We’re already seeing record lines at food banks across the country[0], and some are already warning of food shortages. We’re already seeing the negative effects, our society just doesn’t want to pay attention to what’s happening to the poor.
We’re at serious risk for community starvation not seen since the Great Depression.
But those don’t look like cheap cars. No one is perfect, but still it looks like some people set the wrong priorities between saving money and buying status symbols
Loan companies only give you access to cars that have a reliable resale value. Since Americans basically buy nothing but pickup trucks or SUVs you can only get loans for SUVs and trucks.
That's completely inaccurate. Considering the instant depreciation once you drive off the lot, loans are dependent far more on your credit history/income level than linked to any specific style of car.
That’s definitely true, but can you blame them? They’ve been psychologically assaulted and bombarded from all digital directions to buy those symbols. It’s not like Facebook and YouTube are showing ads that encourage people to save their money.
This goes way back than Facebook and YouTube though, I recommend watching Adam Curtis' "The Century of the Self" [0] if you haven't yet and are interested in how we ended up with modern consumerism.
Almost all of those vehicles are from the standard automaker labels, very few luxury vehicles in those pictures.
I see one Dodge Charger in the bottom picture, which is a little sportier, and I’m sure I missed a few others, but otherwise I completely disagree with your observation. I’m not sure what you expect poor people to drive if not GM/Ford/Toyota, etc.
When half the Fortune 500 apparently need a bailout three weeks after this hits, it might be time to adjust expectations of individual preparedness to be more in line with observed reality.
There might also be a gap between what people realistically prepared for and what happened. I'm not entirely sure, for example, if a family with both parents employed in (what used to be considered) stable jobs should have foreseen the possibility of losing both jobs at the exact same time?
In the end, this is a numbers game: you can blame the individual up to a point. But when some double-digit percentage fails to abide by your standards of personal responsibility, you have to accept the sometimes flawed nature of humanity and try to work with it instead of insisting on futile efforts to change individual people.
and there's no reason this has to happen. the same way we can print money to hand out to companies we can print money and buy food with it and give it out to hungry people WITHOUT causing inflation.
that doesn't, however, create more food -- and the current problem is really that food is starting to run out, as production has fallen by 20% at the same time as supply disruptions have caused another 20% to spoil at the source
It’s so hard to see that happening though, and if it doesn’t, we’re in trouble.
We still don’t have scalable testing in the US, which is absolutely vital to reopening the economy safely. Without that, we risk losing all of the progress we’ve made flattening the curve.
Then all of these businesses have to open back up and hope they’re able to generate income quickly enough to stay afloat, which isn’t a guarantee.
There are also a growing number of experts saying that we’ll be in flux for the rest of 2020 unless we establish that survivors can’t be reinfected, which hasn’t been confirmed yet. Even if some areas are able to open up early, the economy will continue to suffer to its global nature. We’re just in no way able to say it’s going to be normal in 2 months.
> Without that, we risk losing all of the progress we’ve made flattening the curve.
I personally believe that the worst could be done in many places.
New York was too slow to institute controls and stopped just short of catastrophe. But, it's likely (based on extrapolation from serological data elsewhere), that 15% of people in NYC are immune and 20% will be soon. A disease with an Rt of, say, 1.8 is still scary and still requires controls and distancing, but it's a whole different ballgames from one with an Rt of 2.5. (-0.5 Rt for reduced susceptibility, -0.2 Rt for seasonal effects, say).
> There are also a growing number of experts saying that we’ll be in flux for the rest of 2020 unless we establish that survivors can’t be reinfected, which hasn’t been confirmed yet.
The case reports we have and clinical experience suggest reinfection is very rare. The bigger question is lasting immunity. Will most people be totally protected for 3 years like with a typical cold coronavirus? Or can we expect more like the 5+ years seen with SARS-CoV-1? And even if people become susceptible again, will the disease be less severe?
I also believe that in the long run, 2019-nCoV will become "just another" endemic common cold virus, and will kill small numbers of people every year just like the other endemic respiratory coronaviruses (229E, OC43 etc) do. I bet those would be pretty fearsome introduced into an immunologically naive population. Which really sucks-- say, 10% more severe respiratory illness forever is not good. But I think it's the path we're on unless we get a truly terrific vaccine, and I don't think we can bet on that.
Thanks for your post. Every news story seems to say "12 to 18 months for a vaccine" as if it's a given, and I always think of all the diseases for which we don't have any vaccine despite many years of effort. I don't have any background in that but I'm hoping we can see some more clear-eyed discussion of the likelihood of that.
One recent report: Two hospitals in NYC did universal screening of 215 pregnant women admitted for delivery between March 22 and April 4th. 15.4% tested positive. Most of those testing positive (87.9%) had no symptoms at the time they were admitted.
Pregnant women go to hospitals for the antenatal appointments a lot though. And hospitals are full of the virus. You would expect pregnant women to be more likely to be infected than general population
In any case, I think the interesting things are: A) the share of infected people who will never have symptoms, and B) the share of infected people that have minor symptoms and will not be diagnosed. There's reason to believe that both A and B are significant. If they reach 90%-- which there's reason to believe they likely do-- it means that with a 1.5% cumulative case count you have more like 15% of the population having been exposed.
NYC's case count is 111k and we know it's very low even vs. symptomatic people. The population is 8.4 million people. This is 1.3%.
Serological data from a random sample of the German town of Gangelt shows that even a robust testing regime missed about 90% of the cases. The known per-capita case count at the time of the study was similar to New York City's, but 14% of the sample carried antibodies to COVID-19.
The German testing regime is and has been considerably better than what's been in NYC. I'm inclined to think that an even bigger multiple of the known case count may have been exposed in NYC than in Gangelt.
Separately, Iceland keeps their test data in two bins; one for people with a known exposure history and any (even minor) symptoms, and one for members of the general population without a known exposure history or symptoms. Analysis of this data suggests about 50% of people never develop symptoms and don't have any known exposure history, in an area with a much more robust testing regime.
> Serological data from a random sample of the German town of Gangelt shows that even a robust testing regime missed about 90% of the cases.
The results are disputed to say the least. A random sampling study in Austria found that the true number of infected is likely to be only three times higher.
> Analysis of this data suggests about 50% of people never develop symptoms
At the time of the test asymptotic. They did not say never develop symptoms.
The odds ratio approach was backwards-looking, so it means "never developed symptoms [in a couple of weeks]".
Seems Iceland is testing a lot more than NYC and that their focused testing (which is still broader than NYC's overall testing) misses ~90% of cases.
Note that the Austrian study I've read shows that current infection as detected by RT-PCR is about 3x higher than present case count, which isn't quite the same thing I'm talking about with the antibody tests in Germany. If you're referring to something else, please share. In particular, no one knows the sensitivity for RT-PCR of asymptomatic people and it might be rather low--- it's not exactly wonderful in people who are quite sick and presumably shedding more virus.
I'm hoping in the next week or so we have antibody data from a couple of US jurisdictions, including the SF Bay Area. It can really inform policy.
> Note that the Austrian study I've read shows that current infection as detected by RT-PCR is about 3x higher than present case count, which isn't quite the same thing I'm talking about with the antibody tests in Germany.
The reason Austria wasn't doing antibody tests yet is because the quality of these is not anywhere close enough to be reliable.
Stanford estimates 2.49% to 4.16% seropositivity, versus approximately 1000 reported cases as of that date-- so about 75x the actual reported cases. Of course, the way that Stanford recruited their sample means that people who were previously exposed might be more likely to report, so I think this overstates things a little, but...
If blood donors are representative of the population as a whole, that means about 94% of cases have been missed. Again-- with better testing than the US.
I visited four food banks to offer them food over the last two weeks. Three of them were completely out of food. Only one of them had an abundance of food.
On aggregate, food banks may be stressed, just like on aggregate the measure we use to determine economic fortune may be down only 3%. In reality, this means there are lots of individuals literally starving and making $0.
Those people are going to struggle to hold out for however long it takes.
A month or two may be true in aggregate. For many, simultaneously, their jobs will never return.
Wait a few months then let's see how bike sales go.