Yet hardly a pandemic makes these things happen. It doesn't happen with lightning speed. And this is the time we are at peak hype about it. So... toilet paper riots? — ssu

You are using your European experience as a basis. There are some key differences.

The US does not have paid sick leave, nor quick and easy "keep me alive money" like your infamous Kela (Finnish bureaucrats solve your personal problems on behalf of the government). As soon as people have no money, can't eat, and get violent on, not necessary big scale, just impressive for the news cycle: Marshal law.

The US does not have universal health care, so it's going to be chaos people, government, hospitals, trying to resolve who pays for what. Obviously, the simple solution is for the government to say "ok, we'll pay for all health care" and poor in what money's needed and people just get whatever treatment they need (if they survive the government death panels: i.e. triage), as that's a sensible policy, but the Republicans will have a very difficult time psychologically coming to such a realization, in particular before the chaos begins. As soon as someone attacks a hospital with a gun and succeeds a bit: Marshal law. Such a person may feel cheated of treatment for themselves (for instance, a different chronic disease that can no longer be treated properly), may be aggrieved for lost loved ones that got triaged unjustly in their view, or some other chain of reasoning to violence. Marshal law.

The US does not have free education and rehabilitation based justice system; this fosters a large criminal underclass. These people do crime, it's how they survive. They won't stop because of a pandemic. They see new opportunities and (thanks to poor planning due to a low education quality that is funded to proportional to the value of houses in the neighborhood) get into too many gun battles with the police: Marshal law.

Measures without Marshal law are just not getting the virus under control and the pressure is immense to do so: well, Marshal law.

It's the only institution Trump will have available to deal with any of these problems, and so it is the institution Trump will use.

It's like Mad Max. — frank

Marshal law isn't a mad max scenario. Most people would just be sitting at home.

But if the administration loses it's grip even more of the situation (they're trying to catchup now, have serious press conferences, take everything "really seriously", listen to the experts and build some sort of collectivist spirit of "all America"), then soldiers in the streets will be needed to fix things.

Marshal law will just symbolize how incompetently the whole thing has been managed.

If the virus stays the same, hospitals will be overwhelmed and lot's of people will die in bad conditions, but the virus will end up going through the population and achieve the "herd immunity" strategy all by itself (no government intervention is needed to achieve this goal).

However, what the situation will be like then socially, economically, politically, is hard to predict for the US.

I don't see any reason for people revolting. — ssu

I'm not sure NOS4A2 is talking about a revolt.

For me, however, it's not that people revolt, Marshal law would be needed in the event of "crazy people" vs the police or just your normal gangs vs the police.

Marshal law may also be needed if (due to inaction in slowing the infection rate until now) it's simply way more out of control than even Italy as a base case.

I disagree. Even the libertarian people of the US will adhere to the instructions of the CDC and their local health services. — ssu

Although I agree US libertarians will be fully engaged in the collectivist organization, funding and even proud of their own little personal sacrifices for the common good, I actually agree with .

The institutions needed to keep things stable in the US don't exist as they do here in Europe, and there's no way to create them on short notice.

People are going to get really, really angry for many, many reasons.

There's also a massive organized crime problem in the US due to decades of pursuing a policy to create prison labour and disenfranchise African American voters; a very different situation to the Nordic's where organized crime does exist, but is not a rampant one nor is gun violence the norm within the organized crime community. Thanks to investments in education, social security and a rehabilitation based justice system, so all members of society can "see" the social contract working if they look, which avoids fueling a vast criminal underworld of, essentially, outcasts. Crime gets worse, not better, when the system destabilizes.

It could be managed, but it's a tinderbox.

That's true. It started as an "ordinary flu". The second time around was worse. — ssu

Yes, so if this is starting already at "really bad" our last experience with sort of major pandemic is we can expect it to get even worse.

It is a truly plausible and quite simply terrifying possibility.

When a person is sick with two bad viruses at the same time, genetic material gets mixed and matched and there is quite high probability of a new viable virus ... that maybe solve the weaknesses of one with the strengths of the other.

This is a quite rare occurrence, but in a pandemic so many people are getting a dangerous pathogen that these recombination events become essentially inevitable. We now have more people on the planet, and thus more absolute numbers for such possibilities to occur (there are other factors at play, but they could easily give us worse odds too, I don't think it's possible to know ... ahead of time).

If no action would be taken to fight the disease, there would have already been a lot of pandemics in our lifetime causing similar havoc as the black death or the Spanish flu. — ssu

And this is my point: we simply don't tolerate the idea of many thousands dying in an epidemic as we earlier did. — ssu

Both these statements assume you can make a comparison between "action" and "no action" by estimating the likely outcome of each course of action.

However, I disagree that "we tolerated the idea of many thousands dying in an epidemic as we earlier did". We didn't "tolerate the idea" of, for instance, the Spanish flu; it wasn't just accepted as "that's life", lot's of actions were done from trying to cover it up where it emerged so as not to invite a German attack at a time of weakness, to wide spread fear and disruptions, and a large effort to treat people as best as could be done.

The whole idea of policy measured to reduce rate of infection to something doctors could deal with was discovered in the Spanish flu and from which the classic comparative cases are drawn as the empirical basis for the policy.

The phenomena is very similar to what we are seeing today for a pandemic of comparable mortality.

The case fatality rate was 2.5% for Spanish flu, "not so much", "nothing close to the black death" and yet society remembers this event.

Our coronavirus pandemic today could easily be worse, as we've spread the disease around the globe even more quickly and efficiently and despite our science improvements we have places with a official case fatality rate of between 3 and 5 %, and we do not know what the future holds. It was a second mutated strain making a second wave in the fall that was the most lethal episode of the Spanish flu.

Treatment for critical coronavirus patients is possible, but highly labour and equipment intensive for medical facilities. This is a massive disadvantage compared to Spanish flu.

Making a precise comparison is very tricky (we can for instance count not only deaths but "quality years lost" in which case Spanish flu is weighted much worse; but only so far in this pandemic; if it causes a lot of long term complications the weight may swing back on such a scale), but they are clearly comparable events and the fear is rational now, as it was rational back then. It wasn't just "a tolerated idea" that a disease would come through and kill a bunch of people; people feared such events, and rightly so.

I don't understand. What do you mean? — Shawn

If money isn't your motivation, why would observations of the stock market have any affect on you?

The thing is, you cannot argue with counter-factuals of "What if nothing would be done, then how many would die". — ssu

Obviously you can argue with the counter factual of "What if nothing would be done, then how many would die" by having some basis to estimate the deaths will be low if action isn't taken.

Your whole previous point of drawing a comparison to previous pandemics that didn't have these extreme policy reactions is proof that you can go forward without the measures we're seeing today ... if the deaths really are low enough that "the economic disease" of extreme measures would be worse than "the actual disease" then yes, it's unfortunate it will kill people but it's impossible to shut down society to just delay the inevitable spread of the disease.

In those previous cases where the world reaction wasn't so intense, health systems weren't completely overloaded. That's the difference with this disease, and it's not based on "aha, you can't argue with the counter-factual! now bow to the liberal hysteria!" it's based on the experience that unfolded in Wuhan, Italy, South Korea. The disease explodes in number of cases and is overwhelming until measures are taken to reduce rate of transmission.

If numbers of deaths aren't crazy high, it's because measures were taken. This simple fact should be very obvious by now. If more people aren't already dead in Italy, it's because they've been progressively making more and more intense measures until the infection rate goes below the threshold of what's manageable. That it has not been achieved yet should be extremely worrying of just how dangerous this disease is to enough people that it quickly overwhelms the health system (3 weeks from "we have an outbreak" to shutting down the entire country).

Now, yes, you could just let everyone who can't survive without treatment die and everyone else carry on as normal. The fact is, people don't accept that policy. So, you can argue for a change in values and subsequent change in policy, but the facts simply happen to be this disease is way more deadly than the flu, both seasonal and previous flu pandemics up until the Spanish flu (and the Spanish flu was very disruptive to society and economies; some places avoided the disease for quite some time through extreme measures like quarantines and travel restrictions like we're seeing today; the reason we remember the Spanish flue of 1918 is precisely because it was so disruptive; without treatment Corona virus could easily kill 10% of cases, that's a deadliness on par or higher than the Spanish flu. The difference today is that we have way better treatment for pneumonia and so societies want to save people that can be saved, which requires lowering the infection rate to a level where doctors can treat everyone).

Good for you, then. Money never motivated me so go figure. — Shawn

Then why does a stock market move lead you to change your dealings with people in the first place?

I'm not buying in your scenario, I'm selling.

And I'm raking it in.

then what? — Shawn

Smells like victory to me.

There is little doubt in my mind that Coronovirus is being exploited mercilessly as a profit generating idea, based on fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. — Shawn

Even if that were so, isn't that just good marketing?

Lot's of ideas make money by taking advantage of psychological weaknesses in people. Can Windows and Mac compete with my Debian Linux, I don't see any rational basis for it, but I don't see why I shouldn't wish Microsoft and Apple success in exploiting psychological weakness in people to make them desire their products, that then make it easier for me to compete in the market place with my numerical analysis service taking advantage of software people were foolish enough to give away for free! talk about an ocean of insanity over there. Indeed, I wish Microsoft and Apple all the best. Why, if you've lost money failing to predict these events, I feel nothing for you, but I divert my energies to taking the market share from anyone who made a similar mistake.

You’re seriously under selling your point with those stats. — I like sushi

No, the stats are only a good point if there was some reason to believe deaths and injury from Corrona would of similar magnitude as previous pandemics.

But this whole logic that "the liberals are inventing" is just ridiculous. If Trump was in charge, and the facts didn't warrant "banning flight with Europe for 30 days" and declaring a state of emergency, why would Trump do it then? To please the left? It makes no sense.

Certainly if it was really a hoax or overhyped by keeping a cool head Trump would prove his superior genius and all the other attributes he attributes to himself. Why go along with a ruse if you know it's a ruse and you're the president of the united states?

He even becomes self aware that the logic makes no sense when he has to add "diminished power" before explaining it's all whipped up by liberals.

Based on current case fatality rates under triage conditions, global deaths could be as high as 100 million. If 70 percent of the world gets it and there's 1 non-diagnosed mild case for every "case" and the case fatality is 5 percent, then that's roughly 120 million people. An order of magnitude more deaths than cancer and many additional risks that we simply don't know yet: long term injury, reinfection, complications, more dangerous mutations, etc. Maybe we get lucky ... maybe we don't.

It's these basic numbers that is causing these completely unprecedented responses from governments.

I think most of this is self-inflicted. I observed the plunge in the stock market, and it prompted me towards the conclusion that people are rather not worth dealing with. — Shawn

Why did't you deal with those people in the stock market by placing put options or betting on the winners in this sort of situation, like netflix?

Shouldn't you just learn to make better deals next time? Why conclude you shouldn't deal with people at all in a free market exchange framework? Seems rash.

... Also, why would Scotty be motivated to beam you up in a moneyless society dedicated to the betterment of mankind? Implausible fantasy if you ask me.

I don't know what your position is. Anyway, thinking nowadays is becoming so hard to do that I just lay in bed and relax and hope I go to heaven with my small piece of sanity. — Shawn

Thanks for joining and promptly existing the discussion. Your contribution has been noted and catalogued. I will ask you later if you still think your island is the sane one, once consequences enter your personal sphere it should be easier to judge; hands on learning and all that.

I've never seen so much fear and anxiety. Aspirin kills more people a day than this ever will. — Shawn

Notice how when I say to all these comments "you'll understand in a week or two" none of my astute interlocutors ever comes back with reasons the situation should be expected to be any different than is described currently right now in Italy? But please, try to succeed where others have failed.

I was talking about deaths, not every Corona induced sneeze. 6455/worldwide population is the current number. — Hanover

We're also talking about deaths, but also those in the future which, with foresight, is possible for people to do something about now.

If you want to only talk about current deaths and a hypothetical world where only those matter, you should say so, so that we can dismiss such a topic as irrelevant and not waste our time.

You're at about Feb 15th Italian time. — Baden

This would be the case if there wasn't a quick corporate gift to make a quick buck producing some easy-smeazy test kits. That socialist institution the WHO did it! How hard could it possibly be.

US could be as little as 8 days behind Italy, but actually worse than that because, again without testing, measures are lagging behind and additionally, with the president downplaying, lot's of republicans and other fools felt the need to virtue signal that they didn't fear this "just the flu" by participating in activities and gestures that actually increase the chance of spreading the disease, as well as everyone scrumpling together to panic buy as the free market gracefully responds efficiently to the situation, and to make matters even worse, without sick leave, many just have to work even if they know they're sick. Therefore, more doubling times will be locked in before there is a lock down, resulting in significantly, significantly more problems.

Thanks to testing, Italy did put in place regional travel restrictions and quarantine pretty quick, that those measures weren't good enough to significantly slow the virus should absolutely terrify anyone in the US a saturation is reached without even the benefit of those inadequate measures.

In all seriousness, there are expectations that the death toll in my home state of Georgia will double at some point. It's currently at 1 but on the verge of chaos.

The US is at 41. That's 41/50ths a person per state we've lost. Do you know what it's like to lose just over 80% of a person? It's not pretty I tell you. — Hanover

Let me introduce you to a little concept called "exponential growth", or if you insist on technical mathematical speak, the acceleration phase of a logistics curve of total cases, active and resolved.

Since you're about to get a live demonstration, just circle back if you have any questions once we pass the inflection point and things start to calm down.

Yes, the very large percentage of critical cases (cases that are unlikely to recover without medical intervention), is why abandoning containment as a policy, as I observed when I joined this thread, was so incredibly irresponsible.

Had containment been pursued, and the threat taken seriously, systems would be overwhelmed much slower as well as at different times. This not only "flattens the peak" for each individual health system, making it easier to deal with, but allows other health systems to move resources around to optimize the global community's response (increase capacity where it's needed, take lessons learned from one crisis spot to the next).

The only plausible explanation is that policy makers in the West simply didn't see human life as having any intrinsic value, and by the time the economic consequences were investigated of different approaches (takes a while because economists are not real scientists and they mainly just deal with retro-active predictions and so want to see how things play out elsewhere) it was too late to pursue an optimum strategy both from a public health and economic point of view.

Turns out you really can't serve two masters; you will love the one and hate the other, and your house will be divided in times of crisis.

Any idea why Germany has a CFR almost an order of magnitude lower than everyone else? — Echarmion

Although as mentions, cultural differences have an effect, Germany is not yet overloaded. They also have higher health care capacity due to more sustained public health care investments.

Deaths start to rise with triage. Someone with almost non-functioning lungs can be kept alive on a respirator for weeks. Someone with completely non-functioning lungs can be kept alive with a ECMO machine (filters and oxygenates the blood outside the body).

With capacity, many people that would otherwise die recover, and even the people that don't ever recover can have their life extended by many weeks.

At capacity there will still be differences between outcomes in different places due to average age, average weight (obesity makes it harder to breath and so much harder for the body to deal with pneumonia), smoking, culture etc., but they won't be large differences (not near an order of magnitude difference we are seeing). However, once capacity is reached and the system is forced into triage, as happened in Wuhan and now Italy and Iran, deaths rapidly increase. Lung failure of course kills immediately without intervention.

Of note, because old people are triaged to save the young, this biases the data towards "old people dying" even more, leading (at first) young people to minimize it even more and spread it around even more. Statistics seems to suggest the "true danger" of the virus is actually more-or-less equally dangerous to all age groups in that catching the virus doubles your chances of death this year; however, if you're plus 80 and have a 10% chance of dying this year, now it's 20% so results in way higher absolute numbers for older age groups (in addition to the triage bias).

Literally 16 hours ago:

In a few days they'll do like everyone else and lock down, and they'll say "well, our gamble didn't work, but it was a jolly good try". — boethius

Now:

U.K. to Accelerate Measures After Virus Cases Jump Faster Than Anticipated — Bloombers news

It was obviously never a "strategy" of any sort, just a propaganda slight of hand on gullible people to make them look more responsible: "Well, we had a plan, but we're big enough to admit it's not on track and so we're changing our approach".

When one option for reasons for bad political decisions is ineptness, I know for what option I'll go for. — ssu

I'm not so confident. National security decisions do get made by shadowy figures around round tables.

It's pretty well documented that China covered things up as long as possible; we needed a Chinese doctor to warn us (which is risking one's life in China ... and he died, but we're told it's just coincidence).

I haven't gone into the exact timing of events, so don't have an opinion of what's the more plausible cause of the cover up.

However, it's only Trump, among the leaders of great powers, that doesn't care in the slightest about "the Great Game", it's unwise to extend that assumption to the leadership of the other great powers. Having a situation where China is locked down and the rest of the world isn't is a national security disaster for the PRC; setting things back 1, maybe even 2, five year plans. And time is of the essence, since with proper containment strategy, even if the pandemic was simply mismanaged at first and is already inevitable, maybe a simple cure is found between the highest economic damage in China and the rest of the world, so even measures that effectively slow the virus globally would be a threat to national security.

There is no way to prove such a theory at this time, but there is no way to exclude it either.

The whole saying "never attribute to malice what is explainable by incompetence" or however it goes, isn't really informative. Society rarely accepts the defense of "I accidentally pulled the trigger" ... unless it's a police officer, naturally, but even then sometimes society does decide it was malice, and maybe it even was; both explanations are possible, and humans have survived so far by being clever, not by being inept, so that maybe some evidence that a priori malice is a better explanation if there are only those two options available.

At least actions taken now are dramatic. And China did at first respond badly, that's true. — ssu

Yes, dramatic action is in the end inevitable.

It is very possible China made sure it "was let loose globally" either by reflexive cover-up of inept mandalorians or then by design once it was clearly going to have massive implications in China. Obviously, China is first to fail to contain.

However, the rest of the world failing to implement any serious containment, means now it's exploding in all the major countries simultaneously (that naturally have the most air travel). Serious containment effort would have displaced peaks, which significant benefits.

No major economy wanted to stop the planes, but what they didn't realize is that "do nothing" meant going towards "planes and everything else" not working. It is an incredible failure in policy, and that the consequences were clearly mere months away, for me anyway, shows that the "brain trust" of capitalism now truly thinks only on time scales of one, maybe two, news cycles.

I would say that there is a learning process here: SARS, MERS, Swineflu etc. — ssu

The learning process from SARS, MERS, Ebola is that containment avoids this sort of situation. What we learned from Swineflu is that if something really is not "much worse than the normal flu" turns out people then downplay the next thing.

Probably lesson from swine flu is the current pandemic system is inappropriate to apply to a new flu strain, if it can't have the effects we're seeing now. That "pandemic" should mean for people something extremely disruptive, not a technical thing that can include something bad but not terrible. And another rating system is used for the flu, which only reaches the pandemic official classification if it really is an order of magnitude worse than previous flu strains.

Containment was simply never seriously implemented in a globally coordinated manner this time around -- for reasons that have been clearly communicated by our leaders as "needing to balance with economic interests"; as shutting down too much air travel, lowers air line profits, lowering air line stocks and related stocks, which means the economy isn't "doing as great" which in turn means re-election is less certain.

People just flew all over. In SARS the quarantine and contact tracing measures were serious. 40 000 people where quarantined in Toronto. In ebola, strict travel restrictions allowed containment to a single region that then resources from outside could be poured in.

The current situation exemplifies ignoring all the lessons we learned for SARS, MERS and Ebola.

The thing is these pandemics and the one we have now could have been equivalent to Spanish Flu or to mid-20th Century pandemics like the Asian flu and Hong Kong flu, but they weren't. And likely the outcome of this one will be far less also. It doesn't mean that this is at all less dangerous. — ssu

Here, I agree with you. If people had the attitude "old people die all the time of pneumonia" then the disease could just burn through the population, a lot of old people die at home, get buried and that's it. some young people die too, and that's unfortunate.

The "problem" in terms of disruption to our lives and the economy, is indeed psychological. People are no longer accustomed to their loved one's dying for preventable reasons in rich countries, and of course only the middle and up classes in the States -- if it was a disease of the poor it wouldn't be a problem there. Of course, this "privilege" is due to global institutions previously working pretty well; now that they've failed to manage this, each government in turn is simply unable to just "let it burn" whether they want to or not, people just don't accept it. It is too great a trauma to see people in the West die of a disease without even getting to see a doctor; therefore, governments are compelled to act. That they all act, like clockwork, too late, reveals that policy is setup to prefer those people just die and be done with it, but capitalism has reduced it's decision foresight capacity to literally month long timescales.

As I mention earlier, if the economy is primarily "that which keeps people alive", it's impossible to argue you need to die to live.

I wouldn't know, I dont see the world through some political ideology. I view human nature scientically, not politically. — Harry Hindu

So what does the science say?

That by accompanying a benefit with a negative that is less than the benefit, scientifically, this changes behavior to try to avoid that negative?

You've made a claim about changing behavior. Perfectly verifiable and scientifically valid claim. What data or supposed mechanism supports your claim?

I think your emotions have an major influence on how you read into things. — Harry Hindu

Are you talking about my emotions personally, or is this just some general observation that conservatives and liberals just have a different emotional view of the wold, that leads to a different factual view of the world, and both, when a liberal has a point a conservative has no rational answer to, are very valid and understandable in their own way?

Maybe if we "feel" for the worker in your example we might be tempted to do something.

But isn't helping people deal with a pandemic just going to teach the wrong lesson, the lesson to look for the government to solve your problems rather than solving them yourself. If people get bailed out from this pandemic, how will they learn to prepare for the next pandemic?

Seems that, if the market is efficient, we should let the market sort it out, and it is only by allowing those unprepared for this situation to feel the "negative consequences" that they will learn. That by not helping, we are actually helping them to become better by learning from their mistakes or then, at least, removing them or their business from the market place to let more competent entities take their place. Wouldn't you agree that if the market is efficient, it needs to be let to work, regardless of what anyone "feels" about the short term consequences?

Should we be punishing the workers along with the corporate heads? I think it was quite clear that the megative consequences will be brought upon those making the corporate decisions. — Harry Hindu

How so? No one forces an individual to work for a given corporation, they should have picked a winner or then be an intrepid self employed entrepreneur hopping valiantly from gig to gig.

No one forces an individual to not succeed and not build up a "rainy day fund" for things like pandemics, that any reasonable person knows are a guarantee "happened before, will happen again" as you've taught us.

Why should your tax dollars help out these fools that didn't see this coming and prepare accordingly?

Also, dead pensioners don't vote, so the policy is admirably Machiavellian. — unenlightened

Yes, the policy literally kills their core base. They may very well have thought is was noble of them to sacrifice a big part of their base like that. But I think they really did believe the right wing down-playing propaganda just long enough that it was too late. I think the "it kills old people, good for the economy" was a sort of "backstop" position of them thinking "hmm, even if I'm wrong, it's not so bad for Queen and country! For the Queen!".

My analysis is that you cannot call a government incompetent when they have managed to push through an unpopular and damaging policy by winning an election. "competent criminality" is more the mark. — unenlightened

Completely agree. Criminality is a drop in for ideology as I am using it. That they weren't concerned about so many deaths is criminal, but that they didn't realize the deaths would be so high as to crash the system is the incompetence.

Thanks to the mass hysteria the media is causing, people are unecessarily flooding the healthcare system. When 95% of the tests are negative for corona, which means that they a different respiratory illness, the stats aren't a necessary cause for people to worry that they have corona at the first sign of a sore throat. — Harry Hindu

I can assure you that "too many calls" is not the definition of "overloading the health system".

You'll see what it means in a week or two, and we can continue this discussion then.

If the govt wants to has to continually prop up industries that fail during a crisis with my taxpayer dollars, then I want some consequences laid on the corporate heads of these industries. The way you change behavior is to make sure there are some negative consequences to the behavior, not rewards. Every bailout should require a restructuring of the corporate environment that needed the bailout. — Harry Hindu

Isn't bailing out a reward full stop? Is "restructuring" really a negative consequence to the business?

What about individuals? I also asked about them, isn't any assistance simply a reward?

In both cases, how do you ensure there's a "negative consequence" worse than the reward. If the negative consequences you talk about are't worse than the reward, then why would those consequences change behavior?

If I steal from you 10 dollars, and as a punishment I need to pay a 3 dollar fine, how does that incentivize me not to steal?

How do you make your scheme actually change behavior unless for every dollar of your tax money the government gives away there is actual pain valued in some way more than a dollar.

You seem to be negotiating with your belief system in a way that doesn't pass a cursory surface level criticism. Could be your belief system is wrong. Think about it over the next few weeks.

Yes, it's the ideology spectacularly backfiring that my purpose here is to document in real time.

In December, containment was possible.

In January I agree containment was no longer possible globally, but it would have still been possible to "stagger the peaks" from one region to another, which would have been difficult but way more manageable both in terms of organizing the worlds health resources as well as not disrupting all economies simultaneously.

In February, yes, it's everywhere basically, but the social distancing measures are inevitable and the sooner they are put in place the better the health system will manage. Banning flights is no longer a game changing social distancing measure, but is just one of many.

When I described the political reaction to Johnson's strategy, I was not supporting it, only describing it. In my opinion the team managing the government's response is developing this strategy, they do have some strategic thinking going on, but they are lazy and naive about the magnitude of the crisis. As usual with a Conservative government, they are naive and live in an ivory tower. Their raison d' etre is to keep the privelidged classes in power and generate enough wealth to support their privileges. But the current government is the Vote Leave campaign, they are ideological fundamentalists and their doctrine is to leave the EU and become a Singapore on Thames. In this they have left behind the moderates in their party and are recklessly pushing forward the implementation of their ideology. — Punshhh

Yes, I had understood you weren't supporting the decision. I could have made it more clear that my position is simply they are "more incompetent" than your position.

My point was the framing of your original comment as a "strategic choice".

However, we are pretty close. I am sure the exact details of how decisions were made will come out in various investigations, "telling the inside story" and so on, once the crisis is ended. Health professionals know starting such disputes now won't help the situation, but, to me at least, it's transparently clear the "learning curve" of out leaders was far behind the growth curve of the virus and now they are trying to pretend they had actually listened before but made a strategy.

But we seem to be in agreement on the essential aspects.

What I have been trying to make clear is that this situation is a rare instance where what "they think is economically good", however they define that, spectacularly backfired. Obviously whatever economic pain they were contemplating 2 months ago as "too painful" is essentially insignificant to the economic pain now.

That they were "making decisions for the economy" but we're in a phase of capitalism where decisions are so short sighted, the risk of catastrophic events mere months away is ignored. So it's a mix of fanatical ideological devotion to the stock market as well as unmitigated incompetence, and it's difficult to tease those things apart; but is the philosophically interesting thing from my point of view.

I get it, Trump does it speak well. He fumbles his words, contradicts himself, exaggerates and uses “salesman rhetoric”. — NOS4A2

Did you know that Trump also makes decisions that affect how events actually unfold? And that when he sells decisions using fumbles, contradictions, exaggerations that are bad decisions, the consequences that follow might also actually be really bad?

Is speaking well and using the right combinations of words in the correct order leadership to you? Because any actor, any lawyer, any speech writer, any talking head can do that. — NOS4A2

No, it's making good decisions for the collective good that is good leadership of an entire society. Boris Johnson does "good speak" but has also made poor decisions that I have been criticizing.

Trumps incoherent speech, on this occasion, represents incoherent policy decisions.

Meanwhile, Trump was quarantining foreign nationals, barring Chinese entry into the country, evacuating Americans from Wuhan, and started developing vaccines back in January while he was in the midst of a fake impeachment scandal—back when Italy, with it’s eloquent law-professor of a PM, had its first 2 coronavirus cases. Around the same time, Germany, France, and Spain had their first few cases, all led by people who can speak with eloquence and gravitas. And now Europe is the epicenter of the Coronavirus. — NOS4A2

Yes, Europe's response as a whole I've been criticizing as well. I have been mostly referencing "Western leaders", UK, US and all of Europe.

However, Europe has, ultimately, less to fear from this pandemic because socialist institutions are in place to more easily deal with it. The reason why the US previously put a lot of investment into pandemic prevention -- the program that was cut 80 percent that the Fortune article talks about -- was not out of the goodness of America's heart but because previous administrations understood that a pandemic going out of control in the US would be a catastrophe. I'm not going to explain why the US system is particularly vulnerable to this sort of event, you'll get to see first hand! so best talk about it after.

Just to be clear, I do not think their leadership led to the spread of the virus in their countries—it’s no one’s fault—but look what their political niceties and placating lullabies got them. Nothing. — NOS4A2

Yes, this is the lie the right wing propagandists want desperately for you and others to believe. Ahhh, phooey, pandemic, but it's no one's fault guys; decisions couldn't have been better, they were the best, if anything it's Obama's fault.

It's for sure people's fault. Had a containment strategy been effectively implemented, the same strategy that worked for Sars-1 and Ebola, the pandemic, in the least, would have been significantly slowed. Instead, journalists could fy right from endemic epicenters right through international airports without any testing, questions or quarantine measures. This policy has ensured that the outbreak is everywhere in Europe and US simultaneously. The debacle of the testing in the US means that social distancing, i.e. lockdown, in combination with downplaying the threat of the virus, means that the virus was able to go through many more doubling times than had social distancing been put into place early. A single doubling time means double the problem is "in the pipe" when the system gets overwhelmed, two doubling times means 4 times the problem etc. and the virus can double in normal social circumstance in 3 days, sometimes it seems less if a few super spreaders in key points.

Had the pandemic been slowed as to not overwhelm healthcare systems or, failing that, at least not overload all the major health systems simultaneously representing most of the global economy, yes there would be inconveniences to travelers and some stocks taking a little dip, but 90 percent of the global economy would be working as normal at any given time. Slowing things down buys time to understand the virus and effective measures better, even develop new measures, produce and stockpile critical equipment, optimizing resources for when the virus does hit.

We can debate the “implications” of Ziemer leaving until the cows come home. I’m well aware that a “critical thinker” would imagine a bureaucrat leaving out of some sense of a higher calling, quitting because of Trump’s mismanagement. All bureaucrats have a sense of duty and principle. Isn’t it that so? But often the story isn’t as romantic as we make it out to be. — NOS4A2

So, your response to my comment wasn't supportable, so now you think "debating until the cows come home" is a good place to move the goalposts.

Rear Admiral Ziemer quitting is just one data point we have. Another data point was his program was defunded and his team disbanded. What was the purpose of that team? To prevent a pandemic. What's happening now? A pandemic. If you want to live in a conceptual world where those things are completely unrelated, and even if they are related, no reason it's due to a corrupt and incompetent management of those institutions. Since previous administrations, as I mention above, weren't so corrupt as to not see it's in the self interest of even the most lugubrious plutocrat to prevent a pandemic, most likely they didn't put "just some bureaucrat" in charge of the program, but someone actually competent, actually called by some higher purpose to prevent needless deaths due to a pandemic. It was in Trump's self interest to try to keep someone who had a track record of success with previous pandemics on the team, or, if Ziemer quit to go fishing or something, then make sure there is a proper handoff to someone up for the task, and failing that, cause those fish won't catch themselves you know, then keep that team together to lose the minimum in organizational competence. Trump didn't see it was in his self interest because he's that stupid, and now he's paying the price for wanton firing of those selfish bureaucrats that are certainly not moved by a higher calling for the public good.

If you don't have a response and capitulate on the above issues, then let's move on to others.

I have a question for you.

Given that bailouts are a collectivist socialist scheme, both to individuals and businesses, and given that "Covid-19 isn’t the first threatening disease that’s surged around the world — nor will it be the last." as the article you linked concludes, would you agree that it would be more efficient to let any individual and any business that can't deal with the pandemic fail? Either bankruptcy or homelessness, both in terms of paying for treatment, if not insured or underinsured, or then dealing with the economic downturn.

Given that pandemics are a given, isn't it the responsibility of each individual and business to prepare for what is certain? Clearly only a fool wouldn't. Why should businesses and individuals that are healthy financially and can weather this storm, subsidize those that can't? Wouldn't you agree those that can absorb the shock without government assistance should get a recompense for their wisdom of being able to pounce on more market share or then increase their individual competitiveness in the job market?

For people interested in the subtler aspects of propaganda.

The article links to has a little "fact check" checkmark; all the authority anyone needs of course.

Yet states:

And some early reports say COVID-19 may have a higher death rate than the seasonal flu. But we may soon find out it’s less deadly than initial reports since so many people with COVID-19 have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic and therefore don’t see a doctor and are largely unaccounted for. — Healthline

Take notice that the two sentences aren't logically connected.

Yes, it has been reported that it's more contagious and has a higher death rate than the seasonable flu.

Yes, the reported death rates maybe lower when we have more information on total deaths to total true infections.

No! The second sentence does not actually state the coronavirus could end up being less deadly than the seasonable flu! No expert says so. All information and all credible models show way higher death rates than the seasonable flu.

The danger of the coronavirus pandemic is not individual chance of death, as this article attempts to portray to try to calm people down, but the systemic effects of overwhelming health systems and governments forced to act to lower the infection rate to something manageable.

Overwhelming the health system not only radically increases the death rate as people die due to lack of treatment, but also causes deaths of other conditions and injuries due to lack of care available, and also causes long term damage to health system -- killing some doctors and nurses, weakening others long-term even if recovered, creating a backlog of everything that can be postponed even if very suboptimal for health outcomes to postpone those scheduled appointments and treatments.

There are also short term systemic affects that go beyond the health system. Criminals may take advantage of the situation to go on a crime spree. People that do not accept triage decisions may lose it. Vulnerable populations that cannot deal with the disruption may riot.

Then there are the longer term economic consequences. Bailing out everyone at the same time to try to reboot the system may cause hyperinflation in a combination of eroded trust in institutions and a new economic situation that is fundamentally different.

Did you even read the link I posted? — Harry Hindu

Did you read the link you posted?

Or did you just assume it supported your conclusion that

The fact is that previous flu pandemics have had higher death rates more more deaths than coronavirus, yet the media (and others) has fanned the flames, causing hysteria within the ignorant portion of the population. — Harry Hindu

Which the link doesn't support.

To make the claim that those pandemics have "more deaths than coronavirus" you need to know how many total deaths there will be. We do not know at this stage.

Sars-1 and Ebola are much worse in terms of death rates, sure, but those pandemics were contained by an effective containment strategy -- what I argued when I joined this discussion was a good idea and a policy failure to not pursue containment when it was still feasible, at least for many regions.

The only comparable case on the list is the Spanish flue, which killed 50 million people, maybe more, and was highly disruptive. Also, because there wasn't international air traffic in 1918, that pandemic spread much slower, from region to region, and didn't affect everyone simultaneously. This pandemic is better than the Spanish flue in that it doesn't affect children, but maybe much worse in the second order systematic affects because it is happening simultaneously globally due to not stopping air travel when it would have had a chance to feasibly contain, and even if containment ultimately failed then the pandemic would have spread asynchronously with much more time to prepare, understand, as well as "most" of the global economy functioning as normal at any given time.

So what's your link supposed to establish? Obviously not the total deaths of Coronavirus that you claim will be less than those, as you have no clue what total deaths will be and your precious link does not provide this fact -- as it's in the future and facts are about the past.

So what does it support? That eventually we'll get herd immunity; that's not in discussion here -- although we do not yet know if immunity is long term for this virus, people could get it again which was another reason for containment. Or do you just want to say "pandemics happen"; agreed, yes they do happen.

Yes, "herd immunity" will happen one way or another, but the UK's position that "getting herd immunity quickly" is a strategy, is not a strategy; it's a propaganda play to portray their incompetence as some sort of plan all along.

In a few days they'll do like everyone else and lock down, and they'll say "well, our gamble didn't work, but it was a jolly good try".

The fact is that previous flu pandemics have had higher death rates more more deaths than coronovirus, yet the media (and others) has fanned the flames, causing hysteria within the ignorant portion of the population. — Harry Hindu

More deaths at a comparable time in those respective outbreaks? Or are you comparing final deaths of previous flu pandemics with early stage of this pandemic?

If that's the case, google can't help you.

Jost now

Live: Spain prepares for lockdown as WHO question's UK's "herd immunity" strategy — theguardian

Turns out the pandemic experts haven't heard of this approach as a "reasonable gamble".

Why? because it's completely made up by propagandists to try to cover their asses.

The calculation is that after realizing they messed up, and people's loved one's dying for preventable reasons will result in a lot of anger, the best plan is to try to point blank tell people "their loved ones will perish" so that later they can say: "we told you, difficult thing this governing, too complex to explain to you lot, but we did tell you this would happen; but you didn't listen! should have washed your hands if you wanted to save your grandmama's!"

For instance, CNN just published a piece entitled "What does Britain know about coronavirus that the rest of Europe doesn't?" which is (for critical thinkers) basically pointing fun at UK leaders at oblivious morons.

They then just changed the headline on the front page, however, to "UK is taking a big gamble on Coronavirus".

Why the change? because someone executive got a swift "that's not the narrative you fool!".

Anyways, when even CNN can't help themselves to pointing out the transparent inconsistency of UK's policy changes.

Flanked by the country's chief scientific and medical advisers, the Prime Minister announced that his government was moving to the "delay" phase of its plan to tackle the outbreak, and warned Britons that they were facing their "worst public health crisis for a generation" and should be prepared "to lose loved ones before their time."

And yet, faced with such grave prospects, would the UK be taking the same stringent precautions as other affected countries? No, was the answer. At least not for now. — CNN

As the UK will soon realize, "delaying" requires measures to actually achieve. You can't just say "delay" in order to cause a delay.

But many prominent members of the medical community are unconvinced by the government's approach. Doctors on the front line of intensive care units have warned about the potential lack of respirators, as seen in Italy and China when cases peaked there, and said that if staff become sick themselves, access to experienced labor could become a problem.

The editor-in-chief of the influential journal The Lancet criticized the UK's response to the crisis. "To avoid an unmanageable catastrophe in the UK, we need to be honest about what seems likely to happen in coming weeks. We need urgent surge capacity in intensive care. The NHS is not prepared," Richard Horton tweeted Thursday.

"I am not being alarmist. What is happening in Italy is real and taking place now. Our government is not preparing us for that reality. We need immediate and assertive social distancing and closure policies. We need to prepare the NHS. This is a serious plea." — CNN

So, I don't think "listening to the experts" but "taking a gamble" is what's been going on, but rather incompetent inaction, perhaps to cover up and spin as best as can be done the latest pedophile scandal left little room for other government issues, and now that this pesky virus thing is a crisis (which blame will inevitably fall on those in charge) those in charge are desperately trying their propaganda tricks anyways, prepare their base to believe their "loved ones" died for a noble cause and everything was taken "seriously, very seriously" at every step.

It's perfectly consistent that the leader that brought "Get Brexit Done" thought it was a good idea to "Get Virus Done".

It is attractive to believe that people with a lot of power who say and do obviously stupid things are "actually smart" and don't actually believe obviously stupid things and, maybe ignore long term risks that "we don't know about for sure" but certainly would be capable and astute faced with short term risks to the entire system and their political careers. However, it's an all or nothing epistemology; to sell lies one must believe those lies even if one knew they were lies in the beginning. Propagandists always fall victim to their own propaganda time and time again throughout history: the pandemic is the low probability and high impact systemic risk these people have been pointing their propaganda at for decades, painting anyone who points out these sorts of "vulnerabilities" as "alarmist", which of course generally works as the risk is low so doesn't likely manifest right away, but, over time, leads them to believe their propaganda is actually true and that capitalism really does "work efficiently".

I know that they are being advised by some of the world's top epidemiologists, but there is a growing suspicion that the government is limiting the strategy to one of a number of models provide by them. The model of blunting, or smoothing out the peak of the epidemic while accepting that at least 80% of the population will become infected anyway. In the aim that this degree of infection will generate a heard immunity and subsequently smooth out any following peaks. — Punshhh

I disagree here. I think you're giving BJ too much credit. You've let him wank your chain, if only a bit, which is preventing you from fully penetrating the thin veil separating the world view of the noble steeds from the common ass.

Framed this way they have "taken responsible and serious measures, well informed" and yes "it's a gamble, but there are risks either way".

This narrative is quite clearly being constructed now simply as a cover up to the initial incompetence of downplaying it.

If you read what Boris and co. were saying before, they are quite clear in their theory that "it's only a bad flue". UK was first to officially abandon containment, with the explicit logic that "it's not so bad", they were quite proud of their heroic complacency in favour of the economy.

I think a better explanation is that Boris and co. simply weren't alarmed by the prospect of "old people dying" and so minimized it, and by the time they did learn from the experts why it shouldn't be minimized: oopsy too late. Sowy, so, so sooowwy.

They are trying to transition towards the inevitable by pretending to make an intermediate step designed to make the previous mistakes look like well intentioned thought-out policy.

The theory I have been developing here, is that the neoliberal ideology is not equipped to deal with a situation where lives cannot be sacrificed for the stock market. Usually they can, because most conflicts between people's lives and the stock market are over a long enough period of time for propaganda to intervene. Why isn't everyone killed then? @NOS4A2 might ask innocently. Well, everyone may very well be killed for the stock market, the century is still young, but why it hasn't happened yet is because there is an optimum between keeping people alive in order to be consumers, sick consumers needing long term medical products ideally, and unregulated business to maximize externalities and thus profit (the world functions fairly close to this optimum).

These people are not only corrupt but lazy. To slow a pandemic requires "being on it" and not "seeing how it plays out elsewhere". Yes, they did hear expert advice, but my guess is their reply kept on being "yes, yes, let's meet again in a week and see where things are. No, no, we're not doing something drastic, run along now". No one had a model that inaction would actually be worse for the stock market, so they assumed the denialist propaganda was an adequate position as -- well, if anything their own base believes it, and what's true or false normally doesn't matter to their base -- and "letting old people die to reduce pensions and health care costs" generated on the right was actually true, so is, wink wink, a fiscally responsible thing (they forgot that it's important to tell the difference between truth and their own bullshit from time to time).