My favourite how different the "home budget" and a national economy works is if you want to save some money for a trip you just stop spending a bit and keep the extra money in a savings account until needed. If an economy did that then the economy will contract, reducing peoples spending power and income.
It's like you're saving for you holidays and your hourly rate goes down because of it.
In other words it's following a logistics curve. This is what every pandemic does: the problem is that we can't know when the inflection point is. Sometimes it's quite early on, and sometimes it isn't. Plan for the latter, hope for the former.
Unless Chinese officials are still lying about their cases, and international observers are being fooled despite now knowing to look carefully, it seems (only tentatively, not saying it's the case at this point) that China is already reaching an inflection point. The number of new cases has dropped heavily and the death count is shrinking too apparently. That this is possibly already happening in such a densely populated region could bode well for the rest of the world for the initial surge in cases leveling off sooner than some are predicting.
I've seen a surprising amount of panic and unfounded assumptions towards the worst from many commentators here on HN and though it's perhaps to be expected from a crowd with a notable number of visible hypochondriacs, it's disappointing to see too. This isn't to say that concerns about the virus should be neglected or that people shouldn't take practical precautionary measures seriously but someone leaping to cataclysmic conclusions based on early figures is no more substantive than another person dismissing the whole thing as nothing major. Both are based on notions without backing and impossible foreknowledge.
>> Unless Chinese officials are still lying about their cases
Is/was there a whole lot of evidence of this? Was it a local problem in some parts of China? Or was it unfounded? It seems to me there's been just as much of this going on in the west + we're doing a much worse job of handling the epidemic than China has done. I don't have any personal opinion on China generally but the amount of China bashing + hypocrisy in the last few weeks has been astonishing. Supposedly they are even at the point where they are shipping supplies they no longer need to Italy (masks + other equipment) and considering sending people to help too.
I in no way intended my comment to be seen as China bashing for its own sake, but in the early days of the epidemic in Wuhan, there were noted incidents of at least local officials claiming false information about how contagious COVID was and how far it had spread. It's difficult to generally trust any authoritarian regime that has a vested interest in downplaying things which in part worsened because of its own bad initial response but no, nothing right now gives a solid reason to doubt the current numbers on cases, fatalities, recoveries from China and if indeed they are true as they likely are, the reduction in new cases is visible, and even if that's being achieved through strict measures, it's heartening to see, because it shows that COVID spread can indeed be mitigated to some extent through social measures while medical resources brace themselves
There's almost zero chance you see peak virus before end of March in the US. From what I hear, most people are predicting peaks in Europe in late April / early May and peaks in the US a week or two after.
I'm not sure how much faster you think we'll see peak than that.
Maybe you mean the tail will be shorter? Most people I see are predicting Coronavirus will impact consumer behavior until end of year. I don't have the first clue how likely that is.
I agree with you on what you say about zero chance for those dates, but there have been predictions (many repeated right here on HN) about a level of spread that in months infects dozens to hundreds of millions and results in several million fatalities worldwide. So far, none of these extreme prediction figures have a genuinely concrete footing (and a number of similar figures were predicted for how much it would have spread even by now, which obviously haven't come to pass)
"someone leaping to cataclysmic conclusions based on early figures is no more substantive than another person dismissing the whole thing as nothing major"
The potential downsides for "dismissing the whole thing as nothing major" are a lot higher than "leaping to cataclysmic conclusions". Better safe than sorry. Better to be prepared than unprepared.
While that may be true, it is in no case at all a reason for panic and panicked behavior such as rampant hoarding of things one won't even conceivably need for the length of time this is reasonably expected to last. I have seen a large number of rather hysterical comments on this site that have openly proposed that yes, people should outright panic. It's absurd.
It inflected early in China because of the lockdown. People are hardly allowed to leave their house. Not even for work unless you're essential personnel.
The US is not prepared for those methods. Not culturally or legally. For better or for worse, it's the sort of thing that can only happen in an authoritarian dictatorship.
I fully expect the US to inflect much, much later than China did.
It seems to me that there’s also a wave effect at play. For instance, China’s largest source of new infections is now imported cases. China can’t exactly drop its guard until the virus is on the decline across the world. The same will apply to other countries who are hit early. This might be with us for a while.
It'll inflect when the measures we take reduce the R0 enough that (1-1/R0) goes below the fraction of people already infected, hopefully but getting R0 below 1. But yeah, it's hard to tell when that'll happen.
Early can mean "at a low percentage" (which would be good) and not just "reached fast" (which would be very bad, unless also at low percentage). The percentage is directly depending on R0 (which apparently isn't easy to get below 1 even with China-grade measures).
The inflection point here means that the speed of the spreading of virus gets slower, so less people get infected then previous day. If this point is earlier in time, this means that the virus won't infect so many people after a time. I think the big question is the cause of the inflection point. Is it because of the nature of the virus or because of the different action like quarantine
One of the problems I see with CO2 sequestration is that it will be a nice way for companies to suck at the teat of taxpayers the world over.
I'm sure Halliburton-like companies have a 3 step plan to be right at the front of the money firehose when governments are forced to reduce CO2 or face even bigger costs (both financially and politically) in the coming decades.
This assumes that the only way a project like this could be pulled off would be for the state to open a "money firehose" and spray it onto buckets held by private corporations. Is there any reason it couldn't, in theory, be a state controlled venture? Especially for something as seemingly basic as "planting trees", I don't see where the corporate expertise comes in that the state could never replicate.
"The state will handle this" is not only a legitimate structure in totalitarian dictatorships, it's used across the developed western world for most public services.
You need infrastructure. You need petrol/oil to power the machines to build the roads so you can build the electricity to be able to build the internet connectivity that you need.
The nations are wealthy but if the profits are siphoned off by both corruption and the international companies that own the mines, then the citizens don't see any of that money trickle down to them.
In these countries the educated leave very quickly unless they're employed by any of the above.
They are inalienable rights first. It has nothing to do with citizenship. If I'm on US soil then I have (roughly) the same right as a US citizen. That's what so great about the Bill of Rights. (note there some specific clause for US citizens but they are labelled as such eg US president etc)
It's like you're saving for you holidays and your hourly rate goes down because of it.