I’m guessing that the overall deaths in the USA will be down this year compared to previous years. My line of reasoning is that all of the social distancing and hand washing and soaking ourselves in sanitizer will shut down the regular flu to such an extent that those lack of fatalities and related issues will far overcome any Covid related deaths.
SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 Update, Easter 2020 edition
There are lots of hopeful reports — despite the USA COVID-19 infections being over 1/2 million and the total deaths of over 20,000 people — that the pandemic will soon be “Over.”
This is fantasy thinking at best. SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 won’t be over, until it is over, for YEARS.
“Over” being defined as world wide mass vaccinations to the tune of 70% of humanity or human herd immunity. Assuming such a thing is possible, which it may not be, given this recent report from the UK Daily Mail on post SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 infection immunity —
Blow to Britain’s hopes for coronavirus antibody testing as study finds a THIRD of recovered patients have barely-detectable evidence they have had the virus already
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– Nearly third of patients have very low levels of antibodies, Chinese study found
– Antibodies not detected at all in 10 people, raising fears they could be reinfected
– Explains why UK Government repeatedly delayed rolling them out to the public.
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Related studies:
Wu F et al. Neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in a COVID-19 recovered patient cohort and their implications. medRxiv 2020.03.30.20047365; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047365.
and
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Zhao J et al. Antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in patients of novel coronavirus disease 2019, Clinical Infectious Diseases, , ciaa344, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa344
total by July 1st 51,197
Or this South Korean story on coronavirus “reactivation” —
South Korea reports recovered coronavirus patients testing positive again
APRIL 10, 2020
Josh Smith, Sangmi Cha.
The issue with most COVID-19 tests, like the ones mentioned in South Korea, is they detect SARS-CoV2 RNA. They do not detect whether the viral particles are active or not. The issue here is whether these people are shedding active viral particles that can re-infect people. We don’t know if that is the case here from the story text. Given how infectious it is. This coronavirus will tell us in due course.
There are some viral diseases like Herpes that hide inside your body and reactivate to make you infectious. We do not know enough about the SARs-CoV2 virus to say whether that is the case here.
If the SARS-CoV2 virus is like Herpes in that once contracted, it never goes away and flares infectious several times a year.
And there is no herd immunity for some people no matter how often they are infected.
Then we will need multiple, cheap, out-patient style “cure-treatments” as well as multiple vaccines, based on co-morbidities, and possibly to account for racial differences like sickle cell blood mutations, as SARS-CoV2 may well be more a blood disease than a respiratory infection in terms of it’s killing mechanism.
See:
COVID-19: Attacks the 1-Beta Chain of Hemoglobin and Captures the Porphyrin to Inhibit Human Heme Metabolism
There is not enough reliable data, d*mn it!
Until we get to “Over,” our old economic world of Just-In-Time, Sole Source anywhere, but especially in China, is dead without replacement.
The world is in the same position as Germany was from August 1944 – April 1945 or Japan from August 1944 until August 1945 versus the Allied strategic bombing campaign. We have entered the world of “End Run Production“ as world wide supply chains grind to a halt from various fiddly bits of intermediate parts running out without replacement. The on-and-off hotspots world wide of COVID-19 at different times and places in the world economy is no different than WW2 strategic bombing in terms of causing random damage to the economic life support.
See also “End Run Production” here from this one volume WW2 history book The Great Crusade:
Be it automobiles, self propelled construction equipment, jets, power plants or the latest electronic gadget, anything that has thousands of parts sourced world wide with lots of Chinese cheap/disposable sub-component content anywhere in the supply chain simply won’t be produced for the next 18 months to three years.
This “random damage to the economic life support” effect is amplified by the unwillingness of Western private industry to invest in building the capitol equipment to produced those intermediate parts. Because of the threat of China coming back with predatory pricing — using bought politicians to cover for them — means those parts won’t be built without massive cost plus contract government buy out of the investment risk like happened in the USA in the 1942 WW2 mobilization.
The story of one American n95 mask manufacturer’s experience with the Obama Administration in 2009 with the Swine flu is a case in point. The n95 mask is a 50 cent item where China pays 2 cents a mask for labor versus 10 cents a mask for American labor. When the American manufacturer geared up to replace Chinese mask production. China came back on-line and the Obama Administration refused to keep buying the American mask producer’s 8 cents more expensive mask when the Chinese masks were available.
Unlike almost 80 years ago, current Western and particularly American politicians are too corrupt to go too massive cost plus contract government buy out this private investment risk. Mainly because these political elites can’t be bothered to figure out their 10% cut. Instead we are getting more “fiscal stimulus” AKA boondoggles that the elites will saddle the rest of us with high interest payments on huge public debts.
It will take local small to mid-sized business to get the American economy going during the COVID-19 pandemic via making products and services that don’t use the intermediate products China threatens with when the pandemic ends.
My read on what comes next economically is local/distributed production with limited capitol investment that is multi-product capable. The name for that is additive manufacturing, AKA 3D Printing. Here are a couple of examples:
- The idea of 3D Printed Sand Casting Molds For Automobile Production
voxeljet enters alliance to industrialize core tooling production using 3D printing
2. And the replacement of physical inventory with 3D printers, print media and electronic drawings:
Such “Make or buy” decisions have always been the key decision of any business. The issue here is that middle men wholesalers and in-house warehousing holding cheap Chinese-sourced intermediate parts are both set to go the way of the Doe-Doe Bird in a 3D/AM manufacturing dominated world.
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Distributed production in multiple localities with 3D/AM vendors for limited runs of existing intermediate products to keep production lines going. Or the re-engineering intermediate products so one 3D/AM print replaces multiple intermediate products for the same reason, will be the stuff of future Masters of Business Administration (MBA) papers describing this imminent change over.
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But, like developing SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 vaccines, this new locally distributed manufacturing economy will take time. The possible opening of the American economy in May 2020 will not bring the old economy of December 2019 back.
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That economy is dead. It cannot, will not, come back.
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We will have to dance with both the sickness from SARS-CoV2/COVID-19 and the widening “End Run Production“ product shortages that the death of the globalist just-in-time, sole source in China economic model causes for years.
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And this is a hard reality, not a fantasy, we must all face.
Will we learn not to trust the government with unsexy maintenance tasks for vital public needs?
Pro-Publica lays out the facts decently but fails to draw the right conclusions in its dissection of New York City’s failure to stockpile for a pandemic. An endowment to finance storage and maintenance of an adequate stockpile would not have been subject to cost-cutting mandates and a move to just-in-time inventory systems. It would not be subject to political moves to take away its budget. It would just go on, year in, year out, assisting medical providers with emergency supplies stock rotation and providing a backup reserve for their on-site emergency supplies.
So who is going to propose to create such an endowment, whether local, statewide, or nationally?
Proactive to Punishment
I can’t decide which is the more dispiriting element of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic; the fact that so many local authorities in America and Britain are letting their inner authoritarian out for an untrammeled romp while sanctimoniously insisting that it’s all for our own good whether we like it or not (or agree or not), that a large number of ordinary citizens are falling all over themselves in volunteering to inform on neighbors who are doing nothing more than going for more than one walk a day, visiting a park or beach, or exercising in their front garden, and that representatives of our National Media Establishment are as malicious a set of scurvy, biased, panic-sowing incompetents as ever crawled out of a journalism school armed with delusions of adequacy along with the degree. Age 27 and know absolutely nothing, as Ben Rhodes remarked.
The Shape of the Future?
Historian Niall Ferguson cites “the most succinct statement I’ve yet seen of the “massive enduring social and economic change post-pandemic” hypothesis.”
Offices>>Remote Work
NFL, NBA>>Esports
Movie Theaters>>Streaming
TV News>>YouTube stars
College>>ISAs, MOOCs
K-12>>Internet homeschooling
Corporate journalism>>Citizen journalism
EU/EEC>>27 sovereign states
I’m surprised he didn’t also include Stores>>Home delivery.
Of course, the degree to which these changes happen and are sustained will be largely a matter of how long the coronavirus pandemic lasts and how definitively it is suppressed. But even if coronavirus continues as a recurrent plague, none of these trends are likely to be absolute. For example: Offices>>Remote work…my own experience with new-business initiatives, both in existing corporations and in startups, suggests that there really is a lot of advantage in the in-person human interaction. Some of these never would have gotten started in the first place unless such interaction had taken place. And, of course, there are a lot of things that can’t be done at home, including most manufacturing and all construction work. Ditto transportation. And I’m not sure what TV News>>YouTube stars has to do with coronavirus or other epidemics, given that neither modality need involve person-to-person contact.
Assuming that coronavirus is largely or completely suppressed, what are the long-term effects likely to be? Are there now so many people who will have been exposed to the convenience of on-line grocery shopping that they will feel little need to visit physical grocery stores? Will spending half a day at the mall ever again be a thing? Will people want to be densely packed into a movie theater or will they just decide that streaming movies at home (especially with large screens that I bet a lot of people are buying under the current circumstances) is just as good and a lot cheaper? How about airline travel (or sea travel) for vacations?
Colleges..traditionally, the on-campus college experience was (at least supposed to be valued) for free discussion and interaction with professors. Yet much of this has already been suppressed, both via giant lecture classes and by fear of creating offense. College was also valued for its social opportunities, especially those involving dating and mating and the finding of spouses. Yet reports indicate that this has become pretty awkward due to the administrative sex police and their frequent condemnation of people (especially men) with no form of due process. Plus, people are now getting married a lot later, so the pressure to find someone during one’s college years is less-strong than it used to be.
In his tweet, Niall Ferguson also makes the excellent point that “I’d be more persuaded if there were evidence of comparable changes after the (much more lethal) 1918-19 influenza pandemic.” Although media influence in those days was much less comprehensive and continuous; also, many alternatives that exist today (such as work-from-home as opposed to work-at-the-office) really weren’t feasible in those days.
Thoughts?