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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

> But in February, there wasn't any sign of an economic downturn. Everyone was enjoying the bull market.

First: I’m super sorry about what you’re going through and I hope things work out with your new employer.

Second: I worry that “nobody could have known” will be the narrative. A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode and that the prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse. Super uncontroversial. And like, I’m just a guy.

On an individual level, that excuse is unfortunate, but the individual level doesn’t matter much (except for the individual, of course). On an institutional and a governance level, we’re likely to excuse the failures of our leaders because we ourselves weren’t paying attention.

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>Second: I worry that “nobody could have known” will be the narrative. A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode and that the prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse. Super uncontroversial. And like, I’m just a guy.

Big same. I'm just another software engineer, albeit one with a taste for international news and a few China-focused specialists & one or two PRCs citizens that I follow on Twitter.

This was predictable in early-mid Jan. Once the pics and discussion of the overloaded Wuhan hospitals and the measures the PRC had to take hit the English language world, it was pretty bloody obvious. The news had hit the popular English language papers by Jan 27[1], although I was reading about it somewhat earlier - Jan 12 at the latest[2]. A timeline can be found in [3]. Anyway, by Feb 1, institutions with a specialty in disease control should have been going full bore to address the incoming wave.

Our public health officials, the officials they advise, and other health institutions should be held up to scrutiny and not covered with glory dust just because they had to act by the pace of events.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933719/Incredible-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/11/china-mystery-... [3] https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...

> A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode (...)

Your circles seem to be the exception then. There are a lot of factors that affect personal perception of such matters, like proximity to inflicted areas, professional background (ex: medical), experiencing similar events in the past, etc.

In hindsight it seems obvious that the world wasn't paying attention. But it took until February for western countries to realize the epidemic was already out of control, and the markets reacted.

> prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse

Anyone that knew this last month without a doubt could've made tons of money shorting positions in the stock market.

He's probably talking about the rationalist community, and people did.

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1233174331133284353

I assure you I am not talking about the aggressive curve-fitting community. Just...normal people. Nobody famous, not even any Chinese nationals. Just...fairly normal, if tech-worker-y, Americans and Europeans.

By and large, both the general public and organizations were caught by surprise. If most people knew, the stocks would have tanked in January, not these past few days.

Which brings an interesting question: how many of all the people you know who knew, yourself included, put their skin in the game and are now rich from the options they bought in January? If it is not many, I would argue it is better to say people suspected or feared, not that they knew.

It's a real big stretch from "certain enough to take personal precautions" to "is a stock head and wants to throw down puts". You get that normal people don't really give a damn about the stock market, yeah? Put a gun to my head and I can't tell you how a put works and I don't really care--I'm too busy buying a house.

I did, however, rebalance almost entirely out of stocks three weeks ago and while I am not "now rich", my portfolio is doing a hell of a lot better than most folks'.

Out of curiosity, do you have any plan when and why to go back in stocks? I'm currently 20% stocks (ETFs really), 5% bonds, 75% cash. I only plan to continue buying stocks and bonds every month, as usual (so, DCA).

https://www.capitalgroup.com/individual/planning/investing-f...

50% tends to be near enough the bottom for these kinds of things that that's when I'll rebalance my retirement fund. I'm going to keep my brokerage out longer as I have shorter-term needs for that money.

+1 to this. I'd been worrying since mid-late January, and aggressively telling people since early February that this was going to be bad... but even a week ago, tons of people that I talked to were thinking that this was such an overreaction and would blow over. Just couldn't believe it, even after seeing how it went in Italy, a majority of people said the US would never have that problem.

I didn't even know that a "put" on the stock market was a thing until last week, and am not particularly interested in figuring out how to do that... But I did back out of buying a car because I thought I'd be better off to have the cash when this gets bad, and here we are now in this thread... Maybe next time (hopefully there isn't one) I'll figure out more of what a "put" actually is and how to get one

I pretty much agree with you on this, my wife is a Doctor so I got to overhear a lot of calls where the CDC and the local Doctors/Hospitals and none of them saw this as obviously exploding into a pandemic. Rather they made decisions as it progressed.

That being said, I did take what I felt was a risk at the time and shorted Royal Caribbean and Carnival Cruise lines which payed off, but I was not certain that at the time it would (if I was I would have risked a whole lot more), I went off a hunch once I started seeing them close the ports to cruise ships. I am now buying those stocks because I think their hit from CORVID-19 is priced in, but we will see. It's all a guessing game on good hunches. Hardly anybody saw it exploding (short of the doctors on the ground in Wuhan) and everyone was hoping that it was going to be contained in China just like SARS was.

The reality is, Doctors and the CDC do not make decisions on news reports they make them on papers and data from people on the ground. That data was actively being suppressed to some extent by China until it was too late. Sure there where rouge Chinese doctors in the media warning us (and they where right), but that is a thin straw to base policy on. Once the true data was out and the CDC could base guideline on it, it was already too late.

Also to note I am sorry and pray for those of you that are affected by this.

Trump announced the China travel ban on Jan 31 - effective Feb 2nd - which was over 6 weeks ago. Even then he was called names and the "it's just the flu" mantra started. Huge segments of the world saw what was coming and started moving, most didn't move far enough fast enough.

Ref: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117403/trump-coronaviru...

Trump had no backup plan for when, not if, a case went undetected in the US. He didn't start stockpiling masks and ventilators until much later.

I agree. He didn't move far enough fast enough. The public's awareness and preparation was slowed by the media (NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, others) screaming "it's just the flu!" until just a couple weeks ago so most weren't prepared. :(

My comment was in response to people not realizing this was a thing a month ago.

I think it was other news organizations than the ones you listed that were the primary culprits in screaming "it's just the flu"

Read https://twitter.com/balajis starting early February and documented many of the posts. He was one of the earliest to call out their BS and anti-scientific agenda.

And then the House tried to remove Trump's travel ban: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/12/house-committee-vot...

You can play politics or you can look at reality.

That Politico article is about the travel ban involving Muslim countries, not China or any Asian country. Do you read your own sources?

Look at the date of the article very closely and realize that it covered all travel bans as noted in the subhead:

"The legislation would void all of Trump's executive actions establishing travel restrictions."

https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/fcdckgt368/econTabReport.pdf

page 9 Do you think the coronavirus epidemic is a national emergency? yes, democrats 81%; no, republicans 53%

page 18 Which cable news network do you watch the most? Democrats, 42% CNN, 48% MSNBC; Republicans, 89% Fox News

Trump himself has been downplaying it this whole time. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-statements-about-th...

A lot of this seems to be "I told you so". And yet, I have a hard time believing anybody could have foreseen an almost complete shutdown of the global economy over this. A lot of the "we saw that coming" can be boiled down to "it will be bad".

But even if you saw it coming, how does this help now? Right, it doesn't.

That someone's circles saw it coming doesn't help. Wht you can do now helps. Unfortunately a lot of these folks are lacking in that department IMHO.

SARS1 didn't have this effect. MERS didn't have this effect. And a number of other recent viruses didn't either.

But every time there were people "predicting" the worst. This time they were coindentially correct. Not because they "knew", but because chance.

My "circles" (which include a friend married to a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor who had been in Wuhan last October) knew that COVID-19 was possibly a serious concern, but also "knew" that it could have wound up as another SARS (not that SARS wasn't terrible, but it was also very localized in terms of overall impact).

I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago.

>I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago.

Good way of looking at it.

Maybe you should have told every single government in the world, because none predicted that it would have this huge of an impact. SARS1 pretty much stayed in China, MERS pretty much stayed in the Middle East. It was only when a country like Italy was caught by surprise that governments started to consider very far reaching measures.

Depending on the country and an observer’s cynicism, I think the majority of nations understood early on that it was already far too late to significantly dampen the impact of such a deadly and infectious virus.

The United States government was thoroughly informed of this risk via Operation Dark Winter but never geared up for it - perhaps this is best managed by states once the infection crosses the border, but preparations on those levels weren’t completed either.

It’s not possible to predict the future, so I disagree with your stance that it was obvious a virus could cause an economic downturn like this. It comes across as victim blaming to me.

If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms.

There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have.

My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.

2-4% is huge for a novel highly infectious disease. Our healthcare system is not prepared for that at all, without aggressive measures that's potential for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US.

Fully agreed - but I'm wondering why the solution has been less bars, not more temporary hospitals, ala China.

Temporary hospitals are being set up, but we simply don't have the capacity to build life–saving machines fast enough to handle the no-social distancing scenario. Neither did China, really.

Having live television feeds of people dying in the streets (like in Wuhan) would absolutely crater the economy and cause massive social unrest.

2% to 4% is the number of hospitalized people that die IF they get care.

If the health system is overrun, and there are zero ICU beds or ventilators available, that number will go up quickly. THAT is the problem we are trying to avoid.

The numbers matter here. Go up by how much?

Look at the difference between Italy's death rate and South Korea's.

Free market knew of this possibility, but pocketed the profits for shareholders instead of making investments to prepare. And the government didn't intervene. This is a culture problem. We weren't listening.

SARS experienced countries made very different decisions, over the past few months, and since 2003.

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