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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Fair, although I think we need to remember in difficult times like this that:

- 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.

View on HN

I'm 28, fit, physically active (bouldering / running / gym), no pre-conditions whatsoever, take vitamin D supplementation, I don't take any medication.

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.

Oh yeah, it'll be a bad cold. You may well have it now. By no means am I suggesting people run out there and hug the nearest stranger they see, but what I am suggesting, is they not panic. The numbers are in their favor. This could have been much, much worse.

To be clear, the evidence seems to be that your outcome is still in the minority of cases. Some unknown but double digit percentage experience no symptoms at all despite testing positive, another large proportion only experience upper respiratory symptoms and never get a lower respiratory infection or pneumonia, finally there are so called "mild" cases which I believe are "a bad flu." What these proportions are exactly is unclear, but it is clear that the vast vast majority people are not at risk of death. The data is unreliable and all over the place, but it's trending in this direction: in otherwise healthy people, this isn't particularly lethal.

I am not a doctor but you should probably get tested.

I cannot get tested. I live in the Netherlands and unless your case is serious enough that you either have very high fever or a great difficulty breathing, the official instructions are to not even call the health line, much less go to a hospital. I have friends in Portugal, Spain and Italy that have similar symptoms to mine and are home and doing the same because those are the official guidelines.

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.

That's too bad. We really need to ramp up PCR tests as well as begin serological studies (there is one I am ware of, and a product on the way.) Immediately. We will not get this under control if we don't. We need to know how fast it's spreading, where, and so on.

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.

Viruses do have treatments.

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...

>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.

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?

I was speculating about the role of Azithromycin though it appears another peer post mentioned something similar. The study was only 28 patients, open-label, non-randomized, 6 of which were asymptomatic. I think it's too early to say one way or the other, the N is really small on the study.

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.

Were you tested for regular bacterial pneumonia?

If not you most likely have the corona.

> Were you tested for regular bacterial pneumonia?

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.

An anecdote of my own: I am in my mid 30s and can run a 46 minute 10k and I have had what you describe twice in my life, both times probably caused by the flu. One of the times I had to get penicillin for the pneumonia the other time it resolved itself. You should not underestimate the influenza it can be pretty nasty for your lungs too.

Yes. But you'll live. You getting past it - as much as it sucks for you - lowers the overall threat. Now you're immune. The more we have lime you, the better off we are. We can't stop it. But the more immune there are the better.

Yeah my family and I were hit by a nasty, nasty, flu/cold. Just when we were done, covid hit.

We were hoping it was covid so we’d have immunity. My wife was just tested - no such luck.

This is interesting... I wonder if we're eventually going to see that this virus is worse for Italian/Spanish/Portuguese genetics. Italy has been hit super hard, New York (the most Italian ancestry in the US) is being hit hard. Just a hypothesis, don't everyone try to kill me at once, please.

Interesting hypothesis of course, I suspect it's because the outbreak was in Lombardy which is much older on average and has 3X the average number of comorbid conditions.

Italy as a whole has a higher proportion of elderly folks.

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.

Well, yes. You have 1 data point. How does that undermine what the OP said about an IFR of 0.5% or the average age of victims being 80?

More personal anecdata: I got pneumonia three years back. A couple of weeks beforehand I'd run a 12km that I'd trained for over the three months prior. Once cleared of pneumonia (after another couple of weeks) I was puffing just walking 100 metres.

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.

I'll jump into this anecdata thread too: used to by in the military, regular gym rat, but totally got my butt kicked by the swine flu a few years back (like ~2010-ish).

Never got sick, rarely a head cold, but this laid me out for a week.

> This will all be over in a few weeks.

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...

Edited to reflect it'll probably be a few months. 2020 will be spicy.

Which countries are closest to lifting the first lockdown? Italy is generating record death tolls every day but that could mean the pandemic will die down soon (pardon the phrasing.) I feel like that and Germany might see some improvement by the end of April, they've been taking things quite seriously.

China is in the process of lifting its lockdown right now. The total number of active cases is 5K out of a total of 81K. They are starting to let the healthy out of quarantine, re-opening tourist attractions and getting back to work.

So they claim. Anything out of China should be taken with a healthy pinch of skepticism.

Apple has re-opened Apple stores and factories there, while shutting down Apple stores everywhere else. No matter how you feel about the PRC there's no reason to doubt Tim Cook.

My coworkers in China confirm that people are gradually getting back to work, and I have no reason to doubt them.

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.

I'm still hoping for a slight acceleration of medical research and production when they get potential symptoms easing and actual vaccine. Enough to dampen the secondary waves.

For some young people, it might ressemble to a "bad cold", and some people might even be completely asymptomatic, HOWEVER:

- 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.

>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.

I said "during", and "focus". Right out stating to the world "oh my god the world is overreacting, this is not such a big deal, and the best opportunity in your life to get rich for completely abstract reasons" during the greatest pandemic people in huge parts of the world have every lived, while literally a billion people are more or less locked down, and in the thread commenting "The Plague", is, I don't know how to put it precisely, but lets say at least: "weird".

Some people are focusing on designing quickly mass-productible respirators, etc...

My dude, in a market, if there's no buyers, the price of equities becomes zero. If you want to help people preserve their net worth, what you want is more buyers. For the sellers, maybe they require the liquidity to pay for essentials? It doesn't matter. What matters is that if nobody is buying their shares are worthless.

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.

Not to mention we have designs for ventilators. Companies have been making them for almost 100 years -- the first one was made in 1928. All we need to do is have the government tell the companies to do so. New designs are not required.

>Some people are focusing on designing quickly mass-productible respirators

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.

> - in France 50% of ICU patients are under 60

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?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm

>We don't halt the world for "bad colds".

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.

We don't usually call a disease that can easily evolve to pneumonie "a cold". And your focus on the supposedly low lethality is misplaced. Way more people need a stay in an hospital (sometimes short). This disease has the power to double (or even worse) the mortality rate of industrialized country during months or even years.

That some people are even asymptomatic is not even a particularly good news IMO. It will just spread more because of that...

I am personally 100% on board with halting the economy to fight COVID-19, but your are factually incorrect. The influenza is often called "a cold" and it does cause pneumonia. I have gotten pneumonia most likely from it and so have several people I know.

>We don't usually call a disease that can easily evolve to pneumonie "a cold".

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.

I think the pandemic is really pulling the mask off in that it neatly sorts out the kind of people who worry about vulnerable people, the elderly and not overwhelming the healthcare system so that more could live on one hand, and the kind of people who worry first and foremost about "the economy", and whatever imaginary deaths a recession could entail based on some abstract sleight-of-hand reasoning.

You're putting words into my mouth. And I really don't appreciate it. In fact, I think that our focus should be directly on the at risk population. I think we should do more to protect them and provide a whole host of interventions and services. I think we can do that without causing a depression; Remember, the effects of economic downturns affect every single aspect of peoples lives including their health. If we do this wrong even more people may die or have significant, long lasting, hardship because of an ill-considered and potentially unnecessary intervention.

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.

I didn't specifically have you in mind and I'm sorry I made you feel that way

>in France 50% of ICU patients are under 60

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.

Indeed. They could all be 45-to-55 year olds.

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).

> in France 50% of ICU patients are under 60

But you have no idea how many are infected and will never see a hospital or even a doctor.

... or will never need to.

Yeah, exactly. With the current numbers where only a handful people are tested, it is really hard to see what is going on.

> 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.

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.

Depends, as always, on how much your worst case is priced in. Over the last month or two, Lyft is down 70%. The company is not intrinsically worth 70% less than it was the Friday before last. Does that mean it's a good company? Who knows, maybe not. Can it fall more? Sure. Does it have a big cash position to weather this storm? Yeah I mean it's got $3.3B-ish on hand and doesn't have to pay drivers when nobody's taking rides because they're contractors. Just like Uber [1] and their $6B bank account [2]. And Square with their $2B bank account [3]. At this point Square is trading at 7X cash on hand. UBER at 6X cash on hand. That makes them better capitalized than your Wells Fargo savings account with a fractional reserve rate of 10:1.

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-...

To not downplay the severity of the virus, even if a young person were to recover from Covid-19, s/he may experience reduced lung capacity for several years. There are many sources online based on SARS and here's one:

https://thorax.bmj.com/content/60/5/401

based on SARS is not useful. Until we get COVID-19 specific data that means nothing. 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronoaviridae and that very much doesn't cause these problems. Just because you see something in SARS-COV-1 doesn't mean you'll see it in SARS-COV-2. SARS-COV-1 has a fatality rate of 15% overall and 50% in over-65s [1] and MERS have death rates approaching 35% [2].

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...

[2] https://www.who.int/emergencies/mers-cov/en/

If this is true, then things like FlattenTheCurve are the wrong approach. We would need StopThatShit asap.

> if this is true

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.

"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"

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.

> 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?

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.

My mistake. I misinterpreted the wording as being a modifier of the range on SARS-CoV-2. The rest of my comment stands.

Though 0.5% is 2 order of magnitude less than 50%. Not to mention that the plague had a mortality rate between 1 - 15%...

Wikipedia puts bubonic plague at 30-90% if untreated and 10% with treatment [1] and septicemic plague at 100% [2] when untreated. You really don't want a Yersinia pestis infection. I think that's a fair comparison as at this point we don't have a treatment for COVID-19. It's not clear to what extent hydroxychloroquin kills SARS-COV-2 vs. modulating the immune system and preventing cytokine storm. I do understand your point, and I could have been more clear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague

[2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/rxforsurvival/series/diseases/plagu...

Is it possible to guess past plagues asymptomatic carriers? The death rate might be actually lower if there were asymptomatic spreaders too.

How much of the extremely old mean death age do you think is caused by burdened hospitals turning away certain age groups. If it gets bad enough hospitals here in the US will create rules to turn away people over a certain age.

Figure 2 in the CDC write-up indicates they account for a much larger fraction of the hospital admissions, though a much lower fraction of them require ICU admission, and a much lower fraction of them die [1]. This aligns with Korea [2]. The funnel is much, much less forgiving to the aged.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105088/south-korea-coro...

Do we know for sure that people are immune after getting it once? A lot of the downplaying rests on that assumption but I haven't seen anything that says we know that's the case.

Do we know of any viruses that we don't develop immunity to? (I don't know either way). I'm guessing that if we've never encountered a virus like that, then the occasional person we've heard that "got it again" might be just a false positive, one of the two testing times.

They know for sure, but they don't know for sure how long the immunity lasts. For some people at least, it doesn't last very long.

And the virus is mutating.

[citation needed].

I'm not saying it can't I'm just saying it hasn't yet.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/coronavirus-no...

Here is a nice picture with all the mutations and how they (most likely) relate to each other: https://nextstrain.org/ncov

The article isn’t about literal similarities between the bubonic plague and the Coronavirus.

Sure, the book is most commonly attributed to being an allegory about Nazi occupied France. As there isn't a Nazi invasion going on I assumed people were taking it more literally than they were allegorically. And if you're going to take it literally, contextual information matters.

Swing and a miss. What’s this got to do with Camus?

Good, refreshing perspective! How do you think we will get out of the lock downs? That’s my biggest concern right now. The restrictions are getting worse and worse and we are suffocating many businesses. I fear the repercussions are greater than the effect on the curve flattness.

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