Atlantic: There are THREE ways the pandemic could play out.
Atlantic: Ok, the FOUR ways the pandemic could play out are…
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The only way to slow this down is a total worldwide ‘shelter in place’ order, with governments spending lots of money to keep everyone safe. But politicians are too spineless or trapped in their partisan economic ideas to do that (and many countries don’t have the power or money to do that.) So the third option is the most likely. All our lives are on hold now, whatever plans we were making for the coming year are gone.
This is a wake-up call. COVID-19 won’t be the first global pandemic (in fact it’s not-- see: black plague) and there will be a lot more global threats (asteroid, global warming, megavolcano, magnetic pole-switching-- all of these are possibilities.)
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For the Gen C cohort, I propose the birth year be moved back to 2017.
If you were three years or younger when the pandemic played out, it’s not going to be something you remember directly, but something your parents tell you about that “happened when you were a baby.”
To wit: I was barely a year old when the Cuban Missile Crisis played out, but that event informed my upbringing.
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Imagine what would have happened if we would have had bold leadership which made testing the highest national priority, closed the boarders, sheltered everyone in place for two weeks, then did 100% testing and quarantined everyone who tested positive until they were no longer contagious.
In February.
Essentially everyone would be back at work now. We’d be supplying the rest of the world with supplies, our economy would be booming.
The economy isn’t cratering because the virus. it’s cratering because our milquetoast management at the federal level isn’t providing any confidence that things will get back to relatively normal anytime soon.
(Blooper reel: my auto-correct wanted to change “Federal” to “deferred”. That is exceptionally accurate and insightful! 
)
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From the article:
Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”
“Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated” pretty much describes every aspect of the executive branch since January 2017
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Why imagine ?
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I’d been wondering about this myself. I have a box of items ready to be donated, but all the charity shops (UK) are shut as far as I am aware (they certainly should be). When (when?) they all re-open, how are they going to deal with donations for the foreseeable future? I buy most of my clothes secondhand, and although I’m not likely to be in need of anything new (to me) anytime soon…it makes me wonder what the future holds for the whole sector. It has the potential for massive impact on the incomes of many charities, plus is going to hurt a lot of low income people when they cannot buy secondhand goods as normal.
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NO ONE expects the pandemic! Fetch me the comfy chair!!
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Dream on. In February the public would not have supported that kind of measures anywhere, and especially not in the US.
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I’ll see your Randal Munroe and raise you a Douglas Adams
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I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
sounds about right. funny that it sort of works with pandemics and climate change as well…
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Expat in New Zealand here:
New Zealand is doing just that. (Although we’re not doing 100% testing, just those who show symptoms or were exposed). We’re on lockdown fo four weeks. The bailout package is 4% of our GDP and includes money for people who can’t work. Also your mortgage payments can be deferred without penalty and you can’t be evicted from a rental for non payment for 6 months.
Here’s the thing: no one is complaining. No one is saying “this is just Labor Party (current goverment) scaring people”. No one is saying “mah freedums”. No one is saying “let’s sacrifice Grandma to save the economy”
Not here to gloat. I am truly saddened to see the wilful ignorance going on in the US.
(so fooooooookin’ glad I moved here in 2005)
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That’s why we have experts, and an executive who is supposed to listen to those experts, and then is supposed to implement policies to to protect people from their own worst impulses, even if it is unpopular. A very public message saying, “we’re doing this to protect the lives of tens of millions of Americans” would have gone a long way.
Instead we’ve got an executive who can’t protect himself from his own worst impulses, and would literally sell one of his own kidneys to be liked just a little more.
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AMONG the possibilities are…
I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but there was no expert consensus for what you describe in Europe or US in February.
We still have not enough data to understand what’s going on. What leads to increased excess mortality of coronavirus in some places may very well be a combination of a broken health system (Italy, US, Spain), air pollution (northern Italy and Hubei province), which leads to respiratory diseases, and several other factors.
Experts knew about these things before coronavirus, but zero fucks were given by politicians.
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Your last sentence contradicts your first sentence. Epidemiologists knew what to do as soon as China started reporting serious numbers. The President and Congress were briefed on the seriousness in January.
Data should be used to back off from the most restrictive measures, if indicated, not implement more restrictive measures two weeks too late for them to do any good. It’s not rocket science.
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would literally sell one (or many) of his own children’s kidneys to be liked just a little more. FTFY [you don’t really think he’d sell his own, do you? He needs them!]
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