Originally Posted by
trueblu
d) Let's assume you really do care about people in LMIC countries: aggressive measures in rich countries will impact them to an extent in terms of consumption, I concede. But e.g. tourist attractions in Paris are not really dependent on factory workers in Vietnam for their viability, same goes for football matches. So yes, people will be impacted, but those people will be in rich countries.
I spent the last year living in Uganda. Not to mention 25 years of doing business across Africa and all parts of Asia. I started in China in 1997 back when it was a much different place than today. Back then you had donkey carts bringing produce into Beijing. So maybe I am more sensitized to how the poor live and the effect that global financial crisis's have on the poor. The knock on effect of what is happening to the travel industry is much, much more than you realize. I'm not talking about tourists in Paris. I'm talking about the supply chain from the poor countries to the rich. And much more.
e) The likelhood of severe economic slowdown, and its duration, will be far greater with a true pandemic than aggressive early measures.
That point is debatable and of course it depends on how a pandemic would roll out. I doubt it would be uniform, but that's just my opinion and I respect your learned opinion.
What's really _different_ about COVID-19 compared with e.g. influenza pandemics we've seen, is that COVID-19 appears to be more _susceptible_ to aggressive social distancing, to a surprising degree. To be fair, we've never done what was done in Wuhan in modern history (as far as I know)...but it's worked far more effectively, and quickly, than at least I would have conceded...
These aggressive measures aren't enough by and of themselves: the population remains susceptible, and in LMICs, we just aren't looking for COVID-19. So until there's a vaccine, there is vulnerabiltiy. But if one can bring down numbers aggressively to the low hundreds, there is the possibility of extremely fine-tuned aggressive containment measures going forwards until we have a long-term solution. That won't be possible if there are tens or hundreds of thousands of cases, followed by millions of cases.
Good to hear it is not as bad as you originally expected. I supposed everyone is still guessing on how fast it could spread. I saw many predictions that it should have spread much more in the US than it has to date. But it does not seem to be spreading like wildfire just yet.
PS 'the few' deaths you mention would be around 50M+ in the next 12 months...a doubling of ALL cause mortality.
Removing the concern about the lives of 50m people for a minute and dispassionately looking at macro picture, 50m people die each year from auto accidents (so I've read recently) and the global population still increases. 50m is less than half of one percent of the global population, right? It is not something to be lightly judged in any case.