I am not a coronavirus alarmist. I believe that the mortality rate is lower than the 2% health experts are working off of, because I am assuming that many people are sick or have very mild symptoms and aren't reporting that they ill. However, I just learned that a 2% mortality rate could be roughly comparable to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919 (we just don't have very good data on 1919).
The stock markets are not rational actors, they never have been. But it's pretty clear that they are anticipating major disruptions to the global economy, and that seems a pretty safe bet. The incubation period for this virus is especially long, and people can be infectious without being noticeably sick. With the flu - a virus with a similarly contagious profile - you come into contact with the virus and you are sick within 1-4 days. With COViD-19, you can be infected for two weeks before showing symptoms. That massively increases the ability of the virus to break efforts to contain it. China - with all the levers and machinery of an authoritarian state - could not contain it; there is no way the US or Europe will be able to.
Right now, the CDC has 15 confirmed cases in the US. Given that long incubation period, that number is almost certain to grow. Where I am, in Connecticut, there are no reported cases. But there is one case in Massachusetts, and what's more, if there are cases in California, then it is in New York. If it is in NYC, it is in Connecticut. What's more, we go on spring break next Wednesday, and while the school has asked people not to travel abroad, that's neglecting the likelihood that it's already scattered amongst communities across the US that we don't even know about.
So, while I am not an alarmist, I'm concerned by what I see as a dangerous level of unpreparedness.
Despite the fact that teenagers seems uniquely able to survive this illness, schools will shut down. We live in a country with piss-poor family medical leave and employee sick days. People will come to work sick and infect others, meanwhile parents will struggle to take care of kids that are home from their closed schools. The double whammy of healthy people staying home and sick people coming to work will create disturbances that I don't think we are really prepared for.
What happens when we have an outbreak in a community like The Villages, with tens of thousands of elderly people with poor immune systems? How does the health infrastructure handle that? What happens when there starts to be runs on medicine, fueled more by panic as medical necessity? And of course, we have a president and an administration that is openly contemptuous of expertise and science. Putting Mike Pence in charge of a health crisis is like putting me in charge of the NY Ballet. I am aware that ballet exists, but I don't understand it, I'm not especially interested in it and I don't have the skill set to know where to begin.
Yes, it seems inevitable that Covid-19 will lead to a recession. This feeds into the global turbulence caused by Trump's trade wars and Brexit. It's a perfect storm of disruption to the global economy. Add in the rank incompetence that typifies the Trump administration, and it's difficult to see how this won't be terribly disruptive to the global economy and society.
Trump campaigned as an isolationist, America-Firster in 2016. It would be ironic if a microscopic virus from that globalized world is what destroys his presidency.
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