The fatality rate is actually not even that important at the moment. It's the fact nobody has immunity and enough are sick enough that they require hospital care that will demand all the healthcare capacity a country has. The knock-on deaths because of that will mean deaths that can be attributed to corona will greatly increase. — Benkei

Yes, but only because the rosy scenarios have clearly been essentially ruled out by nearly everyone who's following along. The author is still a hold out for roses literally raining down from the sky upon us.

The author goes to some length to try to show a scenario where the CFR is not so much worse than the flu, as well as a rosy scenario where, even if it wasn't, just "letting it pass" will save more lives as the health system can at least get back to treating everything else quickly.

The CFR not mattering is only above a threshold, that has clearly been passed but this author doesn't accept, since the author still tries to dance under this threshold by making very large range of estimates, based on cherry picking even among the data that's currently available, and then saying: "see, it could be super low, still just in the noise of normal coughs that kill old people all the time".

So, given this advanced state of delusions, my answer focused on the main problem with this reasoning, even just internally assuming his estimates, which is that "well, it could be super high too; obviously", and that equally obviously "not having the information" the author wants is not some necessary fact of the situation we just have to deal with by underplaying things, but a choice by leaders. That we don't have the information is a criticism of the people not going and getting the information, not a criticism of the people worried that things may be on the worse end of the wide estimate windows as well as everything else the author doesn't consider.

There's also the possibility governments aren't flying as blind as the author thinks, but have gotten out and gotten the information, but haven't published it because it isn't good and we can deduce it isn't good because of the policies being put into place.

But yes, there's so much wrong in this "statistician's" analysis that we could go basically sentence by sentence and demonstrating cherry picked data, making factually incorrect statements such as social distancing "we don't know will work", unsupported conclusions from his own premises, not balancing the rosy scenario of "it could be on the low end" with black scenarios of "it could be on the high end".

But some suspect it will be even lower, possibly lower than seasonal flu. Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis Recently wrote: — NOS4A2

What a complete idiot; can't believe this guy is correlated with the word "statistics". That's academia for you.

His reasoning is completely preposterous.

After explaining why sampling bias creates large uncertainties, which is true, that without good estimates of the infection fatality rate, no optimum strategy can be constructed. True. An honest intellectual would have pointed out why it was so critical to contain as effectively as possible during the initial outbreak to buy time to get good information to make good decisions.

But, either due to being a dishonest intellectual or then just a complete idiot, he does not want to inform his readers that people in charge completely dropped the ball during the initial phase where containment was still possible to either contain or at least significantly slow.

He really, really wants to criticize people who don't have an optimistic reading of the numbers, which he himself goes to some length to explain that there's not enough information to get a good estimate on way or another -- but insists on emphasizing only a rosy reading.

This leads up to his key premise which is as follows:

The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that’s information we don’t have. — John Ioannidis

From this premise the reasonable conclusion is that sort of random testing should be carried out! so that it goes from being information we don't have to information we have. That should then be the end of his reasoning line: if we want better decisions we need better data which will require more testing capability as well as randomized testing. Another example of things that can't be done early on when testing is outsourced to a crony who then does a crappy job.

Instead of informing his readers that the Trump administration does have the power to do this, and therefore should do it, he instead criticizes people for "preparing for the worst scenario".

In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work. — John Ioannidis

Is his next sentence. What the hell is this? Most measures of social distancing are uncontroversial in that they work.

Epidemiologists, which this dufous apparently is, all agree social distancing measures work at reducing transmission rates. "Shelter in place" obviously works at reducing infection rates.

By focusing on one edge case of schools, where there is room for some debate, doesn't cast shade on all the other extreme measures of self-isolation and large scale quarantines. This is just completely dishonest argumentation to imply all social distancing measures have the same uncertainty as school closings; however, a numerical model recently leaked does show school closing as being effective, so, in order to keep "the uncertainty is the same" perspective he would need to at least provide a numerical model showing school closings are counter productive, which he doesn't because he's lazy and stupid.

School closures, for example, may reduce transmission rates. But they may also backfire if children socialize anyhow, if school closure leads children to spend more time with susceptible elderly family members, if children at home disrupt their parents ability to work, and more. School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease. — John Ioannidis

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

This is simply wishful thinking analysis.

The expression "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst" he basically wants to change to "Hope for the best, and also prepare the best".

It's completely reasonable to prepare for a worst case scenario if the Trump administration doesn't carry out the randomized testing that the author wants. That's the reasonable conclusions to the "room for doubt" that he brings up: "The administration is completely incompetent, the infection rate is out of control and not tracked correctly, we don't know what will happen, policy reactions will not be optimum leading to high second order risks in terms of economic and social disruption fallout."

Yes, a rosy scenario is still possible, that "it's not so bad".

But a black scenario is also still possible. Health-care workers are disproportionately affected, have much higher infection rates due to close proximity and starting to run out of protective gear already in the first weeks of the crisis, and death rates and "just them older doctors" we should care about dying more than is needed, as they have a lot of experienced their loss represents long term damage to the health system. The capacity of the health care system is not constant through a "acute" overload, but could be significantly damaged leading to a protracted under capacity to deal with other disease anyways; the author does not mention the benefits he points out in his rosy scenario are not assured, but also unknown, since the author is unable to think critically. In an overloaded scenario many more young people may die without treatment; this number is also unknown, extrapolating from the cruise ship numbers is not a valid proxy to the "run wild" hypothesis. Letting it run rampant also maximizes the probability and also evolutionary pressure to mutate into something worse. Long term damage to lungs and other organs is also among the things unknown at this point, especially without treatment which would result from no social distancing. Also critically, re-infection, due to losing immunity in a relatively short time or then mutation, is also unknown; so, letting the virus run rampant cannot be assumed to provide everyone immunity, and the virus may come back as a second wave pandemic putting us back to square one but with a severely damaged health system and maybe a worse virus to deal with.

That the black scenarios can't be ruled out is why all the measures being seen are taken by every country that has an exponential outbreak, and strict quarantine and travel restriction are being put in place by countries that do, as another social distancing measures, and countries that don't in order to carry out the containment strategy competently to buy time to prepare and learn from failed policy cases; including now Trump! is doing some extreme social distancing like stopping planes, and various states individually as well are going more extreme to fill the policy gaps!

The idea of "letting it run its course" was investigated, governments put competent statisticians on the job; no country would be stopping nearly all economic activity if rosy scenarios weren't essentially all ruled out at this point. The author doesn't mention this, because the author wittingly or unwittingly, wants his readers to imagine that government's just listen to lefty snowflake twitter users to make decisions.


Wha't the reasoning for attacking Trump's own decisions now of taking things "super seriously", indeed deciding to have taken it super seriously from the beginning and now implementing severe measures? That the "libs got so loud that Trump was forced to act on the left's snowflake delusions." It's a crazy line of argument to imagine that the left is actually in charge, somehow, now that the stock market it tanking and Trump is no longer "sticking it to the left" by downplaying the pandemic as "just a flu".

It's the most stupendous feet of double think that I have so far witnessed in the political scene.

If you want to criticize the reaction, criticize the administration that is currently in charge of the reaction.

If you want to criticize the lack of data needed to create a optimum strategy in terms of "life lost from the virus" and "life lost due to reactive and overdone policies affecting the economy", then criticize the administration for A. abandoning effective containment and contact tracing so that little time was bought to figure out the information needed B. fumbling the layup "make tests available" to do random sampling as well as track symptomatic cases and C. not doing random sampling testing even now to have a clear idea of what the situation is now.

I am not sure why you keep talking about Euclidean geometry, which, as you admit, doesn't even have the notion of a limit. You may as well be talking about group theory. — SophistiCat

Because the OP does not specify an axiomatic system but describes the problem essentially in Euclidean geometry. The OP doesn't say "what does real analysis say about this?".

This is also not a highly technical mathematical forum, so people unfamiliar with real analysis may wonder how the problem presents in Euclidean terms.

Furthermore, it is a fairly usual question of interest "what is the simplest system in which the problem can be described?", and the problem of making the staircase or circles smaller and smaller can be described in Euclidean geometry.

The OP doesn't even talk about limits, just this process of making things smaller.

As other posters, have noted, the process of making things smaller doesn't change anything, "zoom in" and the shape is similar. This could be a satisfactory answer for some.

The "problem" arises when we want to consider, to take your circle example, the situation where "all points" on the line are the center of a circle; that we cannot zoom in and see circles.

I don't have time to fully investigate the characteristics of such an object, cause there's a pandemic, but considering the lack of intellectual rigour is essentially the cause of building a system so fragile to the pandemic in the first place as well as failing to contain it "because stocks might go down", I feel I need to be even more vigilant in these troubling times on all fronts!

Yes, you can smooth out corners to make a curve continuously differentiable; no, whatever conclusions are drawn from doing that don't automatically apply to the corner case, maybe we're interested in investigating the corners and want to deal with what happens when, trying to take the limit of shrinkifying the stair lengths, essentially every point becomes non-differentiable (that the object is "only corners", or at least all the rational points are defined as corners or some kind of scheme like this; may or may not be of interest to people here).

My intuition for these kinds of problems tells me my intuition may or may not be correct for these kinds of problems. Making the circles or the corners or the sinewave periods "dense" could have surprising results, which may not be the same for each case, or maybe even different ways to construct these kinds of object within the same system, not to mention different systems, with different results.

This isn't a criticism of your approach. It's totally valid to consider the case of the circle as a closely related problem to the stairs, and the case of the sinewave as closely related to the circles. It's not valid to assume conclusions automatically propagate backwards to all these cases, an argument is needed for why this would be so (lot's of theorems have "only necessarily valid for continuously differentiable functions" warning attached); nor is it automatic that those previous harder problems are not interesting because a simpler problem has been found. It happens all the time that very subtle differences make an approach work for one problem and not another and that harder problems are chosen over simpler ones. It's all I'm pointing out, I'm sure you agree now that my position is totally clear.

Er, your terminology is all over the place. A continuous function has left and right limits converging to each of its points. — SophistiCat

My terminology?

I just gave you the definition twice of continuously differentiable, the derivative function is continuous.

I've made it pretty clear I'm talking about "differentiable" in the sense of differentiable.

If you tilt the X-Y axes, it will become continuous. — SophistiCat

No!

The derivative of the staircase is not continuous. I even say:

of course best to use a coordinate system at some angle to the staircase as otherwise the vertical lines are at the same x coordinate as the corners and it's not so clear what the jumping is. — boethius

Yes, keeping the staircase with vertical steps is not continuous. But no, tilting it doesn't solve the problem, only makes the problem more obvious.

So go ahead, plot the derivative of the staircase at some angle and show how it is "continuously differentiable".

The whole point of my first comment is to clarify what when he says:

since the staircase has discontinuous jumps in it — fdrake

There is only a "discontinuous jump" in the derivative, not a discontinuity in drawing the staircase. Since his comment was aimed to explain things to people that know less math, it's important to point out that "discontinuous" is often used as shorthand for "continuously differentiable" in a lot of contexts (someone who doesn't know this may wonder what is "discontinous" about the staircase).

A differentiable (or smooth) function has the first derivative at each point; the half-circle function is differentiable (again, modulo axis orientation). — SophistiCat

No, turn the half circles anyway you like, you will always have a vertical tangent and it will not be continuously differentiable at all points.

Proof: You can move two half opposing half circles together and get a complete circle. A complete circle can be rotated at any angle you want and remains similar. At an angle, it's even worse as now the curve will retrograde and have 2 y values for some x values; so please, tell me, what's the continuous derivative function for that? it's just circles, should be easy to derive.

There are also piecewise- versions of all these (piecewise-continuous, etc.). — SophistiCat

Yes, I recognize you can use a function that is continuously differential, like a sinewave and not have the discontinuous derivatives to deal with. But, as I mention, it's not exactly the same problem, and whatever answer you arrive at for a sine-wave, you cannot simply apply to the circles nor the staircase.

It should be clear that these are not necessarily part of the same class of problems.

As for solving any of them. You'll need to do so relative an axiomatic system. If it's Euclidean geometry, the questions are in some sense sensible. A Euclidean procedure can create these objects under consideration as well as procedure to make half as small staircases or circles, but the limit at infinity won't be defined as there's no such tool in Euclidean geometry.

A sinewave cannot be constructed in Eucidean geometry, which maybe an interesting aside, or maybe indication that there's important difference with your circle example.

If the goal is to investigate a different but similar looking problem, that's fine, but there must be some basis to assume conclusions about something different will hold for the something else. There maybe critical differences (such as continuous differentiability), or maybe not.

Saying "ah, we can make a different object that doesn't have that problem" does not necessarily solve the problem encountered with the first object. Yes, you can make other objects and ask a similar question; no, the answer may not be the same every time you do so. There's a lot of steps to do to arrive at such a conclusion.

However, I have not said your program won't work, just pointing out some important considerations so that, er, avoid:

your terminology is all over the place. — SophistiCat

Yes, that's why I said "non-differentiability is not the end to it".

But it's a good litmus test (that intuitions may not apply).

Without the non-differentiable points that are perpendicular to the axis of the line, however, it's not exactly the same problem though.

But you need to select axioms, re-define the problem as sets for instance, and so on, to then "prove" an answer relative those axioms. Without doing that my response will be "maybe".

My main purpose, as mentioned, was just to explain the definition of "discontinuous" and that normal calculus concepts may not apply. I do not have a problem with a system where the limit in these questions does not make sense, is just undefined, nor a problem with a system where the limit does make sense (and even different answers in different systems would not bother me).

No corners here, the curve is everywhere differentiable (although the second derivative does jump around at the intersections). — SophistiCat

These jumps are what I was referring to as not everywhere differentialable.

Non Differentiable Functions. ... We can say that f is not differentiable for any value of x where a tangent cannot 'exist' or the tangent exists but is vertical (vertical line has undefined slope, hence undefined derivative). — first web search hit

However, I'm not saying that differentiability is the end of it, only that non-differentiability is a good indication that limits may not apply as we might intuitively expect from cases of continuously differentiable functions, and my main purpose was to explain what discontinuous meant in the context.

Non-diferentiable points can be approached in various ways that may or may not make sense given the context of the problem. Physicists, for instance, may approach these points with a important theorem called "whatever, I don't care, we'll figure it out later, or someone will eventually I'm sure".

To "solve" these problems we'd need to choose an axiomatic system. If we view these problems in Euclidean geometry, there's no axiom of infinity, so the question doesn't really make sense (you can keep making smaller staircases or smaller circles, but you can't say you have done so "infinitely many times" and each staircase or circle is indistinguishable, in some sense, from a single point along a approximate line).

For instance, to demonstrate the loss of credibility:

Wall Street slumps at open as stimulus high fades — Reuters front page

Obviously, no one has confidence in this "stimulus" and everyone wants out. If the FED steps in to make sure their friends can get out ok too (what they are already doing) one way or another, as well as step into monetize huge leveraged losses, it only delays the inevitable, while creating a ton of new money.

"Fiscal responsibility" based crony capitalism, however, is premised on the ability to provide welfare to the investor class while implementing harsh austerity on the government and everyone else (yes, you have inflation from the bailouts, but only the investor class benefit and the inflation can be balanced somewhat by austerity; it's not completely uncontrollable over the time span of a decade at least; which is all the time you need to build bunkers on islands). If problems are self created in the financial system, they've been pretty successful at doing this bailout-austerity trick (it's a good trick spins things this way), but since this current crisis isn't only a self-created problem of the financial system, yes it one of those too, but also a real world problem; austerity is impossible and inflation will start to get out of control as soon as the dust settles on the immediate crisis.

In Guangdong, officials responsible for the coronavirus response announced Feb. 25 that 14% of declared recoveries in the province had later retested positive.

Herd immunity might not be a thing ... — unenlightened

Though I agree with your basic point that herd immunity may not be a thing, the numbers could represents a few scenarios.

A large part of this is explained by false negatives as well as well as a cycle of "intense - less-intense - intense" infection Coronaviurs seem sot exhibit.

So, if recovering means the virus sort of oscillates up and down on the way to zero like a bouncy ball, then you can be recovered, test negative, then the virus flares up a bit and if you're tested then you test positive. In a small amount of patients the "flareup" will develop back into severe disease. This is completely different than overcoming the virus and catching it again.

Even if it is true re-infection, as long as most people develop immunity, then it's not a big problem in terms of her immunity. It's not good of course but not terrible.

What would be terrible is if this is indication that nearly everyone loses immunity over a fairly short period of time, and that this 14% only represent the first part of a Gaussian curve leading to when the majority lose immunity.

What would also be terrible, even if immunity to this strain is usually long lasting, that this is indication that immunity is fragile and that a mutated version of the virus can defeat most people's immunity who got the previous strain, as we see with the flu. It's thought that we are lucky with this virus in that it does not mutate quickly. Unfortunately, mutation is not with respect to time but "total viruses" replicating in people's bodies at anyone time as well as co-infection in a person that has another virus with potentially useful genetic tricks to exchange. A pandemic maximizes both these cause of mutation.

Another reason why the "need to let a few people die for the economy, those planes need to fly like the dickens!" was an erroneous calculation. To make such a risk-benefit calculation (even the goal is just the economy and we are willing to let however many people die to achieve increasing the stock market again) requires information, such as answers to the above, which we currently don't have.

Traders make their money from transactions. If they think the market Is staying the same (stable) they will hold, as you say, therefore they make no money. So the trader's livelihood is dependent on an unstable market, and they will do what they can (strategic buying and selling) to ensure that the market is unstable. — Metaphysician Undercover

"Traders" (as a whole) do not engage in strategic buying and selling to create more volatility.

Some traders, who believe they can both A. contribute significantly to volatility and B. profit from that happening, do as you say. Others, who can not do A or B, or likely both, do not engage in such a strategy.

Traders tend to stop selling if they believe the market is stabilizing as to not lose money, as if they wait they may be able to profit from their current positions. Indeed, the market stabalizing in-between up-and-down is simply the definition of traders no longer selling more than others are buying and a new equilibrium reached (therefore, a net tendency not to now sell; and a stable market this tendency is only slightly out of balance leading to slow rises and falls).

The traders don't give a fuck about the FED. The FED protects their livelihood, but when it's time to make their money they don't give a damn. It's not a symbiotic relation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Explaining this is the whole point of my answer to your first comment.

The FED is effective insofar as traders believe it's effective. An individual trader can hate the FED and what it represents and believe it to be unconstitutional and created through conspiracy and moreover run by delusional cronies, but will still trade based on the assumption that the FED's actions will be effective (at accomplishing the FED's stated aims) if that trader believes other traders believe the FED's actions will be effective.

Your analysis is faulty boethius, — Metaphysician Undercover

You may misunderstand my analysis, and maybe it is faulty, but you have not uncovered that fault.

Mostly, we are saying the same thing, but you are considering all traders as some sort of "cohesive group" that have some sort of agreed on strategy. This is not true.

Traders are not cohesive, they trade against each other, and the net-result of this trading is "supposed to be" corralled and shepherded around by the FED and other central banks.

Yes, we agree, the system is corrupt and will result in bailouts (first tranche already announced; in order to avoid a 5-10% decrease in airline stock due to a major containment operation two months ago ... now their shares are tanking, they are on the brink of bankruptsy and they need a bailout ironically almost proportional to the stock-buybacks they performed using low-interest public loans debt from the previous continuous bailout scheme).

What I am describing is how those bailouts will result in uncontrolled inflation because all the "control inflation leavers" the FED has, have been already pulled due to the 2009 recession (to prop up their fellow cronies; we completely agree there).

Unlike last time, the wealthy will not simply bail themselves out and keep the system running in some semblance of "free market capitalism" while the left cries fowl and (many) libertarians explain that paying back a bailout in inflated currency retroactively deletes that bailout from existence and ta-da: capitalism is alive and well. The wealthy have completely borked the system this time. There's no putting humpty-dumpty back together again.

A monetary system starts to truly enter dysfunction in itself (rather than mere social dysfunction of inequality that is a "values question" plutocrats can ignore) when A. inflation can no longer be controlled and B. more inflation is needed to bailout friends and the government itself (so that it can continue to do its job of protecting the rich from the poor). We have already seen the first obvious but ineffective measure in the long term, measure at dealing with inflation: price controls. It starts small on just a few "necessities" but give it time, give it time.

So why would the traders want to stabilize the market? — Metaphysician Undercover

It does not matter what the the traders want. Or rather, what they want is incidental to how they will try to act.

If they think the market is going down they will tend to sell. If they think it's going up they will tend to buy. If they think it will stay the same they will tend to hold.

I say "encourage traders to believe the market will stabilize" not in the sense of encouraging them to want the market to stabilize and cooperate to achieve that end is a great way to run a free market economy (because the free market is efficient and therefore needs a lender of last resort whenever it collapses into dysfunction), but only in the sense of believing that it will actually happen (because they believe others believe it will happen due to believing the action of the FED will have this psychological effect on others, weaker minded people, that regardless of "fundamentals" the "smart money" needs to hop on the trend to fleece these fools later). If they think it will actually happen their behavior will change, and collectively they will make that change by anticipating it will actually happen.

So, previously, when the FED and other central banks had what they called "ammunition" left, their interference in the market in the name of saving a free market ideology as a basis for world government, would have both a primary numerical effect in the market as well as a secondary psychological effect.

If traders believe "geniuses in the FED obviously know what their doing, as otherwise they wouldn't wear suits and hold press conferences" they interpret any actions by the FED as "obviously going to work in stabilizing the market", regardless of the primary consequence of the FED's actions (indeed, the primary consequence of the interference could actually have a negative effect, because they don't know what their doing, but the secondary psychological effect could completely dwarf that; just like the placebo effect can completely dwarf negative side-effects and the treatment seems to "work great" reinforcing the placebo effect).

So, if the FED has a carefully cultivated cult following that believe the public providing a private entity with the monopoly on what legislatively created entity people can pay taxes in, then basically anything it does or says to move the market will move the market because people believe it will work and thus anticipate it working, moving the market to were the FED wants it to be. And it works! Prediction came true! Reinforcing this psychological influence over traders.

When "placebo psychology" is not enough to counteract real changes in the market (such as a bank going bankrupt) then a "real action" is needed (such as bail out all the other banks and a select few giant corporations).

This real action has some real stabilizing affects, but also amplifies the psychological effect as traders say "wooeee, trillions dollars to me and my friends baby! FED's got this".

However, if traders lose confidence in the FED, then the psychological leverage can not only be zero, but can actually be negative. Whatever actions the FED takes will be anticipated not to work and only indicating how dire the situation is and, in anticipation of the FED's actions not working, traders will reinforce the opposite direction, and again regardless of the primary effect of the market interference (such as buying junk mortgages should support the junk mortgage market), the opposite of what they want will occur (that they can support the price only insofar as they are the only buyer, and as soon as they stop it tanks even more). And the market's prediction comes true! Reinforcing the belief that the FED is a pathetic bunch of has-beens that don't know anymore than your common stock of shoeshine boys.

Why people who care about this sort of stuff as "the most important thing you could possibly know about and cause of all good things in the universe" blabber on about "confidence".

Due to the 2009 crisis (and wanting to bail out their friends, and even make them richer, rather than pursue any sound fiscal policy even according to their own ideology, which is just a public position to keep useful-fools inline and not their private position of doing whatever idea, socialist or capitalist, will get them more power in any given situation), the FED and central banks have spent all their ammunition blasting holes in their own floor in which to shovel in trillions of dollars and lighting it on fire.

This ammunition is mainly rate cuts to the interest banks can loan new money at, large market interventions that represent "a lot" but not so much as to legitimately be on the path of central banks owning whole markets, as well as the fractional reserve limit.

Right now interest rates are zero or negative, the FED owns over a trillion dollars of mortgages and have announced buying some hundred billions more, and the fractional reserve limit has been place at zero (which means banks don't actually have to even loan money from the FED ... but can leverage 0 dollars to make their own infinity dollars anyways).

There's simply nothing of significance left central banks can really do (as far as I know), and so traders will simply ignore their actions, or even interpret any given action as signs of the financial armageddon.

But the central banks will be forced to keep creating money anyways. For instance, US federal government has a trillion dollar deficit, may need to go to 2 trillion due to this crisis (in a combination of not collecting taxes and bailouts for everyone and the direct costs of the crisis).

The crash of the stock market also means the crash of the junk bond market (there's no reason to have confidence in a company who's market cap is lower than their outstanding debt, and due to real changes in the economy there's no reason to believe they can bounce back and that bailouts will come to the rescue rather than postpone the inevitable). FED will need to take all these junk bonds onto their books because the banks tell them to or their crash the system.

All this is a lot of money entering the system to accomplish nothing.

At some point even economists will be going around saying "tut, tut, tut, no free lunch, tut, tut, tut, no free lunch" and wagging their fingers in the faces of every econ 101 students who is trying so desperately to believe regulators are playing some sort of arcane zero dimensional chess and have a point to their actions. (wagging those fingers through video-link of course).

The financial system was already on life support, and so anyone who even imagines that a pandemic walking slowly by regulators over three months as they just stare at it, then quickly jump on the patient in a bear hug squeezing out all the oxygen, as regulators slowly put down their issue of foreign affairs and prance elegantly across the room, careful not to spill their martinis, and then lightly paw at the pandemic while preparing 1000 shots of adrenaline for when the patient codes -- actually believes all this won't have a massive consequence, is a beautiful, beautiful dreamer, just unfortunately in a opiate induced coma at the moment.

That's why no one's coming in here to say "market's at a record high douche bag; do you even know what a blockchain is bro, do you even know crypto isn't a code bro? do you even know anything bro?".

There are plenty of tools available. The problem is that solutions are based on stochastic models for a global economy that is too complex to be caught in such models. So the cure doesn't cure or creates a lot of unwanted side effects. — Benkei

Here I am mainly referring to financial institutions like the central banks.

I.e. no more tools that can work in the existing paradigm to maintain it's central aspects (i.e. get back to "normal").

Of course, the solution I propose, UBI, is obviously a tool, but it's legislative and a fundamental departure from the current paradigm.

I'm not sure if we disagree here; do you mean to say if central banks had "better models" that they could get the economy back on track (as they would understand that track to be)?

But if you're a socialist, you need others to tell you what to do. — Harry Hindu

Why didn't I follow your instruction then? If I "need" others to tell me what to do?

Seems your theory doesn't link predictions to observations. Maybe time to junk your theory because it's not validated by what you can see with your very eyes. If I "needed" people to tell me what do to, I would have done what you say, thankful that you took the lead on this issue.

Now that the important philosophical subject of how trades are executed on stock exchanges has been investigated, I propose we move onto the general topic of corona virus and the stock market.

My understanding of the situation is as follows:
1. Corona is causing massive disruptions to most sectors of the economy: collapse of air travel and tourism for an unknown time, closing of local restaurant and entertainment and every other "in person" businesses for an extended period, many old people dying which will put more homes on the market, disruptions to supply chains due to manufacturing shutdowns in China, and long term psychological based changes in behaviour, damage to health systems (mainly skills dying or being so traumatized that they quit during or afterwards), and all related supply industries.
2. The positions taken by central banks to paper-over the 2009 "great recession" have not been unwound.
3. There are no more tools available (nor the prospect of until now "unthought of" tools) that can encourage traders to believe the free market will be stabilized by collectivists schemes of one form or another.
4. Therefore, any market actions by regulators of central banks will simply encourage people in the know to use those actions to get out even faster (not anticipate those actions will actually work and therefore stay in).
5. Large businesses will be bailed out anyways, even if long term structural changes to the economy mean there are no viable paths back to profitability.
6. Large sectors of the US economy, such as the fracking industry, have essentially never turned a profit and are faced with an economic down turn and a Russia and Saudi price reduction to force them into bankruptcy. Bailing the fracking industry out cannot even be imagined to make sense; they may actually be left hanging due to problems elsewhere being simply too great for friends to look after each other. (but this is an analytic side-quest to maximize one's schadenfreude at the expense of fracking executives and investors, and yes, a little bit at the expense of fracking workers too; but of course, doesn't help the financial system to have a giant rotten lemon on their desks as no one drinks rotten lemonade, except the fed of course)
7. Therefore, the central banks and regulators, by monetizing one way or another, trillions in losses will cash-up the investor class and be left holding what is technically referred to as "a big bag of dog shit".
8. This cash reentering the market when things are stabilized will cause massive inflation of whatever good assets remain.
9. There are no policy tools left (I am of aware of anyways) that could counter-act this inflation (US is already in trillion dollar deficit, 1.5 trillion "plausible deniability bailout" is already started in first week of this crisis and there will be much more, interest rates are zero or negative, the deficit will go even higher, and the fed will stop reporting on their financial alchemy projects).
10. We can reasonably conclude that inflation therefore will not be controlled (i.e. controlled less than the current policy mechanisms as well as just changing the definition of "what people need" on the fly).
11. International trade will start to collapse back to "real assets" (do you have something tangible I want, do I have something tangible that you want), rather than the previous regime of debt based trade (well, debts haven't been a problem before, therefore I will continue to pretend they will never be a problem in the future).
12. Referring back to tangible assets will be a radical simplification of the current trade system (not clear if there will be markets for most of the crap currently produced).
13. Regulators will realize at this point that there is no way to reboot the system without even more inflation since they just gave most of the money to the wealthy ... and have been doing so for the last decade already (and trickle down theories obviously make no sense, so the money will sit there but ready to pounce on any assets that do start to go up in price if the governments do try to bailout the poor through small "throw them a bone" inadequate measures, as horrifying as that sounds they will be forced to face their deepest fears of needing to throw those bones).
14. Service economies will collapse as credit dries up. Manufacturing will radically simplify, but countries with modest manufacturing capacity will be forced to protect their manufacturing due to over-capacity of larger manufacturing centers trying to shift production to "anything and everything that is still being bought somewhere"; the interdependence of manufacturing economies will make such policy shifts acrimonious and volatile.
15. Bottom line: isolationism as we saw in the great depression is now unavoidable, with all tools in the policy shed hemmed in and blunted by inflation.
16. World War would be great to just nationalize whole manufacturing bases and get people jobs in the business of killing people and use the nationalist furor to crush socialist agitation that's trying to help the poor, but nuclear weapons render this no longer "the go to" easy solution for capitalism's woes. It will still be tried, of course, using conflicts to get people focused on something else, but with unknown efficacy / survival of the human species.
17. The only solution will be a UBI, after a currency re-issue wiping out all that money held by the investor class (and all the debts held by everyone else). A UBI works because manufacturing technology has incredibly high efficiency today; you can just reset the currency domestically, issue a UBI and people will sort out how to make what people actually need (though resulting in a very different looking economy as people may change their life goals if they can relax about their short term survival). Countries that already have a well-fare state already have the institutions to keep things stable throughout the transition (most essentials are already organized by the state, staffed with dedicated public servants, and can continue to function without much reorganization). Renewable energy means there is no core-dependence on unfriendly parties to sell you oil, and therefore no need for major countries to go to war to secure critical resources, and no need for smaller countries to accept "free-market" destruction of their manufacturing base in exchange for access to oil. The unmitigated incompetence of the technocratic neo-liberal governing order, as demonstrated in this crisis, will make the propaganda needed to keep this power structure in place ineffective. People who can think critically and care about the poor have therefore a much easier time to get into power and immediately bailout the poor in what amounts to, one way or another, a UBI and currency reset collectivist enterprise. Investor class will try to prevent this from happening (and may succeed by killing everyone) but, as they are already on the back foot in their propaganda at the moment, I believe it is more probable we will be seeing, in essence, Marx's core predictions come true: Capitalists undermining their own basis of power due to "the greed horizon" becoming too short, such as causing this crisis by trying to avoid a much smaller dip in airline stocks literally just 2 months ago, and people taking control of the means of production to satisfy their own needs through equal political participation.

So, it all started somewhere and snowballed. Who first began dumping huge numbers of shares at a lower price, and who is buying them? Is this a matter of public record? — creativesoul

The "police of the market" like the SEC in the US can investigate if things seem manipulated. Such as lots of shares being dumped before a big announcement usually indicates insider trading.

In principle, all the transactions and accounts can be traced, but in practice sometimes it is too complicated to figure out (as anonymous offshore "businesses" can also buy and sell stocks).

However, in this case the crash is not some algorithm gone haywire or just "mass hysteria".

Well, there is mass hysteria, but good reason for it. (The world won't end or go "madmax" but problems are not binary between "nothing to worry about" and "now I have to learn to to play a flame thrower guitar").

The reason for the crash is that the lockdown of entire economies has massive implications for the stocks of most industries. To take one sector, tourism, it's clearly not going to making much profits over the short to medium term.

You may say, well "it's temporary", things will get back to normal.

First, even if that's true, all stocks primarily related to the tourism industry are (all else being equal) worth less because they will be making less profits. A business that skips out on a year of profit is simply worth less than had it been able to pocket that year of profits. So even in the though experiment of "putting a business on pause" and then going back to normal after some time, that business is still worth less and we may expect the stock to trade lower.

Second, the disruption of the pandemic is so severe that the assumption that things will ever go back to normal is tenuous. Tourism may simply never get back to the level it was before because people change their habits during these travel restrictions, and, more importantly, due to the entire market being disrupted people will have less money to do tourism (what money they have they may also say ... hmm, black swan events to happen, I'm going to hold on to this money).

So... hypothetically, such an investor could sell off all his airline stock at a lower price than the current market value, or would those lower prices be the new share price? — creativesoul

Essentially yes. In practice, a offering to buy or sell shares has to be "big enough" to move the market.

If someone is offering to sell 1 million shares at a certain price, if you then offer 1 share below that price it will, usually, just disappear and it's not noticeable as a share price move.

Keep in mind, that the listed price does not mean someone is buying or selling, only that there is (usually a substantial) offer at that price.

If no one buys at 90 dollars all or part of an offer of 1 million shares, then the seller may move their offer lower to 89 dollars. It's only when those million shares actually trade hands that we can say "that's the new value according to the stock market"; and it's not "all or nothing", someone may think 90 dollars is a good price and will sell quickly, but they only want to buy 10%, then if it goes lower they will say to themselves "well, should have waited"; of course, it's easier to say "buy low and sell high" than actually do so.

So, people wanting to sell stock may need to "march their price" down until someone buys. If this process takes an hour for sellers to test each price point on the way down, then it seems the stock went down over an hour; however, there was no one actually buying at all those price points. Seller A sets a price, no one buys, seller B is willing to sell at a lower price, no one buys, seller C offers an even lower price, seller A sees this and really wants to sell so sets an even lower price. In age of electronic algorithms this process can be very quick, which is why you can have huge drops essentially instant.

Which if it becomes widespread, make a nonsense of any herd immunity, and makes a vaccine more problematic. Don't panic. Yet. — unenlightened

Well, doesn't make nonsense, as most people seem to be immune from reinfection ... at least until now (immunity can be surprisingly short term for some pathogens).

But these single cases, unless indicating a general trend, are not very worrisome in themselves. If it's an isolated thing, it doesn't have any effect on general immunity. Also, while these cases are small in number, it's difficult to exclude a false negative for recovering in the first place. So they test twice ... but then it's difficult to exclude two false negatives in a row on occasion.

However, that immunity may not be long lasting, is a very troubling possibility. An additional reason anyone who downplayed the threat while it broke out in Wuhan ... then downplayed the threat when it broke out in South Korea ... and triple-downed-downplayed the threat when it broke-out in Italy, is simply a fool.

It's been estimated that infections are about 20-30 times more. No one has any idea what it is now. — ssu

Then we're in agreement.

Actually there is one elderly corona-virus patient in intensive care. — ssu

At the early stage, the cases-to-critical ratio care can be far from the global average. But there's no reason to believe it won't approach fairly closely the global average. It is possible by some genetic quirk that protects Fins, but essentially zero reason to predict that.

Of diagnosed cases now, many maybe critical care cases but just haven't developed to that stage yet; it can take 5-10 days from symptoms to critical care. Additionally, the first clusters to get infected can happen to all be low-risk-groups, which is basically blind luck but really significant if measures are then put in place to stop further spread moving quickly towards "well mixed" in society.

After tomorrow, I have to say that I'm not living anymore in an ordinary Western Republic as the emergency laws take hold (let's see what they come with) and the ordinary individual liberties aren't anymore. — ssu

I don't think this is quite fair. It's certainly not an ordinary circumstance, but personal liberties are always relative some standard of the public good: you can't walk in the middle of the highway, you can't just carry buckets of gasoline with you to the super market for fun, you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, you can't build and sell houses not to code, you can't do a lot of things that are reckless in likelihood to cause harm. It's just the conditions of what actions will likely cause harm are changed under the pandemic. It's extremely unusual for conditions to change so radically, but the same logic can be still the same and people agree to this framework.

These measures for sure would be draconian if done for political control purposes, and that can be a duel purpose and is certainly a concern -- i.e. China; South Korea to an extent as well with their tracking app -- but the situation I think is not adequately described as "losing Western liberties", as such in most Western places ... of course, second order effects could definitely go in this direction, but I'm not too concerned about Finland in this regard. You're not arguing these points, but without making the above distinction there's no quick and easy retort, is my point; and people were making such arguments during the "great minimizing".

That "it's draconian" is only an argument if you really think the risk is low and so believe this is added weight to the "do nothing" argument. Just like banning flights from China is "racist" is only an additional propaganda argument that makes sense if you really do believe the risk is low and there's no reason to ban flights from China on the merits of the science of epidemiology, so smearing one's opponents as racist is a "good trick" to protect the share prices of airlines.

But on the positive side, I have two happy children that at least now are excited that there's no school and they can sleep late. Let's see what their attitude is after one month of home schooling. — ssu

I completely agree the results of this general social experiment will be incredibly interesting on many levels.

Those at risk of death can take whatever precaution they need to. The average person is just going to get flu like symptoms or less. It's a disproportionate shotgun response, showing how panic and fear of any risk leads to a terrible result. — Hanover

Easier said than done.

First, not all cases are from at-risk-groups, so even if you succeeded in isolating at-risk-groups, you'd still have a huge amount of cases from allowing exponential growth to occur unimpeded in all low-risk groups.

Second, isolation of at-risk-groups is basically impossible. People need to interact to survive. Even doctors and nurses with proper gear are getting infected, that's how infectious this disease is, so there's simply no way to prevent it getting into care-homes where workers don't have gear, don't know how to use it, and there's none available anyways.

Agreed, at-risk-groups that can effectively self-isolate should self-isolate, but even if that's completely effective that won't prevent overwhelming amounts of cases coming from at-risk-groups that can't self-isolate, that need quotidian care to survive from younger people, nor would it stop an overwhelming amount of cases from low-risk-groups, that are more numerous so a smaller percentage becoming critical care cases is still overwhelming anyways.

Keep in mind, the low-risk of dying for healthy and younger people is not the same as the risk of needing critical care. One reason the death age is so old, is because the old are triaged in favor of the young.

It is the critical care percentage that matters in terms of public policy. Maxing out critical care capacity means needing to triage both new cases and every other medical problem that arises from heart attacks to gunshot wounds.

The only way to protect high-risk-groups and low-risk-groups and all goups in between in terms of total number of deaths as well as preventing overload of the system is, at this point, through extreme measures that affect everyone.

UK will do the same as @ssu reports Finland is doing. These "changes in strategy" is simply propaganda to walk from "oh, crap, it is a problem I should have realized will hurt the stock market much more by downplaying it compared to being proactive" to the inevitable position of "all hands on deck! to prevent more spread and get this under control! for queen and country lads!" without admitting to any mistakes and pretending it was "people's loved ones" that were the center most priority all along, just a few understandable course corrections along the way; we managed bold and brilliantly really, an unfeasibly high intellectual standard close to some godlike omniscience such as Thomas the Train couldn't have done any better, get off our backs about it, you're just using people who are suffering from our mismanagement for your own political gain!!! meany-boys!!! vote for us again.

272 infections, no deaths yet reported. — ssu

This number may seem low to you, but the number of infected is some multiple of the current number of diagnosed cases.

Some proportion of infected will develop symptoms and become cases some days from now, and some of those will be critical care patients.

No deaths means those critical within the 272 infections are getting the care they need.

If the trend elsewhere is reoccurring in Finland, then there's about 20 to 40 people in critical care, or will enter critical care shortly, among this group.

That's already quite a lot in normal times. Nothing overwhelming, but not a drop in the bucket either.

Also, don't confuse "beds" with care. From what I have read, major cities typically have a dozen or two of these respirators. Treating crucial cases of this disease requires not only equipment but highly intensive care by skilled doctors and nurses. Keeping someone alive who would otherwise be dead without intervention is no easy task.

Because infections lag behind cases, and grow exponentially without extreme measures, this 272 number has already doubled one or several times in terms of people infected. At this stage, it depends on a lot of factors, so we'll only know later if it's more or less compared to other countries that are further along. But, it's already enough critical care patience "in the pipe" to saturate quality care capacity for these symptoms.

Policy makers in Finland have exactly the same analysis which is why they are shutting things down now, rather than later. For, let's say 1000 critical care patients is the capacity limit, if you wait to reach that thousand, repeat the above logic, and you have at least 2000 -- since doubling times are shorter than infection to critical care times -- maybe even more, 4000 or 8000 or even 16 000, depending on how out of control infections are.

Keep in mind, once restrictions are implemented, they are not instant in reducing infections; there is an initial period of society "getting into it". So not only are there doubling times already "out there" but there is probably at least another doubling time that is unavoidable while society reconfigures for quarantine.

Currently .02% of the world is infected with the coronavirus (169,387 / 7,771,074,926). The percentage of worldwide deaths rounds to 0.00% (6,513), but if you take it out enough decimal points you will eventually see some evidence of it.

That leaves 99.98 % of the population uninfected and about 100% of us not killed by this epidemic. — Hanover

No one is disputing that.

The question is how those numbers grow over time under different responses.

Evidence we have at the moment is letting it grow out of control would lead to about 100 millions deaths.

Those would show up in your significant figures.

If you say "well, they won't grow that high because something will be done", then you've joined the discussion about what should have been done before, even a week ago to avoid 2 or 3 doubling times, what should be done right now, what should be done later, and how these actions affect society in second order consequences, like people losing jobs and so on.

Start a new thread. — Harry Hindu

Don't tell me what to do bro.

They are still free ro try and tread on me, but then can they handle the consequences of their actions? This is basic human psychology and natural behavior that all organisms engage in. Invading ones territory will illicit a response from the organisms territory you're invading. Wil you come out unscathed? Will it be worth it? — Harry Hindu

Ok, so you don't want even the institutions of the police and justice system?

Proof? Lol. The proof is in the definition. — Harry Hindu

I just explained it is no proof.

Unless you have some extreme position where you don't want the police, justice system ensuring property rights are defined and allocated, voting for management of at least these systems, then you are admitting that to pursue your goal you need some institutions.

You have no proof that your list of institutions and laws is actually optimum, or even remotely close to the optimum, to pursue your goal.

It's like saying "I want to travel light, as less mass means less energy needed to get to where I am going; therefore, I will walk naked from New York to San Fransisco without any supplies at all". Then saying "proof by definition!" when someone points out this doesn't follow in the slightest.

You still dont get it. Libertarians arent concerened with telling others how to live. They only rule is "Do as you will but dont tread on me". — Harry Hindu

But that's telling people how to live. You're telling them not to tread on you.

To make sure it's not a suggestion but an ideal enforced as best you can, you want police and a justice system to safeguard property rights. Maybe other institutions to then safeguard those institutions, etc.

If your scheme isn't enough institutions designed in the right way to be stable, you may lose even those institutions you think are in fact necessary and someone treads on you hard.

I am arguing public education and health policies protect more from the situations you want to avoid, not less. What's your counter argument? Other than telling me how to live and to not tread on you.

Libertarians want less govt and that means minimizing any one group or individual imposing their ideals on others. — Harry Hindu

There's no proof of this.

For instance, I would argue that healthy educated people can more easily minimize one group of individuals imposing their ideals on others.

Health and education make people more capable and efficient.

Now, granted, to have these healthy educated people we need to impose the ideal of wanting a healthy and educated population and pursue policies that accomplish that. I am willing to impose that ideal on society, not ashamed to say it.

Now, let's say to get rid of me imposing this ideal, you convince everyone that, even if they agree with that ideal they shouldn't impose it through the institution of voting that you do pursue, along with me, imposing on people. Ok, voting is part of the 3 ideals that you do impose on people, along with the police and property rights, no need to debate why, of course, as that may lead to a framework of reasoning from which to impose a dreaded 4th ideal, which we want to avoid, so better not to know why these 3 institutions but no more!

People agree, vote to ensure there's not an optimum health or education public policy, not even close.

Time passes, let's say, purely for the sake of argument, someone comes along who's clearly a corrupt self centered narcissist and also incompetent along most dimensions of institutions management, even 3 is too much for him; but low educated people like him and vote for him, he gets into office, imposes his ideal of a trillion dollar deficit on everyone and then incompetently manages the small public health institution you did allow in a sort of 3.5 institutions reasoning, that institution was then inefficient in stopping a public health crisis, and that leader, thinking nothing other than his own ego and money, did nothing to intervene early, because government intervention should be minimized and he has no clue what's going on anyways before it's too late to prevent a serious crisis.

Then the crisis unfolds, and large portions of people's freedoms you've been trying to preserve with your system, such as the freedom to just travel and meet who and where you want in whatever number you want, are now curtailed. Is this more or less freedom than the freedom lost in other people having access to health care and education that would mitigate, maybe even completely prevented, this "severe freedom restrictions" scenario?

Just, purely for the sake of argument, what if "less institutions" to ensure "more freedom" actually resulted in "less institutions causing less freedom"?

Lol. Do you even understand what that means? It means that we don't need a bloated govt to tell everyone else how to live. — Harry Hindu

But you still need a government to tell people to live within the laws that you have in your system, and maintain the institutions to accomplish that.

You're just saying your religion with 3 rules is not a religion compared to a religion with 5 rules.

However, your society still has to compete with other society's, so if 5 good rules are better than 3, people may change their religion to the 5 rules because it has better outcomes.

SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome) is a good example. SARS (another corona virus) jumped from animals to humans and first appeared in China in 2002, then showed up in several distant places. SARS has a very high fatality rate (15%, and 55% for elderly patients). — Bitter Crank

Yes, but the difference with SARS is that, because it was so dangerous, containment was serious and effective.

We not only allowed Coronavirus to spread by plane, but abandoned effective containment as to not annoy a lot of plane travelers and so as to avoid a small decrease in airline and boeing stock 2 months ago. Obviously, not realizing airline stocks would be far lower as well as the stock market in general if containment was not pursued seriously, just shows how easily Western leaders are deluded by their own propaganda. Coronavirus is less dangerous than SARS, for the moment anyway, but still dangerous enough to cause all these extreme measures to be taken now; however, it seemed it was below a psychological threshold for our leaders and the general population to not take it seriously.

It's like dismissing a danger that will cut off your hand because "well, it's not like it's my head". Of course, anyone who has such an idea clearly changes it when their hand is being crushed in the gearing. Completely predictable. Easy to talk a tough game of "not even a head bro, not even a head", a lot harder to be zen when one's hand is being slowly pulverized.

Continental Europe, slightly less deluded and so slightly more responsible, but the UK and US reactions have really shown who has drank most of the coolaid.

The implications is those that survive will be immune. — Harry Hindu

Yes, I've made that assumption clear. One of the unknown risks of the disease is re-infection rates of the same strain, which can happen with some disease, and of course mutation into a new strain.

If you're just repeating my points, thanks for pointing that out.

Thanks, China. — Harry Hindu

Yes, I think it very plausible China wanted to maintain air travel to make sure everyone else suffered as much or worse, in a zero-sum game view of geopolitics.

However, we've had all the data needed to make an optimum containment strategy regardless of what China wants. The West didn't pursue an optimum containment strategy, for neo-liberal ideological reasons according to my analysis, and the West is now paying the price for inviting the virus in to grow in an explosive manner, and soon essentially everyone will pay the price.

There were lot's of policy tools available to slow the spread to something manageable and all the information needed to design such policy since the start of the year.

Socialists can only be authoritarian as they think they know what is "good" gor everyone, and want to impose their morality on everyone else. It really is no different than a religion. — Harry Hindu

But don't you want to impose your morality of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism on everyone else?

I agree, I wan to impose my morality of rule of law, universal health care, free education, and similar institutions on everyone. But don't you want to impose your morality of property rights, police and courts to manage those property rights, maybe some fire fighters, on everyone?

Seems, as per your definition, just a different kind of religion, just less institutions are desired but no fundamental difference. You claim your morality, if imposed on everyone, would be the best for society, so do I.

Even though only 40% (+ or -) of adults get vaccinated for influenza each year, that is still many millions of people who won't get, and thus won't transmit, the influenza virus. — Bitter Crank

Flu vaccine doesn't really change the conclusion, as it does not provide 100% immunity, flu is constantly evolving to defeat the vaccine policy.

And what is essentially for certain is there won't be a vaccine for this first wave, which I'm currently focusing on as lot's of members of the discussion don't seem to understand the implications of this first wave.

A good basis of comparison to this first wave is the flu but no one's immune, and a high case fatality rate, as with the Spanish flu.

What's different today is that global travel, because there was no travel freeze when it could have made big difference, has done a great job of mixing up the disease in the major economies in a short period of time.

The flu" doesn't really describe a particular disease, but each year it's a different strain. If you're saying that at some point in everyone's life they'll get some viral infection, I think that's obvious, but that doesn't equate to saying that each year we should expect 100% (or anywhere close to it) will get that year's particular virus. — Hanover

That's exactly what I explain:

And if it keeps coming back like the flu where one part of the population has lost immunity due to a new strain, — boethius

Why it's considered the same disease is because it's phenomenologically similar, and descends fro the previous strains, just like you're considered the same person even if you cut your hair -- your different, but still the same person. A new strain that defeats immunity can be a small change like different hair for the virus; so it's considered the same disease, and the word "strain" is used to differentiate. That's why I used the word strain ... and also why you used the word strain in the same sentence as making the overall point that "it's actually a different disease".

The answer to whatever your'e trying to figure out will be found by looking at actual infection rates over time, not by whatever calculations you're throwing together. I can say that I've never been in a school or work situation where 70% of the people were gone due to the flu. — Hanover

Again, my comment explains why this is the case. Many people are immune to the new flu at any given time, and many others have so mild symptoms they think it's just a cold. So not everyone gets it any given year.

But take a new strain of highly infectious flu, such as happened in 1918, that no one seems immune to, and a high mortality rate relative the "normal flu" we have today, and the situation is very different.

My calculations are based on what we know so far.

- It's highly infectious
- No one has existing immunity to it
- It has demonstrated ability to kill of 0.5 - 1 % percent of cases in good care conditions, such as South Korea were infection rate was lowered to a manageable number, at least so far.
- It has demonstrated ability to kill 3 - 5 percent of cases in sub-optimal care conditions, such as Wuhan and Italy, were cases exceeded the medical systems ability to handle them.
- We do not know how many "mild" infections there are that don't result in cases, but the ice-burg hypothesis seems extremely unlikely at this time, as random sampling testing of the population has not revealed an iceberg of mild or asymptomatic cases, as is being done in Germany; there are some of these asymptomatic or super mild, but not close to twice as many, much less on the order of 10 times needed to significantly lower the danger and change policy to "it's not so bad guys", it is a few percent in this category.

Now, there can be lot's of infections that are in the incubation or first symptoms stage that have not moved yet towards cases and hospitalizations, but that is simply a time lag problem matching observations to the best model of what's going on requires estimating those infections and extrapolating critical care cases. However, in the "uncontrolled spread" scenario we don't care about current cases, just a ballpark estimate of infection to case ratio, and case fatality in triage conditions.

So, if left to go out of control, we could estimate 70% of people on the earth getting it this year, and if we conservatively estimate there's double undiagnosed and never diagnosed infections currently, so a 2.5% infection fatality that then matches up with 5% case fatality, then this is 120 million deaths this year.

I have not seen any data or analysis to suggest uncontrolled spread would far lower, such as 0.2%, than that estimate.

Of course, it's completely unfeasible to have an uncontrolled spread policy, so we're seeing extreme actions that will have a large affect on how things play out: these extreme actions are motivated to avoid this 70% infected, 1-5% infection fatality situation.

Even if the death rate were 5% of those infected, that wouldn't equate anywhere near 5% of the total population. Communicable diseases are common and with no controls at all come no where near infecting 100% of the population. — Hanover

Communicable diseases that aren't controlled but don't reach 100% is because the disease has a hard time spreading. Maybe very dangerous, but is not crazy infectious.

Something very infectious, like the flu, basically does infect close to 100% of people, just not in any given year as a large portion of the population still has immunity. But eventually, nearly everyone gets the flu at least once.

For a new disease, highly infectious, and no one has immunity, without controls, the base line assumption is it would infect about 70 percent of people, at least.

Once infected, including recovered and now immune, population passes 50 percent then the disease has a hard time finding new hosts, as now the majority of people are either recovered or already infected. Especially if those that aren't yet infected is because of behavior that lowers their chances, which is statically guaranteed. So 20 or 30 percent may not get infected.

For instance, something very infectious like cold sores, follows this pattern and it's thought 50 to 80% of adults have it. We aren't bothered too much by this because cold sores don't put 10% of people in intensive care within weeks of getting the disease, and large amounts of people are getting it for the first time because it's a new disease.

Which is why I used 70 percent of people get infected in my calculation.

However, that's only true for 1 wave. If the disease comes back in another wave, then statistically you're going to "get" part of that population that didn't get it the first time. And if it keeps coming back like the flu where one part of the population has lost immunity due to a new strain, then you'll get close to 100 percent over several waves. This maybe the case of corona.

But in terms of the short term consequences, I have been mainly discussing the first wave.

In the first wave, assuming the disease stays the same, and no effective treatment is found, especially applicable to large numbers that would otherwise be triaged, if nothing is done to slow the infection rate, such as the little measures that have been taken so far in the US, then numbers can get really big, really fast.

Clearly not anywhere close to the "uncontrolled" case, but big enough to cause major disruptions, and a single doubling time left to its own devices can result in a very different situation. Whatever problem you already have, now you have two of them.

1800+ as of yesterday. I can't find if there's a separate number for triage deaths though. — Benkei

Yes, I was off by a factor of 0.3 in my lower bound estimate in making the point that order of magnitude differences in deaths have much different implications.

But it will be at 3000 shortly in Italy. Death rate is still rising

368 die of coronavirus in Italy in 24 hours — CNN

And this is with measures that were taken, albeit too late to avoid overload, but relatively proactively based on testing. So, the US could be much worse.

An order of magnitude worse would have very different implications not simply for the health system but for societally and politically. According to official confirmed cases, the number of cases increases by an order of magnitude every 2 weeks about, so waiting for that to happen by not testing and downplaying can have a massive difference in outcome. A week of delay of the needed response can mean 2 doubling times.

Of course, apologists for Trump will say "ahh, but he's learning now! he's doing what's needed now! He stopped the flights". This misses the point that response to this sort of situation needs to be quick and needs to be informed by real data. Neither of which happened, and so the situation is going to be bad. Howe bad will depend on how out of control the virus has been left to spread before extreme measures are taken.

As I'm sure you agree with this basic point.

And I'm sure you will also be amused that when deaths aren't in the "do nothing case" of millions, because "something was done", the same apologists for Trump will say "see, see, I told you so! not thaaaat many people died".

I've previously been arguing why "the sooner the better" for lowering the rate of infection, there is no scenario where the economic costs of stopping flights a month ago would be higher than the economic costs we're seeing now, nor is there a scenario where you want to "make a quick dash to heard immunity".

As an epidemiologist wrote:

I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire — https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/epidemiologist-britain-herd-immunity-coronavirus-covid-19

Obviously, defending against a threat is not possible by letting that threat run rampant. It's like resolving a fire hazard in your house by burning down your house; yes, situation now resolved, but if the goal was to prevent or stop the fire the concept of "fires do burn out you know when they have no more fuel", isn't helpful. Yes, by maximizing the damage the damage can be mitigated.

Apparently the UK is walking back the whole "herd immunity strategy" and some officials are now explaining it was just "a medical concept" but not an actual strategy.

They've decided "isolate 70 year olds" is a nice stepping stone to ease themselves into admitting eventually, as in today or tomorrow, that they'll do as the rest of Europe is doing. BUT! And this is the critical point, their followers will remain ignorant of the easily avoidable mistakes made along that story arch of self realization.

It's going to be just like Mad Max. I'm telling you. Total disaster. — frank

I've already explained it cannot get to a madmax outcome since 85-90% of cases recover easily. So letting it just go out of control and killing whomever it can as quickly as possible, wouldn't collapse society. The 90 - 95% (as not all people become cases) of people that survive can easily just carry on.

So, even if society chose to maximize deaths by doing absolutely nothing to slow infection, it's still not a mad max scenario.

Stop wagging your finger at that straw man.

However, just straight up letting 5% of people die without any attempt to help them is obviously not politically feasible.

Even 5000 isn't politically desirable as @ssu notes.

Italy is already at 3000 deaths mostly due to triage conditions (and it's not finished, if it peaked symmetrically right now deaths would end up about 6000 as a rough estimate, and current estimate is it's not peaking right now), so assuming 5000 triage deaths is a rough lower bound for deaths in the US (I don't think reasonable guess by a wide margin, but for the sake of argument, such as a scenario where containment was pursued competently); well, 5000 is not good, but not the worst cause of death this year by a long shot as has been well established on this thread. Unfortunate, but social and political consequences would not be extreme, one political football among many and one more disease for doctors to deal with (going the way of N1H1 that was soon mostly forgotten).

However, the only way to keep those deaths low is to slow the rate of infection. The reason Italy got to triage conditions is because they didn't take these measures early enough.

So between 5000 and 5 000 000 there's a wide spectrum of different health and political outcomes.

Since there's no adequate testing in the states, no way to get a good statistical understanding of the current status of infection (which then results in hospital visits in a 5-10 day lag, 10-15% of the time, which is a big number for something 70% of people could get in a short time frame).

So, infection rates could already be much higher than Italy, resulting in much more deaths. The more deaths, the more consequences to society through a bunch of second order effects I describe above.

H1N1 has a reputation for hating pregnant women. We'll see if this virus is any different. — frank

Fortunately, there's not much evidence it's really bad for babies, and I believe also pregnant women haven't had it particularly worse. Luckily, children really do seem fairly unaffected, which is definitely a silver lining in the situation.

I don't know where you're getting your figures, but I assume others have already tried to explain to you that you're wrong, and failed. — frank

No one has, but please do try.

You seem to be concerned with all the young healthy people. Most of them will either have no symptoms, mild symptoms, or they'll feel like shit for a couple of weeks. They won't burden the system too much more than all the other viruses are already doing.

I'd be happy to join you in talking about triaging hundreds of people in one day, rounding them up in convention centers, etc. That's almost a philosophical issue (not quite.) There just isn't any reason at all to think that we'll need to do that. None. — frank

Ok, well let's talk in a week or two.

As triage is happening in Italy right now ... doesn't seem that philosophic to me. But if you only care about the states, then let's wait. If it doesn't happen, then we can talk hypothetically about "had it happened in the US".

Yes, I do care about the old and would rather anyone, old or young, get the care appropriate to the disease.

The disease affects young people less, yes, but many still need critical care and some still die, all at once it is not logistically possible to provide that care.

The point I am making in these last comments is that there is a big difference politically between 5000, 50 000, 500 000, and 5 000 000, people dying in triage conditions.

There's also a big difference politically if marshal law is implemented or not. Even if it's not some sort of uprising, it's a highly symbolic event.

Thanks for the lesson, I'm sure it will be useful for someone not yet informed.

Believe it or not, the situation won't be vastly different in the US than wherever you are. American hospitals don't turn people away from emergency rooms. They just eat the cost. — frank

This is not what's being discussed.

Had the US taken the measures (it's now starting to take) such as cancel events and ramp up testing, and encourage everyone to take it "really seriously", declare an emergency, etc. earlier, then yes, I am in agreement with you: US health system would handle the health part more or less comparatively to Europe. The financial part would be a separate issue that would resolve afterwards one way or another, but the finances wouldn't be a crisis, just evidence for or against universal health care. The finance is the easiest part of this puzzle to solve.

The difference is that the US did not take those measures earlier, so we do not know how many cases are going to hit the health system all at once. Reports are the wave has started, so we're going to find out soon enough.

Once numbers exceed capacity for doctors, no matter how well trained and good intentioned, to deal with so many patients, then people start to go through all the stages you describe but without medical care.

The longer a country delays in taking measures to slow the rate of infection, the more people will be in the situation of "One night you find that you can hardly breathe, so you call an ambulance" but there is no ambulance, or then the ambulance takes you to a tent where you don't get any help.

The more people in such a situation, the greater the social and political consequences.

As per my original position, we are about to find out (yet again) why abandoning containment early was a crazy idea.

That the US saw things unfold in Italy and are now aiming for the Italy baseline as the best case scenario (which I hope transpires), is also crazy.

The paid sick leave option is a good point. But then who will say that they cannot go to work? — ssu

I forgot to elaborate. No paid sick leave means people that really are too sick to work won't get paid. But more importantly, lot's of precarious jobs in the US that may simply disappear all together and it may simply be impossible to even attempt to keep such business and giggers afloat as you don't know who they are as it's not a regular business (without some sort of universal basic income scheme).

I will assume that the US response will be something similar. With the exception that it's the rich that will get tested for corona-virus. So not surprising it's Tom Hanks and wife as the new models for corona victims. — ssu

It won't be similar. European countries have learned from the Italy case, and it is more or less known at which stage each European country is. Tests have been available, especially for people dying of covid19 symptoms.

The danger in the US is that due to delay of testing (even of people dead of Covid19 symptoms) it's gone through more doubling times than anywhere in Europe. Doubling times are as short as 2-3 days, seemingly as short as a day in some conditions (such as people actively trying to spread the virus to stick it to the libs). So a week delay on appropriate response can be really a significant difference on how events then unfold.

Dealing with a twice as big problem is obviously much worse, and if you get to 4,8,16 times bigger scale problem by delaying 10-15 days (4 doubling times), it's really a totally different situation.

The current assumption is the US will be as bad as Italy, but due to lack of testing and thus real data informed strategy it could be much worse.

The problem with these sorts of growth rates is that it's really, really difficult to catch up from behind the problem. Italy delayed more than Wuhan in extreme measures ... new cases haven't leveled off as we speak in Italy and are higher than Wuhan's maximum reported number; so, imagine delaying more than Italy.

If you have a real anxiety disorder, you should ignore me. Do you want to know what happens when they intubate you (to put you on mechanical ventilation)? If you're more informed, maybe you'll be calmer. — frank

I don't live in the US. I am not in a high risk group, but thanks for your concern. Please share your information in the event it does end up being useful to me or then someone else following this discussion.

I'm not really worried about any worse problems other than dealing with the disease happening where I am. Why? Universal health care, social security, etc.

I feel for people unnecessarily suffering or having loved one's dying in Europe, the US and elsewhere.

But since this is a philosophy forum and my main concern is politics, my analysis is that this situation is particularly unstable in the US given the political system. This instability can lead to adjacent negative outcomes in the US, but also have geopolitical consequences; worthwhile to discuss.

That such events are now a serious possibility to consider, is exactly why you don't abandon containment in favour of keeping the stock market from going down a bit (my original purpose to argue when I started in this discussion, as I realized containment was dropped as a strategy).

Now that the window for containment is passed, the window to deny it will explode in the US and elsewhere in Europe has passed, we may as well move onto the likely political outcomes.