avoid a serious discussion by playing with technicalities. No thanks.
I live in a relatively small city on the island state of Tasmania, and am probably way behind on some aspects of global politics.
The US is notoriously complicated to gain entry to by legal means.
No, we didn't; US immigration is controlled both numerically and by qualities of immigrants. You may disagree with the choices of controls, but they absolutely exist.
For this crisis, people are saying, give $1000 to everyone... that money is mostly going to find its way into the pockets of already rich people, and/or those companies that should have collapsed because of bad planning, but now won't. Instead, you could legislate things like food stamps for everyone (with the government paying grocers directly, while at the same time ensuring the money isn't spent on shit like alcohol and cigarettes), and a few months of rent amnesty for everyone (including businesses) (it's not like houses will disappear if somebody doesn't pay the rent).
Either way, government money (ie. tax money) will be funnelled to, in your words, “already rich people”.
Your way is probably worse, because it forces governments to pick winners, which they are notoriously bad at doing.
This is being proposed where I live. I'm curious to know who, in this situation, pays the owners of the rental properties for the use of the house, for the expenses and maintenance, for the employees, plumbers, electricians, and contractors, etc. And what about lost profits due for the assumption of the risk of buying properties for the purpose of providing homes for people to live?
First, it is highly paternalistic to tell people what to spend money on.
Second, it takes a huge bureaucracy to manage and enforce controls. Folks still sell their food stamps.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/5416096...
Indeed, and that's kind-of the point: (1) you eliminate bullshit spending (on things like alcohol, tobacco, lottery) that many people are prone to do, but that they arguably shouldn't (to some extent, those products are "predatory"); (2) it provides a minimal standard (survival) yet incentivizes people to work (be productive) to increase their standard of living (e.g. to be able to buy alcohol); (3) avoids inflation, as only a very limited set of products would be affected by increased demand (in particular, not real estate, as "free" housing would only be available in government-owned real estate) that the government can plan in advance.
My prior is that "bureaucracy" can be reduced significantly with modern IT technologies.
How do you propose to prevent people acquiring drugs, and gambling?
Whose pockets do you think it's going to come out of, whether by taxes or inflation (which is a tax on holders of dollar denominated assets). It's just doing more work for other people along the way.
Well, if America just reversed the past 3 years of tax policy, that money would come out of the pockets of the top 1%, primarily. That's people earning more than $400k a year.
As it is, we are going backwards. The government is literally borrowing money now to give money back, in droves, to rich people, instead of to poorer and middle class people.
People prefer money to buy their own food over government-issued turnips.
Because my utility function isn't the same as yours, so outside of goods and services where there is strong reason to believe that the conditions do not exist for markets to work, it's better to provide people fungible currency and allow them to maximize their own utility function through purchasing decisions rather than have a centralized bureaucracy decide what they most need. Also because despite the aforementioned variability in utility functions, agency seems to pretty consistently be positively valued, so centrally imposed selection would be inefficient in utilitarian terms even if it perfectly reflected the recipients utility function before considering agency.
There is no debt. There's only the use of "debt" and "lending" as a thinly disguised pretext for feudal tribute used for political advantage.
If we don't work through this it's going to kill us as a species.
Doing strategically useful stuff that generates invention and opportunity instead of making plastic toys that end up in landfill is a different but not entirely unrelated problem.
The WW2 debt problem in the US was managed by roughly tripling the share of the economy taken in in taxes, not just growing the economy. Taxes aren't fixed.
> Going into debt is a big problem if it eats up all of your tax revenue to service it
It's a big problem if it eats up all of your productive output; tax revenue is an arbitrarily-adjustable figure.
OTOH, if your debt is denominated in your own currency, so is (in real terms) the debt itself.
IMHO, even as a recovering laissez-faire libertarian type, the real reason for those jobs is to create funnels of money to the top of society to make a very tiny fraction of the population obscenely wealthy. The bigger scale and the glitzier the funnel, the bigger the fountain of cash for the execs to splash around amongst them. Billionaires are a mathematical anomaly, and those busywork jobs are their payment for us not decapitating the bastards like it's 1789, coupled with an absolutely stunning propaganda blitz that hoodwinked us mere techie upper-middle classers into believing they earned it, deserved it, worked hard for it. It's a lie; a lifetime is not long enough to learn 120,000 lifetimes worth of wealth, and I don't give a shit how many warehouses or webpages your minions make.
(sorry, this whole thing isn't directed at you; more like the Bezoses of the world).
Give them work in production of things people need or delivering things people need.
> system that guarantees a right to life even if you do nothing productive
How could such a system work? Wouldn't that motivate everyone to stop being productive ?
Having more money isn't useful in this situation. You already get the essentials and can't buy non-essentials because they aren't being produced.
I understand the motivations for what you propose, but I do not see how it would work in practice before going into full-authoritarian mode.
I mean that with UBI you can fix the idiocy of creating real fake jobs to keep people busy, but you won't fix people wanting to buy silly things.
If the supply will be lower because people won't need to manufacture them to have an excuse to not starve to death, price of silly things will go up and that does wonders to people's wants for silly things.
"Militarism is the belief or the desire of a government or a people that a state should maintain a strong military capability and to use it aggressively to expand national interests and/or values."
If you keep your army at home you're not really using it aggressively to expand national interests.
Like it or not, the U.S. armed forces underpin the world's current economic system and its relative peace. The prosperity as a result of America's control is called Pax Americana [1].
Some might consider the U.S.' powers undesirable, but I'm not arguing in favor of the general desirability of Pax Americana here. I'm just saying: keep in mind that "keeping U.S. forces at home" and significant scaling back of the foundation of Pax Americana is not desirable from both an economic perspective (for nearly everyone) or military perspective (for probably everyone).
Don't get me wrong - Pax Americana will end at some point, but it's in the best interest for everyone that this will be a mostly gradual change. For all Americans or non-Americans, it's not desirable that the U.S. withdraws its global army for any reason, including this calamity [2].
-
[0]: Nukes aside, the United States army has the sheer striking force to obliterate any other armed force world wide. In a "U.S. versus the rest of the world combined" scenario, the U.S. would still have a good chance of winning.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana
[2]: Not the point of my post, but I don't believe this would even be a reasonable calamity for the U.S. to withdraw its armed forces for at all - outside of a small percentage of reshuffling things. Not playing down the trouble we're in at all, but we should also be making an effort to make a relative return to normalcy well within this year / within a couple of months. This is what's already being done in China.
Maybe that was the case before USA clearly displayed its military inaptitude in nearly every conflict it has chosen to involve itself with over the last decades.
People of the world now strongly suspect that USA military underpins peace no more than bullys presence underpins calmness in the playground.
The utter dominance of America's armed forces has achieved extraordinary peace and prosperity since World War II, since its dominance has prevented numerous smaller scale conflicts or new world wars. Me saying this isn't trying to diminish the terrible suffering that has happened in the world since World War II, but it's pointing out that historically speaking the suffering and stupidity should have been far worse.
The US armed forces don't embody peace in the slightest, but they do achieve it just by virtue of existing and being so dominant.
Does USA really prevented more wars since WWII than they caused?
Absolutely. This is not just my opinion, it's also the opinion of historians and geopolitical experts. And moreover, it has historical precedent. The Roman Empire's dominance also ushered in a period of peace and prosperity, coining the original term Pax Romana.
It might be a hard view to accept while having background knowledge of the suffering caused by US armed forces, and the stupidity and crimes committed. But that's just a lack of imagination of how much worse it could have been, and how much worse it was before WWII ended.
But I forgot already what my original point was. :-) I'll try to educate myself about historical evaluation of Pax Americana.
Do we know what nobody needs, for real? Sure, there might be some low-hanging fruit, but this seems like an area where Chesterton's fence would apply in spades, lest our judgments age as well as Rick Perry talking about the Department of Energy.
And there's also the fact that it's demand for non-essential things that employs the large portion of people who moved out of farming and other necessities because we got good enough at production that they didn't need to be there.
We might be able figure out how to fund productive things that incentives don't automatically align for, but this sounds trickier than it might seem at first glance.
Fashion, advertising. You probably know the few. Free market under covid pressure will tell us what was the unnecessary crap that was basically just excuse to pay people so they can live.
One concrete thing that will come into focus, especially in this US election year, is the healthcare system. If the virus overwhelms the capacity in the US, it will be constantly in the news. There's no better use of the attention than to have that debate about how healthcare should be done.
About the BS jobs, yes, there's undoubtedly a lot of those. I think the only way they go is if the crisis hits the economy so hard that many businesses collapse and are rebuilt, without those jobs. This would be a catastrophe for an awful lot of people. Now, one thing that might prove to be the difference between business going down and not is government intervention. So it's going to be interesting what level of aid is offered.
My sense is the government will try to save as many businesses as possible, not taking the chance to clean out the mess left from two decades of excessively cheap money.
Maybe this will help to introduce basic income and to finally part with the silly notion that to survive you need an excuse of having some job even if that job is manufacturing products and services people don't really need and tricking them into buying those.
On the other hand, I suspect heavily propagandised blinkers are even harder to shift during a crisis than in more stable times. Fearful people are driven to protect what they have, and are apt to react violently to do so. The "normal" global economy is a catastrophe, but we'll have to return to it (if such is possible) for some time at least.
https://www.loniya.org/storage/pdf/1535752644.pdf
It's an excellent introduction into the problems of capitalism for those not particularly interested in communism and just trying to get their feet wet.
Your comment would've been stronger without this line.
The bullshit jobs are mostly the good jobs right now. The travel, restaurant, and entertainment industries are filled with non-bullshit jobs that are going away in the next week.
In other words, you’re asking for half the world to get a different job.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
;)
No, in this theoretical ideal perfect world you are proposing we conjured into existence in a matter of months, they would take up productive jobs. So they would be going to work, meeting people, socialising and spreading the virus just as much as they were before. It's no the same problem.
I believe the argument is that UBI could be conjured in to existence.
$1,000 * 12 * 327,000,000,000 = $3,924,000,000,000
Collected US tax revenue for 2019 was $3.46 trillion. Even if you could afford it in terms of money, it still wouldn't change anything, because you still have the same amount of goods available.
UBI would for most people be offset by increases in payroll taxes, so for the majority it would be a small overall change in income, up for some and down for others, dramatically buffering the cost compared to your calculation.
Overall I'm a UBI skeptic, I don't see any way it could herald in a utopia of freedom some of it's proponents imagine. That's wishful thinking, but as an emergency measure to help people through a severe crisis like this it might make sense.
The “shit” nobody needs is the main point of living: music, art, science, sharing, pets; the crap you desire versus the essentials.
If we only got what we needed to survive (food, shelter) that would be a pointless and depressing life.
I don’t believe anybody is seriously arguing against any of those things.
The point of social distancing and quarantine measures now, is the choice between a hard time for the next few months, even to the point of it being "pointless and depressing"; and death.
I'm all for a Hayek/Friedman approach to the markets, but I think even they would consider above trivialities in comparison with things like a supportive family, spiritual nourishment, a shared culture, social stability, etc. etc. The market needs to be kept in perspective. If all of that (illusory) choice was vastly attenuated tomorrow, people would quickly adapt.
If I were a dictator, maybe I would think pets are pointless. Another person may think science is pointless.
I think the vast majority of what people want is wasteful, but who am I to tell others what their priorities should be?
And yet, Greta Thunberg.
This all started with black_puppydog's comment: > I don't agree with the conclusion. We can scale down our economies and still maintain production of essentials by ``drumroll`` scaling back shit that nobody needs.
Anybody whose life would be drastically worsened by having 10 different types of shampoo rather than x hundred needs help.
It will relase the capacity of people that are currently brainstorming how to cram their brand of shampoo into their customers homes instead of all the other brands.
Science is one of the essentials. Music and art can and should be done remotely. Pets are fine but if you need pretty vest for your dog this season you might make it yourself instead of paying amazon to force people to crowd by hundreds over sawing machines.
People are flexible with their behavior but they have pretty much innate level of happiness. You can feel as much happiness because of a roof that finally doesn't leak as from new marble patio.
Living in permanent social distancing, waiting to die from 3rd or 4th infection ... is not a humane way to live.
Think about the dense crowds on airports, for example. How many of those people actually have to use an airplane to get where they need to be? I bet a lot of those are flying to a business meeting that could have been a telco or a chat instead. Or if their job turns out to be a bullshit job, the meeting would be entirely pointless.
That's half of Silicon Valley gone then.
Shit, I actually worked at the kinds of jobs he calls "flunkies" as a temp, and it wasn't a big mystery to me what the jobs were for. When I had a temp job as a receptionist, my job was literally answering the phone. People would call, and I would answer. It did not require a Ph.D. in anthropology to figure out the function of the job, or why someone would pay me to do it.
Same with the job market: a lot of jobs are just fixing the damage done by other jobs, or implementing a distributed consensus algorithm through zero-sum competition. Every job is justifiable in terms of other jobs it serves, even though a whole lot of them could be pruned with no loss in value created for the society.
In utopia, we wouldn't need any lawyers. But we have lawyers now because we have disputes. Utopian planners always skip to the part where all the disputes are magically settled, or invent a mechanism only tested within their own minds. They leave the messy work of actually making working systems to the rest of us.
For instance, European countries have lawyers too, but they're not used or involved anywhere near as much as in the US. Societies there run fine without lawsuits as the default method of conflict resolution.
Or you can change one requirement and suddenly you can delete huge chunk of cruft because it no longer serves any useful function.
For the economy this requirement would be "You need to do any job anyone can be persuaded to pay for, to have an excuse to not to starve to death." If you mostly remove this requirement a lot of bullshit jobs will disappear just by removing work supply.
If you just mean that we should guarantee a certain level of income, like a UBI, then that will make no difference whatsoever for this question. We don't have lawyers and middle managers because otherwise they will starve, because those jobs pay more than any plausible minimum.
I'm advocating for paying people enough to not die even if they don't do any job.
And I'm not saying that it will immediately do away with all bullshit jobs. But I'm saying that it will reduce supply of work available to those jobs and it will broaden the choice for workers to choose more meaningful jobs by giving them safe harbor.
It's a pity, because your comment also makes some good points. But adding poison to the commons is more significant.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when commenting, we'd be grateful.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590987.
The good news is that this may be a cleansing fire that the US is long overdue for. By now some of you have undoubtedly realized that 2019ncov is not just a virus - it is a chaotic geopolitical force. It is changing the way we live in front of our eyes.
These are exciting times. There's your silver lining.
>Health and the economy are closely linked. The correlation between per-capita GDP and health (life expectancy) is essentially perfect. If the covid-19 pandemic leads to a global economy collapse, many more lives will be lost than covid-19 would ever be able to claim
I don't agree with his derivation, I think he's mixing correlation and causation a little, but his conclusion is undoubtedly correct.
> and have spent five years in a world class 'pandemic response modelling' unit
A pretty damming thing for the field of “pandemic response modeling”, but not really worth worrying about on its own.
My advice to the young people for whom this virus is not a major threat is ... Enjoy yourself, enjoy your time with your friends. There’s a chance that this virus could mutate to pose as much of a threat to young, healthy people as old, unhealthy ones (and ironically there’s a chance this whole quarantine thing might be of assistance, as OP carefully alludes to). That’s not a sci-fi disaster scenario, that’s just 1918, baby.
Governments really need to increase the penalties — meaning, jail time, huge fines, etc — on spreading misinformation on social media. That is as big of a problem as any during this time. And so-called “medical experts” on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, trying to validate themselves, are a large component of that. If we don’t get people to stop playing games online about this now, we are going to have a full-scale meltdown if this virus mutates later in the year.
Crowd control is a real fix for an epidemic. And while we don't know the details of the infection, we know enough to understand that we can't let it roam free.
Your advice to young people is horrible, and based on nothing. One of the things we don't know is whether there is any lasting damage in recovered patients. We don't know if the virus might mutate. The only safe thing to do is to avoid catching it, whether you are 80 or 20. Note that SARS left permanent damage in some recovered patients. Even without that, the death rate among less than 40 is similar to the flu in the entire population. This is all not to mention that young people have old relatives that may need their help, especially if they are to stay in isolation for extended periods of time.
And while fake news in the media is a problem, it is one of the last things that governments should be spending resources on at this time,especially as there have been no cases of breaking quarantine or isolation based on fake news.
>> The only safe thing to do is to avoid catching it
to
>> The only safe thing to do is to avoid spreading it
(And this is why young people need to take as much note as older people)