What we can learn from Camus’s “The Plague”
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I could very much feel the loss of agency the characters had to endure, because computers were my whole world back then.
“The Plague” is typically read as an allegory of the French resistance to the Nazi invasion and occupation of France, and an analysis of the relationship that humans have with authoritarianism, fascism, and how we can either help or hurt each other in times of crisis. Camus was also a humanist and believed that people were more good than evil (which he comments on in “The Plague”).
Source: I got my university degree in Philosophy and Camus was my main subject of interest/study for a number of years (and continues to be even now).
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
- The plague killed 50-100% of people who got it depending on which kind of plague you got (bubonic, pneumonic or septicemic) whereas while nCoV rates are still TBD we're probably looking at an upper bound closer to half a percent, or 3-4 order of magnitude lower.
- The average age of folks who've died of nCoV so far in Italy is 80 and in China the mid-high 70s.
- The plague took everyone whereas the young and healthy are effectively going to get a (sometimes very, very) bad cold out of nCoV. The younger they are, the less affected. I think out of the hundreds of thousands of cases we know about so far only a single child has died -- and they had serious medical conditions going in. Currently the CFR in Korea and in the USA for people under 30 is less than 0.1%.
Perspective matters. It's easy to get swept up in the panic going on right now. Don't panic. Do listen to authorities and generally keep away from other folks. This will all be over in a few months. We'll mostly all get it, we'll overwhelmingly recover, and become immune. Chances are this is going to become one of the endemic viruses that shows up every year from now on.
As panic sets in, if you've got some cash to invest in the markets and a long time horizon to draw on it, this may be the money making opportunity of a generation.
Not likely.
Many countries are still weeks away from the virus reaching the "oh-shit" numbers, effective lockdowns take weeks more, and then the whole thing is likely to reoccur at least once or twice in most places.
This is going to make the entire year 2020 spicier than we would all like...
The procedure seems quite interesting: Instead of lifting quarantine for everyone at once, the return to work is rolled out slowly (some %age of workers return the first day, some more the next day), so the situation can be monitored.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105088/south-korea-coro...
I'm going through a nasty pneumonia that hurts my lungs just breathing and I've never had something like this before. I get tired just walking around, whereas 2 weeks ago I did a 40 minute 10k. Take that anecdata as you will, but if you can protect yourself, do.
So when you say it's just a "bad cold", I chuckle a bit. What's going to happen to the millions of overweight, high blood pressure / diabetic Americans? Sure don't panic, but be safe.
I am not a doctor but you should probably get tested.
I agree with these guidelines, the phone lines and hospitals should be open for people who are at risk of dying. But that means that the numbers you're looking at are barely the tip of the iceberg for a lot of these european countries.
It is clear that in some ways our hands are tied on testing, but a case like yours at this time knowing if you have it or not could affect your course of treatment.
There aren't as many as for bacteria, for a number of reasons including that viruses don't really clearly fall into "alive" or "dead" in the same way. They hijack your cellular machinery to produce more of themselves but they're not much more than a strand of genetic code wrapped in a bundle. It's hard to say they're more alive than any computer virus.
However, we've studied the way in which viruses do this hijacking and are able to disrupt the process, for instance by blocking their mechanism of entering cells, by blocking their mechanism of exiting cells or by disrupting their ability to replicate their genetic information.
There are even some (albeit new) broad-spectrum antiviral medications such as Remdesivir which was explored in COVID-19. It does work, well even, though as the COVID-19 infection is primarily in the lungs it's difficult to establish a sufficient concentration to be hugely effective.
Hydroxycholorquine is interesting [1] both as an anti-inflammatory and immune modulator. The Azithromycin probably does nothing against nCoV-2 but may well help control secondary infection.
[1] https://watermark.silverchair.com/ciaa237.pdf?token=AQECAHi2...
I had no clarity as to why azithromycin had improved the outcomes in that study to 100% of those treated with it, when HCQ didn't. That's very interesting.
Maybe you could clarify something else for me. Is there any information about whether these two drugs together could function as a prophylactic, or is this something patients have to be administered at the beginning of symptoms, or is this something that can be done late in the course of the disease?
It could easily have been that some patients in the study developed bacterial pneumonia secondary to their COVID-19 and the azithromycin treated it. Much too early to say.
> Maybe you could clarify something else for me. Is there any information about whether these two drugs together could function as a prophylactic, or is this something patients have to be administered at the beginning of symptoms, or is this something that can be done late in the course of the disease?
Wish I knew, seems to be something we'll hear more about in the near term given the interest in studying it. From what I read it works best in early stages of disease and not as well later on. While not side-effect free, they're pretty highly targeted.
If not you most likely have the corona.
IIRC, that's not incompatible with having a COVID-19 infection.
https://www.consumerreports.org/coronavirus/understanding-pn... (first google link I found):
https://www.consumerreports.org/coronavirus/understanding-pn...
> For instance, viruses can cause pneumonia directly. But in some cases, if a viral respiratory infection is severe enough, it can damage the lungs and leave them vulnerable to a secondary infection: bacterial pneumonia. This is common with flu, though scientists aren’t exactly sure how often it occurs.
We were hoping it was covid so we’d have immunity. My wife was just tested - no such luck.
Also a lot of Italy and Spain have adults who tend to live at home or with (older) family, which also makes it far easier to expose them on an individual basis.
And apparently, once you've had pneumonia, you're more susceptible to get it again.
Something that didn't particularly help in my case was that I was prescribed an antibiotic that helps against "most" pneumonia causing bugs, but my pneumonia was actually caused by one of the less common bugs. Once put on the right antibiotic I felt much better within a day - after making no progress for two to three days on the original one.
Pneumonia is no joke.
Never got sick, rarely a head cold, but this laid me out for a week.
- in France 50% of ICU patients are under 60
- this is really the wrong message to pass
- for some people around 30 this more closely resemble to a very bad flu, with extra bonus symptoms
- you are not getting very accurate numbers from Italy right now: only people dying in an hospital are counted, but some are dying at home (the symptoms are very fast evolving at the end, and the medical system is surcharged)
Now I don't discuss that for probably at least 98% of contaminated, (and maybe even more), they will live. But this is certainly not a bad cold, by any fucking standard. For anybody.
We don't halt the world for "bad colds".
> As panic sets in, if you've got some cash to invest in the markets and a long time horizon to draw on it, this may be the money making opportunity of a generation.
Most people have other preoccupations; but if you want to be seen as are seen the people who made a fortune during 9/11, by all means focus on that.
Hopefully nobody looks poorly on the people who bought stock after 9/11, if it wasn't for them the market would never have gone back up.
Some people are focusing on designing quickly mass-productible respirators, etc...
The people focusing on mass-producing ventilators are likely in China where the quarantine is in the process of being lifted as they have resolved the situation.
It only takes a couple seconds to buy an index-tracking ETF on your phone these days, I don't think this optimism is competing for time with ventilator production.
Likely because there are more people under 60 than over 60 who are alive in general -- that's the shape of the population curve, and 50-59 are pretty heavily affected too. The CDC data is probably a good place to start looking [1] as it aligns with other world health data. Even if 60+ are affected 2X as much as 50-59, if there are 10X as many 50-59s in the population then that number doesn't mean much. We need to see the curves.
> - for some people around 30 this more closely resemble to a very bad flu, with extra bonus symptoms
For the vast majority, yes.
> Most people have other preoccupations; but if you want to be seen as are seen the people who made a fortune during 9/11, by all means focus on that.
No, I want to be seen as someone who made a fortune during 2008. In order for someone sell their equity positions, there must by definition be a buyer. People who are panic selling would be far worse off if there were no buyers on the other side of those transactions. The price would then be $0. Perhaps they need the liquidity more than I do? To pay for necessities?
No we typically don't. But in this case we may have. The science is beginning to point to the fact that this virus is not particularly lethal, but it is extremely contagious with an R0 of at least 2. That's where the danger lies -- if this was the plague and more than half of people who got it died our response should be what China did or perhaps significantly stronger than that. But there may be better options that don't doom an entire generation to an economic depression and its manifold consequences (which in and of themselves, in the long run, could kill more people than this disease ever will.) in the case where the disease itself is not particularly lethal.
The lockdown stuff that has economic consequences is speculated to need to last as long as 18 months! Even two months will cause untold damage that will have knock on effects for years, perhaps decades. We didn't even recover from 2007 before this latest downturn and the effects have rippled through our society touching everything, including suicides.
That some people are even asymptomatic is not even a particularly good news IMO. It will just spread more because of that...
That's not true. Just not true. Colds and influenza regularly proceed to pnemonia or long lasting secondary lower respiratory infections, especially in the elderly but also in the young and healthy.
>Way more people need a stay in an hospital (sometimes short).
No that isn't clear at all. The current understanding is that because the infectivity is so high the proportion of cases that are serious come in many times faster than other respiratory viruses, and on TOP of other respiratory illnesses.
>This disease as the power to double (or even worse) the mortality rate of industrialized country during months or even years.
That's potentially true, but it isn't necessarily true. The excess mortality of this disease -- it is plausible and it can be sensibly argued, may not be that high. That is because it is killing, in general, those who are already ill. In Italy 88% of those who have died had one or more serious commodities such as heart disease, and that is on top of the fact that the median age of death is currently 81 (median case age 63.) An unknown but potentially high proportion of these deaths may have happened in the next two years anyway. So at the end of this the excess mortality rates may not be anywhere close to double amortized over two years, and consequently in two years we might see a drop in general mortality rates as a result (if this illness does end up infecting >50% of the population as some leaders have seen fit to say.
>That some people are even asymptomatic is not even a particularly good news IMO. It will just spread more because of that...
It is good news, definitely. Because it means that we don't need to worry about most people. We need to worry about those at high risk. We may be able to get through this by focusing on isolating, social distancing, and providing at home resource for those at significant risk. Such a strategy, if properly done, could even be used to allow the illness to travel through the otherwise not vulnerable population creating herd immunity which will allow those at risk to come out of quarantine earlier.
Read through my profile to find what I've said to this end, I don't feel like giving you any more of my time after you've not given me the benefit of the doubt and basically called me inhumane.
This number is meaningless without knowing the age distribution of infections. If many more young people are infected than old people, we'd expect the absolute number of young people hospitalized to be higher, even if old people are way more likely to require hospitalization.
Or patients with other co-morbid issues or who are immuno-compromised.
Or of under-60 group most of them are homeless and haven't eaten much the past few months (plus sleeping rough in the winter).
But you have no idea how many are infected and will never see a hospital or even a doctor.
This is incredible. Not only do you start with an "upper bound" less than one-half the accepted value, you then toss in a "3-4 order of magnitude" reduction, which is so fantastically impossible that there has clearly been zero actual thought. Just rhetoric. Elon Musk, is that you?
Actual medial professionals are seeing that even tiny spread in a community the healthcare system becomes absolutely overwhelmed. Hence all of the emergency declarations. The Internet intelligentsia would like us all to believe that millions are walking around with it, and the fact that you can trace individual branches and the horrifying results is just a remarkable coincidence happening throughout the globe.
No, this isn't the plague. At the same time anyone who seriously compares this virus to the cold has started in a completely broken, intellectually dishonest and dangerous place. Add that to the silly claims about death rates...
As to investment opportunities, this is an incredibly lazy, zero-value observation -- yes, in the future the market will grow. Nobody thinks otherwise. But right now the market has lost some 35% off a frothy, already-in-danger high, and ahead of us are heroic government responses and a lot of economic disruption. But yeah, at some point it's going to hit bottom, and if someone is willing to churn on limited returns for a while it'll eventually pay off. You could say that in every downturn throughout history.
3-4 orders of magnitude lower than the plague which has an upper bound fatality of 100%. That's not controversial. 3-4 order of magnitude lower than 100% is 0.01 to 0.9%, a range very much in line with your suggestion and that of health officials.
Though 0.5% is 2 order of magnitude less than 50%. Not to mention that the plague had a mortality rate between 1 - 15%...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/rxforsurvival/series/diseases/plagu...
Until we see actual reports of this in the wild directly attributable to SARS-COV-2 we shouldn't really extrapolate. Otherwise it's as useful as saying "based on the fact 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronaviridae, get out there and have fun" or "based on the fact MERS and SARS-COV-2 are both coronaviridae 35% of people are going to die."
[1] http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/05/estimates...
No evidence at all yet.
> then things like FlattenTheCurve are the wrong approach...
#FlattenTheCurve is an acquiescence that everyone's going to get it, they just want to slow it down.
> We would need StopThatShit asap.
If that were possible at this point that would be plan of record, it's not.
I'm not saying it can't I'm just saying it hasn't yet.
See also: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/mutations-can-reveal...
If you think prices are dropping strictly because of covid-19 you're wildly misunderstanding the situation. If you buy now thinking it's low I am quite certain you will lose quite a lot of money.
~20% of the work force is unemployed or at reduced time right now. Goldman Sachs estimates we might see ~2 million people file for unemployment Monday. These are the most vulnerable parts of the population. They're going to lose health insurance, struggle to pay rent, struggle to eat... and we haven't even seen the pandemic warm up in the US yet.
Next will be people at companies whose stock just completely crashed losing their jobs. It will take a month, but when shares drop companies must act by increasing share holder value, which will mean letting people go.
All of this will have severe consequences for the national and global economy, consequences that will just start to be felt once people stop being sick. If this thing magically disappeared tonight you would probably still see a few of your favorite local restaurants disappear forever. And again, this is literally just the beginning.
This isn't happening just because of an unfortunate natural disaster but because the US (and many other countries) have systematic vulnerabilities that make them unable to deal with a situation like this. The world after covid-19 dies down will be wildly different than today. This could very well be the end of US hegemony as we see countries like China, that can deal with these problems, start to rise to become the new global super power.
The best case is looking bad and the worst case is unimaginable. The idea that you can simply "buy at the bottom" and make it rich very wrong.
Plenty of very solid companies are now trading at 30% of what they were a month ago with massive warchests. To say that hasn't priced in a few quarters of negative growth is a bit of a stretch isn't it?
As for indices, well, not all companies stand to get burnt by this downturn. Have you seen the lines at Target and Walmart? As some S&P components go down others go up. That's the raison d'etre of ETFs. Plenty of companies do well as others do poorly.
> The idea that you can simply "buy at the bottom" and make it rich very wrong.
Of course picking the bottom is the hard part but even if you're off by a bit on either side, with a sufficient time horizon, these prices are mouth-watering.
Or should I just wait and buy at the next top? ;) I'd argue the idea that you can wait for it to recover before investing in hopes you become rich to be very wrong.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-gets-an-upgrade-at-we...
[2] https://www.pymnts.com/news/ridesharing/2020/uber-sees-cash-...