Recently, a new coronavirus has been causing many illnesses and deaths. The virus first became active in Wuhan, China, but it has already spread to the rest of China. Scattered cases have been identified around the rest of the world as well.
There are two important questions that are already being encountered:
- How much of an attempt should be made to limit the spread of the new virus? For example, should businesses close to prevent the spread of the virus?
- Should this disease be publicized as being far worse than flu viruses that circulate each year and cause many deaths among the elderly and people in poor health? The median age of those dying from the new coronavirus seems to be about 75.
Unfortunately, there aren’t easy answers. We can easily see the likely outcome of under reaction. More people might die of the disease. More people might find themselves out of work for a couple of weeks or more with the illness. We tend to be especially concerned about ourselves and our own relatives.
The thing that is harder to see is that reacting too vigorously can have a hugely detrimental impact on the world economy. The world economy depends on international trade and tourism. China plays a key role in the world economy. Quarantines of whole regions that last for weeks and months can have a very detrimental impact on the wages of people in the area and profits of local companies. Problems with debt can be expected to spike. The greater the reaction to the coronavirus, the more likely the world economy will be pushed toward recession and job loss.
The following are a few of my thoughts regarding possible overreaction:
[1] The Chinese coronavirus seems to be extremely contagious, even before a person who has been exposed shows any symptoms. The only way we can be certain to contain the virus seems to be through quarantines lasting up to 14 days.
China’s National Health Minister, Ma Xiaowei, has provided information that seems quite alarming. With the new virus, a person may become communicable shortly after he/she has been infected, but symptoms may not appear for up to 14 days. This allows the infected person to infect many others without realizing that he/she is a carrier for the disease.
Today, the United States and many other countries screen for the virus by checking passengers arriving on planes from affected areas for fevers. Given the information provided by China’s National Health Minister, this approach seems unlikely to be sufficient to catch all of the people who may eventually come down with the disease. If a country really wants to identify all the potential carriers of the disease, it appears that a 14-day quarantine for all travelers from infected areas may be needed.
Such a quarantine becomes administratively difficult to handle for the huge number of people who are likely to travel from China. Such a quarantine would make it impossible for pilots and other airline workers to make a living, for example. They would be spending too much of their time in quarantine to do the work needed to support themselves and their families.
A related concern is that person-to-person transmission is very easy with the Chinese coronavirus. We don’t know for certain how many people each infected individual infects, but one estimate is that each infected person transmits the disease to an average of 2.5 other people. With this transmission rate, the number of people having the disease can be expected to grow exponentially, perhaps for several months.
Based on these concerns, it seems to me that funds spent on trying to contain the coronavirus are likely to be largely wasted. The new Chinese virus will spread widely, regardless of attempts to contain it. At most, quarantines will slightly slow the transmission of the disease. At the same time, quarantines will be quite disruptive of commerce. They will tend to reduce both total wages and total output of goods and services of the area.
[2] Deaths from pathogens are part of the natural cycle. They help prune back the population of the old and weak.
We know that in ecosystems, one of the functions of naturally occurring fires is to clear out “deadwood,” to allow healthy new growth to occur. In fact, some types of seeds seem to require smoke for germination. When inadequate natural burning takes place, bushfires as seen in Australia and forest fires as seen in California become an increasing problem.
Deaths from pathogens seem to play a similar role in human economies. This is especially the case with pathogens that especially target the weak and old. Most flu viruses have this characteristic. Early reports of deaths from the coronavirus suggest that this same pattern of targeting the old and weak is occurring with this virus as well. As noted above, the median age of those dying from the new coronavirus seems to be about 75 years.
Since the 1940s, modern medicine has been able to develop antibiotics and vaccines to counteract the impact of many pathogens. This, of course, makes citizens happy, but it has the disadvantage of changing the population in a way that leaves the economy with a much higher percentage of elderly people and others in poor health. This higher level of elderly and medically needy people makes it easy for viruses and other pathogens to make their rounds, just as leaving deadwood on the forest floor makes it easier for fires to spread.
With this rising population of people who cannot support themselves, tax rates for the remaining citizens tend to become very high. Young workers may become discouraged because they do not have enough income remaining after paying taxes to raise their own families. In effect, they cannot support both their young families and the many old people.
Viewed from this unusual perspective, the operation of the Chinese coronavirus might even be considered a benefit to society as a whole. The world has overcome the impact of measles, typhoid, polio, and many other diseases. In some sense, it “needs” a new disease added to its portfolio, to replace the ones that have been mostly taken care of by modern medicine. In this way, pensions and other payments targeting the old and weak don’t become too great a burden on the young.
[3] If the Chinese coronavirus were simply allowed to run its course, without publicity that it was in any way unusual, somewhat less than 1% of the world’s population might be expected to die.
To see what would happen if the Chinese coronavirus were to run its course, we might look at what happened with the Spanish Flu, back in 1918. At that time, doctors did not have a way of treating the virus and authorities downplayed concern for the disease. The US Center for Disease Control reports that 500 million people, or one-third of the world’s population, became infected. At least 50 million people (about 10% of those infected) died.
We don’t yet know with accuracy how many of those infected will die from the current virus. A recent estimate is that about 2.3% of those who are infected will die of the disease (based on 107 dying out of 4,600 infected). If we assume that the percentage of the population that will ultimately catch the new virus is 30%, then the share of the world’s population that would be expected to die would be about [(1/3) x 2.3% = 0.76%].
The UN estimates that the world’s population can be expected to grow by about 1.05% in 2020. If this is the case, the effect of the Chinese virus would be to sharply dampen the population increase for the year. Instead of population rising by 1.05%, it would rise by only 0.29% (= 1.05% – 0.76%), assuming all of the deaths associated with the Chinese coronavirus take place within a year. While this would be a change, it would be a fairly small, temporary change.
All of these deaths would be tragic for the families involved but, in a way, they would be less of a problem than the deaths that took place back in 1918. At that time, mortality was high for healthy 20- to 40-year olds, making the flu particularly disruptive for families. The total percentage of the population that died was also much higher, about 3% instead of 0.76%.
[4] A major danger of the virus seems to be one of overreaction.
Today’s world economy is fragile. China, like other countries, has a large amount of debt. Debt defaults related to poor profits of companies closing their operations for a time and workers losing income could easily skyrocket.
Closing down transportation from China would risk pushing the world economy into a very bad recession. In fact, simply having a very large number of people out sick from work would be expected to have an adverse impact on the economy. Spending a large amount of money on hospitalizations and face masks cannot compensate for the loss of productivity of the rest of the economy. Thus, the tendency would be toward recession in China, even if no action toward cutting off travel were taken.
China is a huge supplier of goods to the rest of the world. In fact, in 2016, it used more energy in producing industrial output than the United States, India, Russia and Japan combined.
Figure 1. Chart by the International Energy Agency showing total fuel consumed (TFC) by industry, for the top five fuel consuming nations of the world.
China’s economy has been growing very rapidly since 1990. Figure 2 shows this one way, in GDP comparisons using inflation-adjusted US dollars.
Figure 2. GDP of China and the United States, computed as percentages of World GDP. All amounts in 2010 US dollars, as provided by the World Bank.
Figure 3 is similar to Figure 2, except the growth comparison is made in “2011 Purchasing Power Parity International Dollars.” This adjustment is made because typically the currencies of less developed nations float far below the dollar, in terms of what the local currency will buy. The inflation-adjusted PPP comparison compares output on a basis that is expected to be more consistent with what the local currency will really purchase.
Figure 3. Ratios of the GDP of China and the United States to the World GDP. All amounts in 2011 Purchasing Power Parity International Dollars, as provided by the World Bank.
On this PPP basis, China’s GDP surpassed the US’s GDP in 2014. Figure 3 also shows that the United States has slipped from about 20% of the world’s GDP to about 15% on this basis.
We cannot simply cut off trade with China, regardless of how bad the situation is. China is too big and too important now. The rest of the world desperately needs goods and services produced in China, in spite of what is going wrong from an illness perspective. China plays too key a role in supply chains of many kinds for the country to be left out.
Even cutting off tourism becomes a problem. The share of China’s revenue from tourism amounted to 11% in 2018. While not all of this would drop off, even a dip would lead to lower employment in this part of its economy. Jet fuel use would drop as well.
[5] A particular problem today is low prices for many commodities, including oil and other fossil fuels. These prices are likely to fall further, if China’s economy falters further.
We used to hear that the world would “run out of” oil and that oil prices would rise very high. In fact, if the people who were concerned about the issue had studied history, they would have figured out that a far more likely outcome would be “collapse.” In such a situation, prices of many commodities might fall too low. Revelation 18:11-13 provides a list of a number of commodities, including humans sold as slaves, for which prices dropped very low at the time of the collapse of ancient Babylon.
The problem is a different squeeze than a high-price squeeze. It is more of a growing wage disparity problem, with fewer and fewer of the world’s workers being able to afford the goods and services made by the world economy. This problem feeds back to commodity prices that fall too low for producers of many types. The problem is an affordability issue, rather than one of running out. I have written about this issue many times.
Prices of fossil fuels have been low for a very long time–essentially since late 2014. OPEC has cut back its oil production because of low oil prices. Several US natural gas producers have taken big write offs on natural gas investments. China’s coal production has remained below its 2013 level, because of low prices.
Figure 1. China energy production by fuel, based on 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy data. “Other Ren” stands for “Renewables other than hydroelectric.” This category includes wind, solar, and other miscellaneous types, such as sawdust burned for electricity.
If China finds it necessary to cut back on production of goods and services for any reason (excessive sickness within China, visitors aren’t traveling to China, tariffs, customers around the world aren’t buying cars), this reduction in output would be likely to further lower the prices of commodities. More producers would go bankrupt. Countries exporting products as diverse as oil, iron ore, copper and lithium might have economic difficulties.
Lower fossil fuel prices may lead to a cutback in their output, but it is doubtful that this cutback would be offset by an increase in the production of renewables. Falling fossil fuel prices would make the price comparison of renewables to fossil fuels look even worse than it does today. China has cut back on its subsidies for solar panels, and this has led to decreasing Chinese solar installations in both 2018 and 2019.
[6] The best approach might just be to let the Chinese coronavirus run its course. Authorities might also discourage stories about how awful the illness is.
Today, we seem to think that we can fix all problems. Unfortunately, this medical problem doesn’t seem to be fixable in the near-term. We should probably do as governments through the ages have done, which is not very much. We should not publicize the disease as being a whole lot worse than flu viruses in general, for example.
We should certainly look for inexpensive treatments for the disease. For example, there seems to be an effort to examine the possibility of using existing antiviral drugs as a treatment. It seems like an effort could be made to look into ways of treating the disease at home, perhaps using supplemental oxygen for a period. In time, perhaps a vaccine can be developed.
Individuals around the world should be encouraged to get themselves in as good health as possible, so that their own immune systems can fight off pathogens of all types, not just this particular virus. Common sense should be used in washing hands and in avoiding being with sick people. I doubt that it makes sense to encourage the use of masks, goggles and other protective devices.
We, as individuals, cannot live forever on this earth. We also cannot spend an unlimited percentage of GDP on health care: It becomes too high-cost for most citizens. At some point, we need to call a halt to the expectation that we can fix all problems. We live in a world with limited resources. We need to start lowering our expectations, if we don’t want to make our problems worse.
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rumors etc…
A co-worker told me today that there is a rumor that there is a person here at our place of work who has the coronavirus…
it’s a big place with hundreds of workers, so we’ll see…
I’m in the northeast corner of the USA and it remains to be seen if and when this will become publicized…
no need to panic! … yet… 😉
For most people coronavirus is no worse than a common flu. Up and about a few days later. It’s just a few who succumb to worse symptoms. In places where people have good immune systems and health care the morbidity rates are not bad. Still… mutations can happen as health authorities are aware of.
In fact, getting it early on might be advisable… Still, I hope it fizzles out somehow. I cannot wish others ill.
Oh brother! The flu has killed more than the corona virus! So much hype!!
How did the flu kill the corona virus?
Virus versus virus, what a great idea for a video game! Create your own genetically engineered virus, and unleash it on the competing viruses. Alternatively, if you do not enjoy watching viruses in skimpy clothing, watch “Venus versus Virus”.
Thank you, Gail, for your new post!😘 Just saw this for you all!
Health insurance premiums are headed way higher
Rick NewmanSenior Columnist
Yahoo FinanceJanuary 30, 2020, 7:55 AM EST
Some family budgets are stressed to the limit by the cost of health insurance and out-of-pocket medical expenses. This burden, unfortunately, is likely grow much heavier.
New analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model forecasts that the real cost of health insurance premiums will increase by 90% over the next 40 years, after adjusting for inflation and economic growth over that time. In plain English, that means paying for health insurance would take nearly twice the bite out of the family budget that it takes now.
The higher cost of premiums, relative to income, means fewer people will buy and more will go uninsured. The Penn Wharton model forecasts an increase in the uninsured rate from 10% now to 27% in 2060. “We’re going to have people dropping out of the insurance market, even when they get group insurance provided by an employer,” says economist Kent Smetters, director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model. “These are fairly significant increases we’re projecting.”
The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, helped lower the uninsured rate from nearly 18% to about 10% today. That’s 19 million additional Americans who have coverage since Congress passed the law. Many analysts think—or at least hope—the uninsured rate will stay at this new, lower level, and perhaps improve more.
But the Penn Wharton analysis predicts the opposite will happen, for two reasons. First, health care costs are growing faster than both the overall economy and wages, and the cost of insurance—premiums—must rise by a similar amount. So health care costs will take a bigger and bigger bite out of the typical paycheck for as far as the eye can see.
Where I’m employed our “pay raises” go to cover increase in health insurance and nothing else!
I would bet (million$) that the “uninsured rate” will be 100% by 2060…
I’m sure their “model” has no input(s) for the way that net (surplus) energy will have crashed by then…
they also have no way of modeling the effects of the coronavirus…
in the short term, many/most economic models could be thrown way off by a pandemic…
so plan accordingly… or not…
Remember way, way back during the start of Obama’s first term and he was asked why he concentrated on Health care reform. Straight out with ant hesitation he stated without getting health-care costs under control, the country would go bankrupt (is collapse).
Well, suppose the above study model just confirms where we are headed.
Never mind the other dozen or so other factors that will cause collapse..
Herbie, there is only one way to get health care costs under control: stop subsidising health care. For routine health care, let people pay out of pocket; for “catastrophic” illness, let them take out insurance. But far too much of today’s health care is wasted just making people die more slowly, which is a bet against Nature we must always lose.
It would also help if doctors income weren’t dependent on treating (and over-treating) patients. The more things a doctor can find to treat, the more money he/she can make. There is no motivation to encourage a healthier lifestyle.
Also, the US system with lots and lots of specialists doesn’t work well. Each one knows his or her subspecialty well, but often would not consider the connection to other specialties (mental health being related to diet, for example). I personally belong to Kaiser Permanente because the funding incentives are to hold down total costs. Thus, the tendency is to under-treat and encourage a healthy life style, rather than over-treat.
Gail, I definitely agree with you. My final research in Singapore was as part of their “smart health” initiative, which had three key themes. First, smart health is not about curing sick people, but about keeping people healthy. Secondly, primary health care belongs in the community, in local clinics staffed by first line care professionals who could filter out the 90% of problems that were easy to solve. And finally, that all treatment, at all levels, should be patient centric, not problem centric.
There is still a long way to go, but the project has enrolled a large constituency of supporters, including three major hospitals. It enrolled me after my heart surgery, which moved me from a routine checkup to the operating theatre in just ten days, and where I spent eight hours having a coronary bypass. (And in case you wonder, yes, I paid cash on the nail, EUR 30,000)
Well, that does it. Bernie Sanders for President. Medicare for All. Enough said.
the coronavirus causes yield curve to invert:
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/01/30/the-yield-curve-inverts-again-signaling-agreement-with-trump-that-rates-are-too-high/
“The gap between long-term and short-term yields has been contracting for weeks. The inversion on Thursday is likely to be at least somewhat related to fears of the coronavirus driving investors to seek a safe-haven.”
inversion = recession coming soon…
Oops!
Groan.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/men-more-prone-coronavirus-infection-women-study-finds
Words fail me on this one.
Dennis L.
In general, men are more prone to die of pretty much everything, except childbirth and breast cancer. This is why women have longer life expectancies.
I would agree, however, that they are making estimates on pretty small numbers.
From what I have read, the mortality rate of the Coronavirus is no where near the mortality rate of the 1918 Spanish Flu (I k now, it’s still early). The Spanish Flu mutated twice and it’s the 2nd version that killed so many people around the world. Currently, the seasonal flu in the US kills between 50K and 80K, depending on the severity.
“This higher level of elderly and medically needy people makes it easy for viruses and other pathogens to make their rounds, just as leaving deadwood on the forest floor makes it easier for fires to spread.”
Your argument here is that the ‘level of elderly’ sustain viral epidemics because they ‘makes it easy for viruses … to make their rounds.’ This statement is simply not factual. The spread of a new epidemic depends upon the numbers of vulnerable people and upon the numbers of their social contacts. The greater the vulnerability and the greater the numbers of social contacts, the faster an epidemic spreads. Vulnerability and number of social contacts change with age. It is school age children that are the most numerous, the most vulnerable (when vaccinated), and that have the highest numbers of social contacts. Next come working adults, followed by not working adults. Last are the elderly. The elderly are less numerous, less vulnerable (because of prior exposure and immunity), and have the fewest numbers of social contacts. In your forest fires metaphor, it is school age children that are the ‘deadwood’ that feed the flames of an epidemic, not the elderly. Here is an article on exactly this topic: doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009360 The Shifting Demographic Landscape of Pandemic Influenza.
You are confusing the potentially dire consequences of a virus for an elderly host, which tend more often to include hospitalization and death, with the population dynamics of how the virus itself spreads, which is determined by host population factors at the other end of the human age distribution.
You might be right. We talk about children bringing colds home from schools.
The elderly do get together and pass things around. Unfortunately, hospitals and nursing homes seem to be places they (sort of) get together and pass things around. (Catching illnesses within the hospital is a big reason for sending patients home as soon as possible.) They also seem to hang around doctors and dentists waiting rooms, cruise ships, and senior centers. If a visitor is a carrier without symptoms, inpatients may very well may catch the disease, and also pass it around before they get symptoms.
Gail – interesting term about clearing our dead wood. Yes, it looks like this will be the case regardless to the reaction to include clear out you and myself because we are baby boomers. You forget I nonlinear chain reaction to this virus. First, you misstate the fatality rate which is not 1%, but closer to 3-4%! And another key piece of data you left out. People requiring hospitilization is around 20%! Yes, this will simply overload the system and bring everything down. No worries about dying from the virus. When the system comes down most will die including old & young.
I was using a rate of 2.3 % as the fatality rate. I multiplied by 1/3, assuming that only 1/3 of the population would catch it. This was based on the Spanish flu experience.
It definitely would be good to have better data. I expect that a lot of “light” cases are not in the data base, because hospitals are not interested in young people who are only a little bit ill. My guess is that the percentage will go down, rather than up, as more light cases are included in the base.
The median age was 55 among the patients in the Wuhan hospital with a death rate of 11%.
The quarantine and lack of transparency is causing panic, since if feels like they are hiding something…and therefore it must be something very bad.
A funny personal note: I’m working with a female chef from the Wuhan region in China. She sent masks to her mother in China. I just hope that the mother doesn’t send bats and stuff to my friend.
As suspected the median age for the first 41 deaths is 49 years old. (Per Lancet)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext
This data is from the situation On Jan 2. It is reasonable to expect this to further decrease since obviously the frail will be the first to perish.
Please be careful with stats.
This study involved six deaths, out of a total of 41 admitted hospital patients. We don’t know what the base of total people coming down with this illness was.
The original group referred for the study included 59 people who seemed to have similar symptoms. 18 of these people were excluded from the study because they did not seem to have the active virus. A likely guess is that their immune systems had already taken care of the virus, so it had been cleared from their systems. They didn’t test for antibodies, so they really don’t know if these 18 were mostly over the virus or what. They were simply excluded from the study.
One of the things the article says is, ” Further studies in outpatient, primary care, or community settings are needed to get a full picture of the spectrum of clinical severity.”
We don’t know much from this study. It doesn’t tell us the ages of the six patients who died, for example. We certainly don’t know that the average age of those who died was 49 years old. The age of 49 was the average age of those screened and chosen to be included in this study. Most of them did not have other illnesses, but most of them did not die either.
Interesting essay on the origins of the Wuhan novel coronavirus.
https://medium.com/@siradrianbond/coronavirus-2019-ncov-part-1-d6a338eed7c5
I suppose it had to happen…
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/30/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-diversity-obama/index.html
An article from CNN complaining that Mr Trump’s coronavirus task force is dominated by Caucasian males, and totally inappropriate for a “diverse” society,
Being an old fashioned person, I thought that, if there was one profession above all others where people should be appointed for their competence rather than their chromosomes, it was the medical profession. It seems I was wrong.
So, for the “woke” generation: how many millions are you willing to sacrifice, by stacking your “expert” committees with politically correct incompetents? Or do you really believe that Affirmative Action can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?
Apologies for the rant, but to read a “liberal” article with so complete a disregard for human life was more than I could look away from.
While agree mostly with the rant.
Thing is at that level it is no longer the profession. It is the designated “managers” of the profession. How do you even determine who is best? IMO, it is all politics.
Which means I can see CNN’s point and President Trump’s classic problem, Optics. Is it get the job done or make it look good(and take extra time, maybe) while doing the job.
I really don’t see the difference between the people chosen and the ones that were part of selection pool. How many minorities, due to how the President is portrayed, would accept the selection? To be the “token(s)” whatever.
This is probably poorly communicated comment but the best I can do,
T2M
Thank you, T2M, and I agree. The media have turned politics into a circus, where blame slingers and virtue signallers are given a clear field of fire. There was something to be said, after all, for the closed, smoke filled rooms.
Did you intend to put a link up here?
The median age of fatalities is based on the first 17 deaths. Obviously the weak will be the most susceptible. This should not be presented as a meaningful statistic. At this point we don’t even know the infectious timing. Caution is appropriate.
The effect on the global economy is a huge concern. Most factories in the world if not in China, depend on component supply from China. This is a global concern.
We need a clear accurate understanding of this virus soonest.
We do need more information, I agree. But if only 4% of China’s population is in the 75+ age group, it doesn’t take a very large sample size to achieve statistical significance.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/coronavirus-by-the-numbers
Here are the latest numbers: “The death toll from the virus rose to 170 on Thursday, with a total of 7,711 infected. Over the past 24 hours, 38 new deaths and 1,737 new infected cases have been reported.” That works out to a 2.2% death rate.
1737 new cases in 24 hours seems like a lot but if that is amongst the sequestered populace then I suppose it’s contained?
I like what you wrote above, Gail: “We are at a point (or perhaps long past it) where we need to start choosing which battles we are going to fight. Fighting the battle to keep more elderly patients alive, and more already weak patients with other diseases alive, is a battle with a horribly low return for the energy/resources spent. Fighting this battle sounds like a worthwhile cause, but it is not one the world’s economy can afford at this time.”
I agree with that and think we should just open the floodgates so to speak. Let people travel where they want, mingle as they please, etc., to allow the virus to spread and cull those with weak immune systems. It would be a sort of litmus test; can one’s immune system fight off this new virus? If it can’t then that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it sets cut off point instead of the excess efforts currently being used to extend lives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/world/europe/italy-coronavirus-cruise.html
This new development goes right to what I was talking about, the idea of opening the floodgates: “CIVITAVECCHIA, Italy — Thousands of passengers aboard an Italian cruise ship were being blocked from disembarking in a port town north of Rome on Thursday over fears that a passenger might have contracted the coronavirus…”
So think of the knock on effect here economically from 1. this ship not continuing on its way, lost GDP, 2. lost GDP because thousands of passengers can’t get back to work after their vacation. And all of that due to 1 passenger with coronavirus symptoms?
One gross story per day.
The cruising ships are absolute nightmare, several cases reported of feces deliberately marked on table ware or inside the hotel rooms etc.. Not mentioning outbreaks of various diseases on board – it’s basically floating island city.
Sigh. Why would anyone in their right mind walk on board a ship that looks like it was designed as a high security prison? Even leaving aside that a crew of largely untrained third world labour have turned it into a floating disease park.
Death rate has to calculated from amount of patients that caught virus at that time, approximately 2 weeks ago, not the current cases. Those coming down with it now will be dying in a few weeks. Will death rate to about 10 percent, at least I read that somewhere.
Sorry for typos
“Death rate has to calculated from amount of patients that caught virus at that time, approximately 2 weeks ago, not the current cases.”
“The novel coronavirus’ case fatality rate is currently estimated at around 2%, according to the WHO on January 29, 2020. A prior estimate had put that number at 3%, between 2% and 4%). Fatality rate can change as a virus can mutate, according to epidemiologists.1 hour ago”
That was from a Google search. The current rate is estimated at around 2% or ~2% which is close to the 2.2% I had put in my post. If you have a more accurate percentage from a different methodology, or a link please provide it.
If this illness is like other communicable diseases, many people catch the disease and have hardly any symptoms. They get over them quickly without going to the hospital. These people are clearly missing from the data base. Any analysis of hospitalized patients, followed until their cases end by recovery or death, will give an estimate that is too high regarding the share of people who catch the illness and die from the disease.
There are a few other issues too:
1 . Virus mutations – unpredictable. Immunity to one version many give immunity to a later mutation. We might even luck out with a mutation that has a lower death rate.
2. Learning curve on treatment. Some else gave a link to a Lancet article discussing the treatment of 41 early cases. It talked about giving what I think of as Tamiflu anti flu drug and prednisone as treatments. These didn’t work. In fact, it seems like the article said that using prednisone seemed to be counterproductive. The health systems learns by trial and error. There are other antiviral drugs to try, for example. As one doctor or hospital figures out something that is helpful, the indications will be passed on quickly to others treating patients.
3. Who has the disease and who doesn’t.
Having a test for the illness that can be easily administered would be a huge step forward. At this point, in the US, samples must be sent to the CDC in Atlanta for analysis if someone wants to figure out whether they sample has the virus. Other countries no doubt have similar issues. Testing for antibodies in someone who is thought to have already had the disease can’t be done easily either. Without an easily administered test, about all that can be done is put suspicious people in quarantine for 14 days, or whatever. If such tests were available, it would be a lot easier to figure how the virus is affecting a sample area of the world.
So, let us get out an additional set of worry beads. This link reads like a bad science fiction movie; but the optimist in me thinks it has to get worse before it gets better.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/im-apocalypse-new-accounts-wuhan-detail-coronavirus-outbreak
If this is accurate, it is pretty bleak, psychologically it has to be very challenging. One has to wonder if the mass psychology will be one of hysteria or resignation. In the abstract one can talk about letting nature take its course, in the real world having someone come in from afar with the virus and move in next door to one’s family is a different matter with far different emotions.
I live alone and not in the abstract, should I get sick I shall live and die by canned chicken. We have been talking in the abstract, if it gets this serious, maybe those of us who like red wine would be wise to purchase some and ignore the dictum about not drinking it with a white meat. Funny, alcohol eases many stresses which may be why it has been around for so long.
Dennis L.
Unfortunately, I am not convinced that there is a whole lot that can be done to fix the problem. We cannot build a huge number of intensive care hospital beds around the globe for example.
Fossil fuels and modern medicine have allowed us a very unusual time in history, where epidemics that a lot of people die from have been uncommon. We have not recognized this. Sooner or later this privileged situation will have to disappear. The folks who have talked about “peak oil” have done us a disservice by not explaining what fewer resources per capita really mean. It doesn’t mean that we all get electric cars, and life goes on as before. It means that the problems of the past reappear. We have many more forest fires, for example, and we cannot afford to put them out. We build “renewable” homes, and they burn down quickly.
I agree, nothing to be done. To be fair to the PO group, I don’t think any of us saw all the ramifications, it is as you say a system, a self organizing system and they behave in very unusual ways.
If an article I have sited often is correct, predicting beyond 30 days is a fools game and simply cannot be done. Matricies, so much to learn, so little time.
Dennis L.
I believe the Ancients said that wine and beer were ‘gifts from the gods, to compensate for the inevitable ills of life’, and I’m not inclined to disagree.
Xabier, I’ll drink to that. In fact, I am drinking to that, right now. Dionyse akme, ya sas!
Dennis, I’m starting to get the impression that all your worrying will do you in long before any of the things we’re exploring here. I hope you’ll overcome.
More on oil as a transport medium.
Simple thought experiment:
Take various residues thought to be precursors to oil, e.g. algae. Duplicate assumed pressure/temperature conditions under which oil formed. If it is self sustaining, it will make more energy than it uses and the idea of algae farms works, instant perpetual energy. If it does not, where did the transformative energy come from when all that algae was made into oil? Add to the crude the energy needed to turn it into diesel, transport it to the farm and compare that to the energy output of the JPL engineer. A guess is getting close to break even, but where did the energy come from to do the original transformation? We all know ethanol is a net consumer of energy.
The 2011 OilPrice article sort of shoots down nuclear energy. A SA article indicates insulation of primordial heat(a useful, vague concept) by the earth which might hint that letting that heat escape via geothermal plants is not a good idea, Mars has no geothermal heat at first approx, nor does the moon.
If a batch of algae or whatever cannot be converted with a sunlight derived energy source, then oil is not ancient sunlight but a transport mechanism and a storage of materials that were converted by energy other than solar. Once the algae(or whatever) is underground, solar additions are non existent. What percentage is solar and what percentage is “other?”
Any ideas? A good refutation or spotting of a contradiction would be helpful in this train of thought. I don’t have a clue.
Dennis L.
The best use for fresh algae ever be it from pond or similar is to feed a chicken or fish.
Or as second best option toss it around plants as mulch/fertilizer. And don’t usurp it all, lets retain ~25% of algae on the water surface for the natural systems to balance out into normal function and renew again shortly. Everybody is happy from plants to insects to amphibians to humans.. Yep, perpetum mobile as long as the Sun reactor still shines..
Well, unfortunately, humanoids mutated into frivolous industrial crap worshiping crazies,
so few find joy and meaning in the above..
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Really became curious about this one: Energy from earth’s core and I found this reference with a quote.
“This is more heat energy than the most popular earth core model suggests, but still far less than the Earth’s total. Says Freedman (One of the authors), “One thing we can say with near certainty is that radioactive decay alone is not enough to account for Earth’s heat energy. Whether the rest is primordial heat or comes from some other source is an unanswered question.” Other sources — primordial heat left over from the planet’s formation, and possibly others as well — must account for the rest.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Energy-At-The-Earths-Core.html
Somewhere the energy to turn plants to oil arose, where? How much? A first hand approximation tells me that nuclear energy was necessary to have oil energy and without that original energy the oil would have been just so much entropy, or natural gas, or uncooked plant/animal mass, etc.
This is all because of the internet, I went searching for an engineer who asked an very uncomfortable question(population size) at the Boston ASPO meeting and he was told to basically not ask that question. He had a Ford tractor with solar panels on the roof, eccentric like most of us.
Thank Gail for the thoughts before that as she has so often raised intermittentcy, transmission, capital costs, and the idea that hydrogen is not an energy source but a transmission/storage medium. It appears to me that oil is the same thing except, how does one explain the moons of Saturn? Flying dinosaurs to space, or did they start there and fly to earth? Relax, the last sentence is meant as humor, we need some here at times.
Dennis L.
The incredible inefficiency of a fossil fuel based system.
Gail, thanks for the advice on the virus; I will let the chips fall as they may and be satisfied that buying a couple of cans of canned chicken leaves me well prepared. Maybe the world is a somewhat awkward balance; this virus is coming along and doing some housekeeping, there is an old saying “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” We can be at peace with this and thanks to Gail and others here I am at peace, I personally can do nothing to change things.
Now, the headline should get some attention.
Fossil fuels are very inefficient in totality. Some assumptions, approximations.
1. Half the energy stored is lost – bugs eat it, it escapes due to lack of cap rock.
2. The storage system itself takes much more energy than is produces, gravity and what not has to move large rocks over the plants, compress them, heat the goop and serve it up just right so it doesn’t turn into natural gas. (Someone help me here if I am incorrect, I am not a geologist).
3. It takes almost forever to make the batches.
4. On a total basis of energy in and energy out, it is possibly negative, of course it is negative, everything is negative save the original big bang – well that might be a stretch.
5. It is convenient and dense and has been relatively easy to access.
6. It is going, going soon to be gone.
But, it can still be a wonderful life. In the reference to the farm in Iowa using solar energy, maybe they are more efficient in totality than oil, if not, they appear at peace with themselves and they appear to be having a good time and life. Oil efficiency may be an illusion, someone like Charlie Hall has not done a total energy accounting – they call it bioeconomics or some such.
In the seventies I read the book, “Limits to Growth.” In spite of it, I lived my life well and avoided doing silly things like building a cave home – in the Quad Cities there was a development done that way. Maybe the book is wrong, not reaching for straws but the universe is expanding, it is not contracting. That book has been right in the details, but the world did not end, it is changing, well, that is more or less how it goes. There appears to be a guiding hand (this will not be good news to some academics), I don’t think that hand runs on oil.
Dennis L.
I would point out that oil and coal are both storage systems for energy. Natural gas can be also stored, but it is not necessarily easy. It helps to have suitable caverns to store it in. I don’t think that fossil fuels that have survived to our era are lost. It is only in comparison to what might have been available that some of the benefit of these fuels has been lost. Microbes eat it for example. We cannot begrudge other species for using fossil fuels. That is the way the world works. We have to share with other species.
The thing that kept hunter gathers from becoming farmers was a lack of a storage system for food (a form of energy that we eat). Once they figured out a way to grow grain, and ways to use it and store it, they could start farming.
Wind and solar are far less useful than they look at first glance because they have no storage system built in. We are absolutely dependent upon fossil fuels during the times wind and solar are not available, because batteries and pumped storage become far too expensive after the first tiny amount. We are especially dependent on fossil fuels in winter, when it is cold and dark outside. We are also dependent on fossil fuels to make wind and solar. So wind and solar are far less useful than fossil fuels.
Graham Palmer and Joshua Floyd have a new book out called Energy Storage and Civilization: A Systems Approach that is related to this issue.
Gail, both Mediaeval Europe and Edo Japan developed a simple, effective, and sustainable means of solar storage. They were called “trees”. One of the earliest applications was the New Forest in England, preserved by royal decree since 1079. Germany followed suit. And the Shogunate reafforested huge areas of Japan.
Of course, this also implies a sustainable population, much smaller than today’s. However, there is a natural solar storage system that holds far more energy that a forest: the ocean. Ocean Thermal Power could run the entire world, if we knew how to make good use of it.
The new Forest in England was set out by decree to preserve the energy contained in the bodies of deer and other animals for the sport of hunting them
the trees were incidental to that
Norman, I respectfully disagree. Yes, the King wanted his hunting preserve, but the ancient rights of the villagers to scavenge fallen wood and underbrush were explicitly preserved. In those days, it was understood that trees were not fuel; rather, what the trees no longer needed was a legitimate bounty.
We understood back then that one should not steal from nature, but take only what she is willing to give.
Gail I have to differ a bit with the title of this post: It is easy to underreact to the corona virus and it was jarring to read that there are good things in eliminating the “old and the weak.” What you are doing is drawing conclusions based on incomplete or absent data. The early tranches on mortality in China indeed showed that it was lethal in the over 65 crowd but that can reflect how it was initially spread. In fact Influenza is lethal in 2 other groups, the under 2 age group and pregnant women. These are not the old and the weak aged tranche. We do not know the lethality across the age spectrum of the corona virus. China is almost certainly under reporting. China happens to be a country of OLD PEOPLE and that fact alone could explain the spectrum. No way to know yet. The stuff emanating from the WHO sounds like it was emanating from the WTO, ie., the real danger of the corona virus pandemic is ECONOMIC. Global pandemics have the potential to could cut or kill economic growth. That would cut energy consumption from fossil fuels, cut CO2 emissions and be beneficial in the short term for the planet. China is the number one emitter and a crash in the Chinese economy could be a good thing. The most important thing is whether corona can be spread by asymptomatic carriers for say 5-7 days before they are ill as it appears to be. That fact will guarantee a world pandemic that is uncontainable and if it somehow makes it to the US, our economy would be overwhelmed because of our fabulously over priced medical system and of course all these supply chain issues and rampant international tourism and air travel are the perfect storm to allow its proliferation. Keep in mind Gail that you and I are in the over 65 group who could be snuffed out.
One thing you said is, “China is a country of old people.” I took the time to download the UN data estimating population by country by age group. These are the percentages of the population who are over the age of 75 years that I found for a few countries:
China 4%
India 2%
Japan 15%
United States 7%
Getting half of the first group of deaths in the 75 year + category when they make up only 4% of the population would be hard to do, unless the disease disproportionately adversely affects older people.
I suppose it may be lethal to pregnant women and babies under the age of 2, but we don’t have the data to show that yet.
You are right. We are both in the over age 65 group, but I don’t think we can spend our lives worrying about the possibility of an adverse outcome. We need to make the best use possible of each day we have.
I recently read “Empty Planet” (Bricker & Ibbetson), which posits that developed economies are not attaining their population replacement rate, due to low fertility. The fertility rate needed to maintain a constant population is 2.1, and no OECD countries attain that rate. The trend of developing countries is a rate that is dropping from, e.g. 5, to less than 2, and that trend seems to be the norm. Apparently UN population figures are extrapolated from historical figures, and do not reflect this trend of rapidly lowered fertility, which the authors explain follows universally as women migrate to cities, become educated and informed about birth control options, and pursue careers. So the natural purging that is found historically may be accelerated by this sociological trend; of note, also, is that government incentives to slow or reverse this trend are not succeeding. Also, the authors note that this trend, beneficial from an ecological perspective, will be detrimental from an economic one.
Just as my reading about Peak Oil, and your cogent analyses that have consistently provided deep insight and thoughtful reflection about the complexities of our energy based civilization, have greatly broadened my understanding of our plight, this book, and its data driven findings, is another huge piece in a very complex puzzle.
Keep up the great work. You continue to provide calm, reflective insight that is greatly valued by this community. You should consider outreach to a larger public, so woefully afflicted by real and alleged “fake news” (although I should hesitate to ask you to expose yourself to the vitriol that surges throughout the internet…. so, never mind 🙂 ).
The issue with population is primarily the death rate, which has been falling. Population has been rising, despite lower birth rates. OECD represents a surprisingly small share of the world’s population. Brith rates outside of OECD and China tend to be quite a bit higher than 2.1.
The UN doesn’t break out the OECD separately. It does have a “more developed” category. It represents 16% of world population. Immigration has been keeping up the population of the more developed countries, with only a few exceptions, like Japan.
Need to distinguish between birth rate and fertility rate, but this distinction is huge. There is a multidecadal lag between the drop below 2.1 fertility rate, and the next rate (e.g., 1.8) during which time the birth rate (e.g., births per 1000 population) will still drive up population. But a child in a single child family will likely only have one or two kids, not replacing their parents on average. Japan is a good model, but nearly all countries are following Japan, will just take awhile for demographics to reflect the trend. Even with low death rates, the lower fertility will be a game changer, as national age averages creep up.
Most Boomers I know roughly track this trend: my Mom had eight siblings. She had four children; her kids have six total, not even replacing us and our spouses (we’re in our seventies).
A new problem then arises when birth rates drop and populations age and respective governments decide that the cost of maintaining an unproductive old population is increasingly burdening national accounts, whilst simultaneously being depleted of skilled workers. China abandoned it’s strict one-child policy after closing down 10,000 schools. Germany almost embraced the flood of refugee migrants a while back because these migrants represented new factory workers.
I’m not advocating anything here, just saying this ageing problem is monumental in the minds of political and financial administrators.
The UN estimates for the world births and deaths, by five-year periods, are as follows:
Births, worldwide:
2000-2005 666,529,000
2005-2010 686,395,000
2010-2015 697,771,000
2015-2020 701,278,000
Deaths, worldwide
2000-2005 268,116,000
2005-2010 271,479,000
2010-2015 274,798,000
2015-2020 286,276,000
Births are still rising, and they are way, way higher than deaths. We still have a problem.
The expected surviving daughters per mother is down, but is still 1.099 worldwide, for the period 2015-2020. By area, Africa is the standout with 1.903 expected surviving daughters per mother! In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa’s ratio is 2.002.
Iraq is at 1.703 for the period 2015-2020. Palestine is at 1.735. Tajikistan is at 1.686. Pakistan is at 1.543. Guatemala is at 1.356. The area called Oceana excluding Australia and New Zealand is at 1.544. This includes a lot of smaller islands.
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Thank you very much for this informative post! I enjoyed reading it and learning from your thoughts! I have recently published an article on my blog about coronavirus and whether we should be concerned about the disease. If you have time, it would be great if you could check out my post and let me know your thoughts! Thanks.
https://thelevinelowdown.com/2020/01/30/coronavirus-should-we-be-worried/
I would observe that you say, “This virus must be controlled as soon as possible.”
This represents the thinking of a world with unlimited fossil fuels, or perhaps unlimited net energy, to use for whatever purpose we like. No one says, “The cold virus must be controlled as soon as possible.” Cold viruses, of whatever kinds, are what they are. We mostly live with them, and use a few ways to try to shorten their duration or lessen their symptoms.
We are at a point (or perhaps long past it) where we need to start choosing which battles we are going to fight. Fighting the battle to keep more elderly patients alive, and more already weak patients with other diseases alive, is a battle with a horribly low return for the energy/resources spent. Fighting this battle sounds like a worthwhile cause, but it is not one the world’s economy can afford at this time.
Charlie Hall has been fond of saying, “At an EROEI of 1:1, we can pull oil out of the ground and look at it. At and EROEI of 3:1, we can transport it to another location. He goes up in his (average) EROEIs with adding schools and medical care, and comes up to a need for a 10:1 or 11:1 EROEI for such uses.
We now have started many uses that are way out of the ability of the world’s depleted resources today to pay for them. Fighting this epidemic is one of the. Supporting huge numbers of college professors who spend most of their time writing academic papers (especially in fields like English literature) is another. Installing solar panels, plus all of the long distance transmission, plus storage batteries, plus all of the fire fighting capability to keep the transmission lines form often burning down, is another thing that we cannot really afford.
We are like kids with credit cards. We keep trying to buy more and more things that look good, but don’t really have enough payback to justify their existence. At some point the debt becomes due, and the whole system collapses because more promises have been made than can really be kept. The 80 year olds that have been kept alive longer aren’t really making a big contribution to the world economy. The academic papers aren’t doing enough of real value. The solar panels cannot repay their whole cost of existence.
We need to be changing our economy toward things with better and better paybacks, but we have been used to thinking that we have unlimited charge cards, and we can buy anything we want.
Very interesting post.
Charlie appears to have missed the power idea, we purchase power in kilowatt-hours, we do not purchase energy. Given an infinite amount of time, a small amount of energy is a large amount of power – it can move mountains and has done so.
Oil is not an energy source, it is a storage of energy in a concentrated form. It would be interesting to see a study of the energy embedded in oil secondary to storage; movement of the plates appears to be nuclear based which implies this energy is very ancient, it came from supernovas making the heavy elements. A guiding hand could easily have a super nova on his/hers/its workbench if that bench were the size of the universe.
That engineer/farmer may be much more efficient than nature, the cost of storage could be much less energy wise/power wise than oil . The guiding hand has isolated the nuclear reactor at the center of the earth, radiation shielded and if something goes wrong, it is already at the center of mass more or less – it won’t fall down over time. Tongue in cheek, whatever the guiding hand this is pretty good safety engineering.
This farmer and group do recognize the intermittency issue as well as the different durations in time between harvest and planting compared to planting and harvest, they are cognizant of power vs energy. Transmission is local – well, that should satisfy all those who want to think local and avoids expensive transmission costs.
This solution probably faces some of the same issues as did farming by horse; the amount of land required to feed the horses vs. the net output of crops. Crops for those who have per chance not thought about it this way are intermittent and we have been living on intermittent power sources since the beginning.
Dennis L.
Charlie Hall is a biologist by background. He studied how much of their own energy that fish could use when gathering food and still have enough left for other functions, including reproduction. If I remember correctly, the ratio was something like 10%.
He has tried to adapt this idea to energy, but it doesn’t adapt quite as well as a person would like. There are an awfully lot of assumptions of equivalence that need to be made.
“The guiding hand has isolated the nuclear reactor at the center of the earth, radiation shielded and if something goes wrong, it is already at the center of mass more or less – it won’t fall down over time.”
Gee, Dennis, you have just described Edgar Rice Burrough’s “Pellucudar”, a hollow earth lit by a miniature Sun at its exact centre. Made into a great trashy movie in 1976, with Peter Cushing as the scientist, Doug McClure as the hero, and Caroline Munro as the stone age local heroine not overencumbered with clothing.
And yes, the Earth’s internal heat cannot be primordial; it’s been too long. It is renewed by radioactive decay, which will last us a few more lifetimes.
Thank you very much for taking the time to write your comment. You have detailed some very interesting perspectives.
To summarise one of your main arguments, you are stating that older people don’t have a role in society. Although you dance around the point, this is what you are saying. They are a waste of space and we shouldn’t care about them. I unfortunately disagree strongly with this perspective. The senior members of society are highly valuable and form integral parts of families. Sure, my grandparents may not be contributing to the progression of society, but they are INCREDIBLY influential to my life and hundreds of others. Your overarching statement can be very harmful.
We need to control the coronavirus because it can turn into a world wide crisis. A report done by a UK Medical Agency in October predicted that an outbreak of Coronavirus could result in the death of 65 million people. That demands an efficent and effective response.
I agree that we are spending too much. We have limited supplies and we are currently using 1.7 times the size of earth. This is not sustainable. But we must make steps to solving this problems.
What do you think?
2000 years ago and more philosophers such as Seneca and those preceding him had already identified how one might both live a good life and die a good death. Both take courage. Gail it seems to me is suggesting no more than that. I agree with her, but then I’m already 80 so it’s easy for me.
However, Seneca would suggest that it is not an age issue.
So many things would be best just left to their own devices, but politicians don’t get votes unless they appear to be doing something. Which is a pity because most of what they do is counter productive and over-reactive I think.
Where Martenson makes sense in my opinion is in his recommendation to live where there are not a lot of people, and stay there. It worked for the folk of Eyam in Derbyshire (Wiki it!)
Anyway, well said Gail.
Living where not too many people live would work, if a person can get enough food, water, and cooking/heating supplies. With as many people as we have today, this becomes the deal-killer. We depend on boats and airplanes from around the world.
We know Seneca did not die a good death. He did live a good life, sucking up to Nero and participating in the Emperor’s orgies, but died when Nero didn’t need the philosopher any more.
One of the responses to the horror of the Black Death was a littlle book, written in about 1450, called ‘Ars moriendi’, “The Art of Dying”. You can find a discussion, the full text, and an interleaved translation here: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/10313/1/MM07840.PDF. Note however that it is mediaeval Latin, so you might have to struggle a bit.
Numerically and logically, I’d tend to agree with your analysis and comments. Dr. Albert Bartlett, if he were alive today, quite possibly might have said, as he did in his “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” presentation, that nature has a way of taking care of problems that we, as humans, are incapable of and/or unwilling to dealing with on our own.
That said, it’s unclear how the value of life is regarded by those segments of the population that see these kind of events from a moral and human point of view. If I were to venture a guess, they’d probably say you cannot put a price on human life – it should be saved no matter what the cost.
When a person has unlimited cheap fossil fuels, a person can put whatever high value on human life that he/she would like.
Coming from the insurance world, I am very aware of the concept of dollar value on human lives, since this is related to claim awards and settlements.
I have also discovered that researchers, when trying to decide how much pollution control to use, also use cost benefit analyses, based on [(number of human lives saved) x (value of a human life)] compared to the [cost of the mitigation]. The fact that Donald Trump’s administration is working toward less pollution controls is equivalent to the evaluations being done at this time use a lower “value of a human life.”
I found a 2008 United States EPA reference that says,
The EPA website now says:
I expect that Trumps’ reduction in EPA standards are based on lower cost of life limits, either directly or indirectly.
In the insurance world, the big claims are disability claims, because then the person will have ongoing medical expenses and likely won’t be able to take care of himself or herself. The person will have lost wages as well.
Death claims, in comparison, aren’t “worth much,” unless there is clearly a “deep pocket” involved. Private passenger auto policy limits vary. In Georgia, the minimum policy limit is $25,000 per person, $50,000 in the aggregate. Most people would carry $100,000/$300,000 limits or perhaps $1,000,000/$3,000,000 limits. Death settlements are usually within these limits. Lawyers typically will not get involved, because their fees, as a percentage of the settlement will be too low.
In the case of medical malpractice leading to the death of an elderly person, I would expect that it would be very rare for any suit at all to be brought. There clearly would be no lost wages. The award wouldn’t bring the person back. It would be a bother to show that some other treatment plan would have worked better. Lawyers would look for young, disabled “victims” to represent instead.
Thank you. Interesting insights.
Because of you, I am working like the dickens to be useful, probably secondary to descending from real Vikings, failure to row probably caused one to be dropped over board and recycled into cod.
Dennis L.
Sorry Gail. There are other forces operating in the medical malpractice racket. My last malpractice suit was settled for “only” $480,000. As an orthopod turned acting Medical Director of a rehab facility, it seems my partner had done a partial hip replacement (bipolar hemiarthroplasty) on a 60 year old black female who was a lifelong 3 pack per day chain smoker, alcoholic, a public charge her entire life, who refused to participate in her physical therapy, and therefore by Medicaid and Medicare guidelines, had to be discharged for non-compliance. TEDS support hose/stockings had been used post-op at the rehab to prevent blood clots (Deep Vein Thrombosis or DVT) These caused some blisters on the top of her foot and had to be discontinued. After discharge, she developed signs of peripheral arterial disease (PAD). Doppler (ultrasound) studies at the nursing home on admission had documented intact pedal pulses. The blisters on the top of her feet were not from PAD, rather friction from the TEDS stockings. Even the plaintiffs own expert opined so. It appears that she later threw some massive emboli/placque at the nursing home, and suddenly her foot became gangrenous. She required an above knee amputation. She was clearly a non-operative candidate for any bypass surgery. She then suffered an acute MI post op and went on to require above knee amputation of her remaining leg. The two internists who were supposed to be following her medically had failed to detect underlying PAD despite her history. My understanding is that the hospital, newly acquired by Community Health Systems, (NYSE: CYH) just paid rather than fight the case. Of course they didn’t care about me. I was leaving town. They protected the other doctors including the surgeon I am sure, as part of a “deal” which would scapegoat me entirely, along with the settlement being recorded only on my National Practitioner Data Bank. All the other parties were dropped. After all, I was a lame duck surgeon/Medical Director leaving MS. CHS is self-insured and had no trouble borrowing money, until their stock price tanked, but only after Wayne Smith CEO had loaded up the company with debt and made costly acquisitions including fraud riddled HMA ( about 12 hospitals in Mississippi,) and collected $123 million in salry and stock options in 2014. I have since had communication with an anxious mother who is one of the members of Face Book’s “Medical Error Transparency Program (METP)” who had her 12 year old son’s radial neck elbow fracture-dislocation treated way below the standard of care and asked me to review the case. The problem is, that orthopod, my own specialty, belongs to the biggest group in North Carolina, and because this group is “too connected,” no lawyer will touch the case. Google reviews are shadowbanned, just as my reviews under ” H Zilla ” of the KY Bar Association, KY Board of Medical Licensure, various lawyers and two hospitals, one in E-town KY and one E-City in NC. I think YELP has not yet scrubbed these, all based on easily sourced material already on public record. I even wrote a memoir, which bombed although currently only 4 five star reviews. (It’s too long, tedious, and depressing for anyone to read if they could even believe what happened actually did.)
https://www.archwaypublishing.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?Book=761645
Medical malpractice suits are indeed a problem. The fact that you were hired by the rehab hospital is what gave the possibility of “deep pockets.”
Once you get into a place where there are not deep pockets involved, lawyers have to content themselves with whatever money is available from the insurance company. Or, perhaps, garnish the wages of someone making minimum wage.
There can be no price placed on human life, because it is not for sale: it is a free gift. A gift that can at any time be taken back by the giver. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job i:21)
Gail,
As you have been saying all along.
Not very efficient to have all that PV and wind capacity sitting idle on those cloudy windless days.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/germanys-overdose-renewable-energy
Storage is necessary, somewhere above I have referenced a solar to hydrogen system on a farm – it was designed by a retired JPL engineer and is well done. It looks like it might work and be green to boot making nitrogen fertilizer and ammonia as a fuel also. We are paying wind farms not to produce, why not pay them to store their energy in hydrogen. Inefficient to be sure, but better than nothing.
It appears as though much of the military and its equipment is a make work project as well as an advanced research platform out of which have come some very useful ideas. It would be interesting to see if the money invested in very expensive tanks sitting in depots and gathering dust and such were placed into this type of renewable energy how much could be produced.
We appear to be going over a cliff, we all seem to accept that idea; perhaps some of us might turn to the left or the right, make a guess; it can’t work any worse than what we seem to be facing and it is a chance it could work.
It is amazing how when humans put their mind to it, I call it “will” they win at the last minute. Most of the time when a person is doing such things logic tells us it is impossible, but as in sports, one only has to win by one point.
None of this is easy, none of it is fun, none of it is the “old” way; but what do we have to lose?
Dennis L.
The payback is not sufficient when enough storage is added as well as sufficient transmission. Wind and solar also need batteries to help with rapid ramping issues.
No one figured out in advance what the system would need to look like, and what the cost/benefit of such a system would be. Instead, they modeled a little part of the system and waved their hands. Certainly everything would work out they way they wanted it to.
One can also say that about the historical development of the whole global system: each interest group or vested interest working out their small segment, with most factors excluded and no real foresight, assuming complacently that the whole would function well and more or less ad infinitum….
This seems to be a characteristic of human reasoning; and in small, primitive, non-technological communities it works well enough.
For us, however, it means we depend on a ‘gim-crack’ system, as Tim Morgan puts it in respect of finance; but in reality it applies to everything we have constructed.
“Dissatisfaction with democratic politics among citizens of developed countries has increased from a third to half of all individuals over the last quarter of a century, according to the largest international dataset on global attitudes to democracy ever made.”
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-global-dissatisfaction-democracy-high-reveals.html
“Thousands took to the streets across France on Wednesday to protest Emmanuel Macron’s controversial proposed pension reform.”
https://www.dw.com/en/fresh-mass-protests-against-pension-reform-sweep-france/a-52191746
I see that France now has five people known to have the new virus. The article indicates that more cases are expected in the coming days.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20200130/coronavirus-in-france-what-you-need-to-know
At least two are in intensive care: a man in his 30s and another man who is in his 80s.
Perhaps the Coronavirus will help fix France’s pension problem.
Maybe the answer to Macron’s prayers?
A coronavirus scare will clear the streets pretty quickly.
He can just go to ground in the Elysee Palace and enjoy all the wonderful cooking: I wonder, does he like his baguettes slightly over-done like Hollande?
Whatever his tastes, we can be sure they will be met just so….
He needs the help, Xabier.
“The French economy shrank unexpectedly for the first time under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron at the end of last year, as the country was disrupted by protests and strikes over pension reform.”
https://www.ft.com/content/f3088ca8-43f9-11ea-abea-0c7a29cd66fe
Yep, indeed these various recent election results and voter realignments are reaction to late stage cleptocracy soaked up ~democratic~ politics inside surplus plateauing or “managed decline” economy. If anti establishment leanings are approaching half of the voter pool and beyond we are near some serious threshold. Funnily enough most of these voters prior to that point did nothing, i.e. kept voting for the same notorious corrupt incumbents and evident swampers as long they were not yet badly shafted by the system, the fact their neighbor or coworker was destroyed in previous rounds ahead of them was not seen as their business..
That’s how road to ruin could be so slow and unless upper middle classes get affected on their living standard as well (now speaking of more affluent IC hubs), there is usually no meaningful protest or avenue of discontent to be mounted through elections.
But when the old structure is finally toppled, well it’s not ending there, as the fight for the proverbial bone continues among the existing wealth and its distribution. This cascades further and eventually results in way simplified system.
Well, in Spain a few years ago, a Conservative (ie Francoist) politician actually said: ‘Corruption? The voters don’t care about that: look, they keep on voting for us all the same don’t they? !’
That party dipped down badly in the wake of huge, scandals, but has come up again. Ditto the Socialists.
And then there’s the party which has a former terrorist and kidnapper in charge, (who actually tweeted ‘Welcome Home’ to a released ETA mass murderer) which has an irreducibly solid vote among morons.
Democratic politics can’t fix the unfixable, unfortunately.
“The US budget deficit will break above the $1 trillion milestone in 2020 as Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts and spending splurge add to an “unsustainable” debt mountain.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/01/29/us-nears-1-trillion-dollar-debt-milestone-unsustainable-trump/
“Back in May 2006, [the Fed] seemed truly to be on autopilot. But we now know that U.S. house prices were about to peak in the next month, while credit markets were boiling up. By making life so predictable for markets, the Fed had created the conditions for complacency and excessive speculation.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-30/fed-s-nothingburger-meeting-echoes-pre-crisis-complacency
“Fed officials, who conclude their two-day policy meeting Wednesday, may again have to grapple with the prospects of a slowing economy, if the bond market is right about prospects ahead.
““While the Fed may want to portray its 2020 rate policy as stable, markets are signaling that their bias should be to further easing,” Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, said in his daily note Wednesday.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/29/the-bond-market-is-starting-to-get-worried-about-a-recession-again.html
Let’s keep our fingers crossed. Maybe we can borrow some more money to fight the new virus as well.
“Can fear of a pandemic—apart from a pandemic itself—wreak havoc on global commerce? In a global economy and stock market heavily influenced by confidence and sentiment, there is nothing fake about the news of coronavirus fear.”
https://www.worth.com/fear-of-coronavirus-might-prove-lethal-for-the-global-economy/
“China has taken the extraordinary step of extending the Lunar New Year holiday — in some places by more than a week — in an effort to contain the deadly coronavirus. Some cities have also been effectively quarantined. That means major trouble for the world’s second biggest economy.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/29/business/lunar-new-year-coronavirus-economy/index.html
“Starbucks has closed half of its outlets in China to protect its staff and support government efforts to contain the coronavirus.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51276317
“Airlines based in North America, Europe and Asia are canceling flights to China as authorities there seek to contain the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.
“British Airways, United Airlines, American Airlines, Air Asia, Cathay Pacific, Air India, IndiGo, Lufthansa and Finnair have announced plans to slash the number of flights they are operating to China or stop flying to the country entirely. Other airlines are offering customers refunds.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/29/business/british-airways-coronavirus/index.html
“Google is temporarily closing all of its offices in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan as a result of the coronavirus. Other tech giants, including Amazon and Microsoft, have also taken action to protect staff from infection.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51276322
People are their most important resource, they have just demonstrated that; very interesting.
Dennis L.
“More than 6,000 tourists have been put on lockdown on a cruise ship in Italy on Thursday after a suspected case of coronavirus was detected on board the vast liner.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/coronavirus-6000-tourists-lockdown-italian-cruise-ship-200130120822687.html
Putting a ship with 6000 passengers on lockdown because one person is suspected with the new virus is going to kill the travel industry. The little companies selling travel insurance will go bankrupt quickly, I expect.
People who read about this won’t want to go on cruises.
I think it is ironic that the WSJ online has as its lead article, U. S. Economy Heads Into 2020 With Steady Growth.
Down the page, we see headlines such as, “Coronavirus Triggers Damage Control from Governments, Companies,” and “U. S. Stocks Slide on Virus Fears.”
Extending the lunar holiday is certain to reduce China’s output during the January-February period.
The commenter on Worth has hit the nail on the head. The problem is coronavirus fear, not the actual disease. We have many other issues that we should be much more concerned about, such as whether we are really eating a healthy diet and getting enough exercise.
“[3] If the Chinese coronavirus were simply allowed to run its course…”
Hmm. Going to have to disagree with you on this one Gail.
Perhaps jump over to Chris Martenson’s work over at Peak Prosperity – he’s doing some pretty informative Coronavirus updates lately (I believe he’s got a background in pathogenic biology, so he may be more on point than most?), one being released just earlier today.
https://www.peakprosperity.com/coronavirus-update-the-calm-before-the-storm/
From that video there were two things I’d like to point out that I think tie back to your article:
First, Chris points out that you can’t just take the total deaths and divide by the confirmed cases we know of today – you have to compare to the number of cases 7 days ago (apparently that’s how long it seems to be taking for someone to die from nCoV?) to get a more accurate death rate % figure. Also, the 2.3% death rate assumes that the data we currently have isn’t being manipulated and/or suppressed in some way (forgive me, but I struggle to believe that China is being completely transparent with their figures/data).
Second, Chris does present some (frightening) numbers as to what we might be able to expect if the coronavirus continues at its current rate for another 30 days – the numbers of infected could be higher than 100 million, with 20+ million “severe” cases with complications.
Chris mentions that in the US, the number of ICU beds are only in the 100,000+ range, many of which are already in use. One has to wonder how many people would actually get access to ICU care, and without it, how much higher the death rate % might spike (which made me start to think that comparing nCoV to any other “contained” outbreak we’ve had – SARS, MERS, etc. – is actually a fools errand, as the outcomes of “contained” outbreaks are likely to be exponentially better than the outcomes we’d witness when our system is overwhelmed with sick/dying). It that situation, you might even see a greater growth in the death rate % of people who we would assume are at less risk of dying (i.e. 75+ year old individuals with health complications may be goners even with ICU access, but perhaps there are many middle-aged semi-healthy individuals who currently have such high chances of survival due ICU and/or access to medical professionals, which they would lose if the system gets overwhelmed).
Even if quarantines ultimately fail in preventing the spread of nCov, they might slow it down a bit, and that could make the difference when it comes to the risk of the system being overwhelmed by a sudden influx of sick/dying (not to mention that slowing things down might also give researchers more time to come up with vaccines or at least more effective treatments that help reduce the impact of nCoV).
You even recognize this in your article when you say, “In fact, simply having a very large number of people out sick from work would be expected to have an adverse impact on the economy”; by allowing nCoV to spread so freely we might actively be causing the greatest number of people to be sick/dead at one point in time. Perhaps another way to think of it is in terms of flows or flow rates, if that makes any sense?
While I’m sure your analysis of how bad quarantine (or an overuse of quarantine) may be for our financial / energy systems is sound, I’m thinking you may be downplaying/discounting the potential danger of nCoV should it be allowed to spread so freely.
To be fair, I’m no expert and that’s just my (lack of expertise) opinion…
Cheers,
-GBV
Thank you for the update. Here is my takeaway: “Our goal is to provide timely and science-based clarity”.
Most laudable. So why is the site saturated with videos of an old mumbling guy who cannot keep on topic for more than 30 seconds at a time? Home videos are probably the most *unclear* communication method ever invented. And my exit point: the section “How contagious is the coronavirus?”, which seems to be an advertisement for several hundred dollars worth of somewhat dubious medical equipment. And which tells us to wash our hands after touching a doorknob. And then, presumably, opening the bathroom door…
Thank you, but I will trust my immune defence system; and if I die, I shall die a man, not a mouse.
No criticism of you is intended GBV; you have done us a service and I thank you.
My experience as a physician for 30 + yrs, especially having made daily visits to the emergency room, ICUs, as well as the subacute floors formed my opinion years ago that our current system of medicine in the US is so clogged with bureaucratic BS and dependency on a limited /controlled number of anticipated steady-state emergency room visits that any sudden stress from a pandemic would overwhelm the system. People would be stacked up in emergency rooms or in ambulances in perpetual transfer to the next available bed at the next facility willing to accept the patient. This would only aggravate the situation.
Gail is absolutely correct on this.
I think you are right about the system being easily overwhelmed.
I read a Fox News article on my cell phone saying that in Wuhan, patients who are young and not very ill should simply stay inside and take care of themselves. In most cases, the illness will go away by itself. The system cannot handle having all of these young, not very ill patients flocking to the emergency rooms too. I expect the percentage of people with the illness who actually die from the disease is likely overstated because these would-be patients are left out of the denominator.
I did listen to some of Chris Martenson’s audio and video material, and this material made it even clearer to me that there is no way that we can actually do much to stop this virus. It also made it clear to me that if we would want to personally stay away from the virus, we would need to stay at home and wear goggles and a mask if we are ever to go out. This condition would go on for a long period, so we would lose our jobs. It would be no way to live. Furthermore, if we stop to think about it, the disease he is warning us about has little chance of killing most of us. We spend our lives living in fear of something that is much less harmful than we are told.
Yes, it does spread quickly. We just have to live with it. See if there are anti-viral drugs we can ramp up, to somewhat mitigate symptoms. If need be, we may have to ration treatment that is available, giving it first to health care workers. After that, I suppose parents of young children should be high on the list.
We have convinced ourselves that we can do more than we really can do. We are not really the top-level predator.
Modern medicine has probably been a major factor in increased lifespans, though I’m not sure that older people are actually healthier than they used to be – somehow, I doubt it, if it wasn’t for plentiful drugs to mask some of the conditions and keep people alive. However, I think it’s probably too early to give a definitive answer on which type of person is being killed by the virus. 75 years was the median age in that link that Gail gave though the actual ages varied from 48 upwards and there have been another 30 deaths since then. Just how dangerous the virus is may not be known for some time and I’ve heard it could mutate, making it more dangerous – mutation is especially likely if it spreads quickly.
Whether the virus should be left to run its course is a moot point, though, since modern societies were never likely to do that. As an older member of our species (mid 60s), I’m not sure if I’d agree with that course of inaction though I am fairly healthy and not on drugs.
Letting it run its course would also have an impact on economies, of course, especially if it remains so infectious.
Whoops, just checked and another 30 deaths are now reported. That’s a steep rise in the last couple of days.
I see India and Philippines now have infections. Any hope of containing this infection should be long past. We want to do what cannot really be done. All we can do now is damage control.
With the rising complexity of the system, there are rising energy requirements on the human beings. These rising requirements transfer into the higher energy consumption for the protection of individual bodies, leaving less energy for wider measures. Thus, we, as a species, lose control over our wider environment, which is the reason for the rising concentration of the human species in the cities.
We need better nutrition and better healthcare to fight other species, especially highly flexible viruses.
I am afraid that the majority of the people can not cope with these requirements, which means that, besides the ageing population, we are heading into serious problems regarding low productivity.
There is no way that the bright predictions about how fast and easy the future will be come true. Instead, the future is going to be less productive and slower. The growth comes to a halt. This will be shock for many who await effortless and easy future. The reality will be an accumulation of various obstacles which will hinder any ambitions regarding the progress of the human and it’s dominance whatsoever.
We, as a species, are becoming weak. We are not able to handle more, but less.
I am afraid you are right. We need to scale back our ambitions, but we really cannot. We expect and demand more and more. This is the issue.
The models that modelers put together are totally unrealistic, but virtually no one understand this. They look “scientific.” They tend to suggest that approachs can be solutions which really cannot be solutions.
In some sense, average EROEI needs to go up, not down. Society becomes less and less able to make the fixes to the economy that we think are necessary.
If nature does enough pruning, in a sense it might help the system, though. Not as many old, sick people to take care of. More resources per person for those left.
Okay, enough doom and gloom, as the person who believes there is always a tomorrow, take a break on this one. The downside of all this is the man who owns this farm is bright to put it modestly, you can read it if you so wish. It is intriguing and right now installing my solar arrays is looking as though it might be a good insurance policy, but making hydrogen, ammonia, running a tractor, fertilizing the land and all from the sun, wow, what is not to like? We are talking green here, a true double entendre.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-retired-jpl-engineers-journey-from-space-probes-to-carbonneutral-farming
The man is not a loner, he had quite a team to do this; for some of us so inclined, it does look like a nice hobby for an eccentric. Now, where are those applications for the subsidies?
Dennis L.
Add on to above.
http://solarhydrogensystem.com/the-project/about-the-team/
Everything in life is a team, a community. This does look like fun’ interesting, positive people, interesting ideas, projects that are emotionally satisfying. Maybe it goes nowhere, but it would feel good going there. JPL did do some things that people said couldn’t be done.
All the best,
Dennis L.
WOW!!!!!!!
look at all those photos of their high tech equipment…
this may be “carbbon neutral” but it is entirely managed because of the existing worldwide fossil fuel network…
sure looks like it takes a lot of money to be “carbbon neutral” as well…
it is easier to have fun when you have lots of money…
This sounds like an article IEEE writes for its audience of readers, without really understanding what it would mean to get along without fossil fuels.
IEEE would like aspiring engineers to think that there are a lot of jobs available in making the world carbon neutral.
Gail,
I agree with you completely, but emotionally it looks like a great deal of fun. Intellectually it would be a blast and David is right, it looks incredibly expensive, but this man did work for NASA as a very high level engineer, federal pensions were 75% of final when I was at the VA in the seventies. This is a farm, it is all deductible , and most likely there are generous subsidies to boot. Reading the general site, Iowa has up to 32K of loans with zero interest. Invest today, get a subsidy on one’s taxes, roll over the loan until tomorrow.
We on this site look at reality in such an honest manner, sometimes it is nice to feel good, do something with a very positive, fun group of people. Too often the greens for want of a better word are so angry. Politically this is what many want, large banks are getting behind the effort if press releases are to be believed.
Someone asked in effect “Who will break?” I replied, “I don’t break, but I have been bent pretty good.” If we as individuals are going to survive, we will need to be useful as well as offer a positive outlook on life, even if it is not exactly as in the articles, we need hope, we as men need something to build, it is what guys do when they get together. Some build race cars, some build hydrogen plants; these guys around the table are smiling, they are having a good time.
Dennis L.
I thought the cover image was hilarious:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/magazine/2019/November
You might not get it if you’ve never driven a tractor….
(H2 powered crop crushers, what will they think of next.)
It is eerie how empty the Wuhan streets look. What are people doing for food? No one shopping for food or going out to eat?
of course, they are scavenging for bats, rats, and snakes…
perhaps unseen because at night…
so they literally are “going out to eat”… 😉
hmmmm… the other day was Chinese new year, and now it’s the year of the rat…
Lack of availability of food is a concern of mine as well. Homes tend to be small. I cannot imagine that people have large hoards of food for contingencies, although they may have a reasonable sized-bag of rice.
When the plague hit Venice in the late 16th-century, killing 25% of the population, (about 47,000 people) the authorities tried to extinguish it by confining everyone to their houses for 2 weeks; but they gave advanced warning and made sure everyone could stock up on food and firewood beforehand. In the absence of any effective treatment and with high infectiousness it was a good try.
Marking the doors of plague houses with a cross drawn in the blood of the occupants was perhaps not so inspired an idea……
“Deaths from pathogens are part of the natural cycle. They help prune back the population of the old and weak”
Gee thanks. I’m old and weak.
I expect a massive overreaction. What else would you get in the age of Facebook and Twitter?
What was the (over)reaction to the Spanish flu?
I am not sure that we know in detail.
The US Center for Disease Control says,
WIkipedia says:
Wikipedia later says,
I thought this was interesting:
In 1918, even the super-wealthy were used to seeing their children and spouses die prematurely of typhus, TB, etc, with doctors powerless to help. It crops up time and time again in their biographies and memoirs.
Even something as simple as an infected blister after a day of playing tennis might take out the cherished eldest son from a rich family.
The hardness and even brutality of everyday life – for the mass of people – also explains in many ways how soldiers stood the horrors of the trenches and coped with mass deaths: most of them had seen horrible family deaths already.
The bubble we live in, and our expectation of a very long life, is unprecedented.
The blister happened to Calvin Coolidge’s older son.
Yes, quite right – they were powerless to do anything despite the best physicians.
I actually agree with the pruning back.
The corona-disease seems like a proper way of dying to me. Personally I would prefer a short sickbed over suffering for years from Alzheimers or cancer.
I agree. If we have to choose a way to die, a fairly quick death would seem to be better than many other choices.
If Gail were to start a new political party, I wonder what its name would be.
1] The Euthanasia Party.
2] The Swiss Clinic Party.
3] The Teensy-Weensy Bit of Ethnic Cleansing Party.
4] The Total Genocide Party.
I am afraid I might be one of the folks missing.
The world cannot handle this number of people. I am guessing that more than 50% of people will need to leave. Just by the law of probability, there is a significant chance I won’t be one of them.
British Airways has just announced ALL flights to All destinations to and from China are CANCELLED.
The question is not one of are we overreacting rather it’s ‘What are we not being told’
These draconian measures were not suggested even at the height of SARS.
The impact of the virus along with the reactions, is starting to have grave implications and not only for China – see https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/casinos-airlines-tumble-as-hong-kong-stocks-resume-in-punishing-fashion-15223323
What is it that inspires so much fear that governments risk collapsing the economy to fight against it?
Or is the big picture one of the end of civilization is at hand and this virus is somehow related to that upcoming event?
Perhaps it is engineered to mutate and kill all who are infected allowing them to avoid the misery and suffering that is guaranteed when the oil age ends?
That’s an ‘out there’ theory but it would not surprise me is connected.
“These draconian measures were not suggested even at the height of SARS.”
yes, we can’t be certain that the response is an overreaction…
but the feeble available data suggests that there is an overreaction…
so…
we may be seeing a lose-lose situation…
there will be an economically devastating reaction AND the virus will still spread worldwide (in spite of the huge preventative efforts) as much as if there was no effort made to restrain it…
that’s humans for you, making 180 degree wrong decisions…
that’s also quite darkly entertaining…
Cancelling all airline flights from anywhere to anywhere might actually work, but nothing else will. The virus has already spread beyond China. So the next flight from Australia, or Thailand, or France, might carry a few billion of the little critters.
Stable door; horse.
More than a little late!
British Airways cancelling all flights to and from all destinations in China is a little over the top. This kind of action has to hurt the profitability of the British Airlines. Now, all of the planes are sitting around empty.
I corresponded with a couple of my friends in Beijing, China. They seemed to be seeing the same numbers regarding illnesses and deaths that we are. Both of them said that they did not expect to be coming to America this summer. When relationships were less frosty, they might have attempted to come to the BioPhysical Economics conference here this summer.
One of the reasons they cancelled the flights is because the planes would be flying with very few passengers because no one in their right mind would want to go to China now. Lufthansa Swiss and Austrian are no longer flying in or out of China either.
I suspect we are not getting the truth out of the CCP (as usual)
Our view now of ‘in their right mind’ is what is getting us into trouble.
Illnesses have to be thought of as a part of nature. This one needs to be equated to the common flu. We have told ourselves that we have the ability to overcome all problems, but we don’t.
Not to hijack this thread but the FED announced today that their goal is still to create inflation?! Can they do that ? Or do they end up just inflating the stock market and the housing market as they have done so far?
they haven’t been able so far to create a little more inflation, so why should their continuing feeble efforts to fight decreasing net (surplus) energy be any different going forward?
housing markets will be crashing, but the stock markets will be kept inflated until the very end…
I am not convinced that the FED can really create inflation. It seems like wages would need to be growing more rapidly than the supply of finished goods and services, pulling prices up.
If the number of people participating in the labor force is rising rapidly, as was case in late 1960s and early 1970s, and their wages were increasingly being leveraged by more fossil fuels, the conditions seemed to be right for inflation.
This is one chart from my collection of old images. Rising after-tax per capita income seems to be associated with inflation:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/growth-in-disposable-personal-income-compared-to-inflation.png
This is another chart:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/growth-in-us-wages-vs-growth-in-inflation2.png
It seems to suggest that back before oil supplies became constrained, growth in non-financial debt (say, investments by companies and debt-based purchases by individuals) was associated with growth in wages (which in turn, might feed back into inflation). But after oil prices started bouncing high, this relationship disappeared. It just took more debt to do the same thing. It became very difficult to use debt to raise wages.
I think that most “inflation” we have been seeing is inflation in asset prices, coming from lower and lower interest rates.
This is tricky territory, since such concepts are perceived as genocidal by average people. The author must be over 70 but that adds objectivity to her arguments.
I think Peak Shale (the real Peak Oil) is the best hope for mass-downsizing and it could happen any year now. Few will be ready and the blame will fly, along with bullets in gas lines.
https://falseprogress.home.blog/2018/01/24/why-do-people-squander-oil-and-other-finite-resources/
I see this is your blog you linked to.
If the economy weren’t a self-organizing networked system, what you are saying would be right. As it is, there are two different limits (a) a high price limit caused by too many buyers relative to available oil and (b) a low price limit caused by an “affordability of end products” problem.
Right now we have a problem of type (b) above. All of the people who waste energy are helping to keep the price from sinking farther than it has. We should thank them.
Beyond everything else (as usual), Gail is absolutely right that by far the most viable – effective, efficient and affordable – way to counteract the spreading and deadly outcome of this alleged pandemic is to take care of one’s immune system.
Besides the rather obvious (but seldom practiced) healthy diet and physical exercise, regular immersion in natural environments, especially forests in the great outdoors, seem to be particularly effective in this regard, even in the short term and with lasting effects (as well as feasible and affordable, as it would take only one’s free time) https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.24741
Much more complex issues aside, such as demographic trends, aging and urbanization, in this special circumstance regular immersion in forest areas could reveal decisive on an individual level, as well as could help alleviating the burden of healthcare costs (not only vs coronavirus).
You linked to an interesting academic article whose abstract says, “This study suggests that exposure to forest environments might enhance the immune response of NK cells and activating NK cells in humans.”
The Atlanta area (where I live) is very spread out, so there so tend to be wooded areas everywhere. I know I saw a deer outside our kitchen window a few days ago. Garden shops feature products that are supposed to keep deer from eating people’s plants. So perhaps we have a little of the forested area, right around us.
Absolutely right, Gail.
Thanks!
Bill Gates thinks a coming disease could kill 30 million people within 6 months — and says we should prepare for it as we do for war
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/27/bill-gates-in-2018-world-needs-to-prepare-for-pandemics-just-like-war.html
Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavirus-pandemic
Just 30 kilometres from where the coronavirus originated, there is a mystery lab one expert claims is part of a secret biological weapons program.
/The Washington Times /quoted former Israeli intelligence officer Dany Shoham as claiming The Wuhan Institute of Virology is part of a secret biological weapons program.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/mystery-lab-next-to-coronavirus-epicentre/news-story/3e5a32fe77263fe8ca81b091cc8d9c42
Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program
Radio Free Asia last week rebroadcast a Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory, known the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-link-china-biowarfare-program-possible/
Australia, which in the last 10 years has been turning into a Chinese immigration colony.is subservient to China to make money with commodity exports. The government in Canberra was so stupid to allow planes from Wuhan and the rest of China to land here.
When looking at empty roads in Wuhan and other cities, this looks like a peak oil scenario.
Low oil prices due to less oil imports by China will reduce available oil to the rest of the world
Oil reserves and resources as function of oil price
http://crudeoilpeak.info/oil-reserves-and-resources-as-function-of-oil-price
And by the way, OPEC’s oil production is on a bumpy plateau since 2005, IRRESPECTIVE of oil price. ME OPEC is making us believe – in a tricky public relations campaign – that they are voluntarily cutting production while actually they can’t produce more oil.
In any case, if there were an oil glut, Iran would suffer most and we can expect more action in the Persian Gulf.
Article #1 Regarding Bill Gates, I would point out that 30 million is 0.3% of the world’s population. It would be far less than the expected natural increase of the world population over that period. Bill Gates needs to read and understand my article.
Articles #2, #3 and #4. I have seen allegations before that the virus was engineered in China. I have also seen allegations that it was engineered in the US. Whether it was engineered or not is in a sense irrelevant. The world does not at this time have a huge amount of resources to spend trying to mitigate the problem. It is tempting to think that we can fix the problem, but I don’t really think we can.
Iran has a lot of oil to sell. In a sense it has a glut of oil. But the US doesn’t want it to put the market, for fear it would drive the price lower. The big problem during the Great Depression of the 1930s was low oil prices and a glut of oil. The issue, then, as now, was affordability. Lack of affordability is what brings the system down.
That Iran has a lot of oil (reserves) is an untested assumption
The Truth Behind Iran’s “Massive” Oil Find
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Truth-Behind-Irans-Massive-Oil-Find.html
If the price of oil is high enough, it is amazing what technology can get out of old fields. It is easy to overlook the role price plays in the amount of true reserves.
At a low oil price, pretty much every country’s oil reserves are overstated. I see that WTI is at 52.33 and Brent is at 58.64. I expect these prices to keep dropping.
Folks, if you believe anything an “Israeli intelligence officer” tells you, well, I have a Western Wall to sell you.
We all know that an uncontrolled new disease could easily wipe out a huge slice of humanity. Some would say that’s good for the biospsphere. But it’s a monstrous negative reality for the species. How can we citizens know the risk in the case of coronavirus? We can’t. Not knowing this, we can’t know if this outbreak is being partly used to affect the China-versus-US trade war. Though we may suspect that it is the case.
Being a flu like pathogen I suspect it will subside as the northern hemisphere warms up in Spring. Then we need to watch for it transferring to the Southern hemisphere, as pandemic flus tend to do.
I’m not sure that the new disease is a “monstrous negative reality” for the species. The world’s biggest problem is overpopulation. Epidemics have often been part of collapses from the beginning of civilization.
A smaller population is left after the epidemic, but it is, on average, a healthier population than before the epidemic. There are more resources per capita after the epidemic. Young people have more job opportunities.
The situation is a lot better than people starving to death or killing each other with weapons, because wages are too low for nearly everyone.
Yes, my terminology was in reference to the headspace of medical researchers whoa re freaked out by the fact that one day a ‘killer disease’ will break out before they have time to develop containment for it. I think such is on the cards.
Starving to death is less of a concern due to wages. I recently saw this.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/01/world-supply-is-increasing-faster-than-population-growth-for-a-better-world.html
For what it is worth.
Now disruptions in transport is more of a concern. Even if it is getting fertilizer and fuel to producers. Not only the food to the people who need it.
T2M
world food supply increasing faster than population?
= overshoot…
how is that making a “better world”?
of course, humans are already in overshoot…
such a positive uplifting article…
this seems to concern the waste product from large male cattle…
I remember Brian Wang from my Oil Drum days. He was busy back then telling us how nuclear power plants would save the world. He was/is the eternal optimist.
The title of the article, “World Food Supply is Increasing Faster Than Population Growth for a Better World” is one Brian would pick. Besides leading to overshoot, it leads to an overweight population.
The global weather event fuelling the catastrophic bushfires this summer is being blamed for massive locust swarms devastating parts of East Africa and creating a food security crisis.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-30/weather-event-making-australian-bushfires-worse-locust-swarms/11914828
WA convoy carrying thousands of donated hay bales heads to NSW to help bushfire-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2020-01-18/wa-hay-convoy-heads-east-for-bushfire-affected-farmers-nsw/11875064
If the population were a whole lot less, grain production could be far higher relative to typical needs. This would give a bigger margin, allowing low grain production for a year or two to not be such a problem. A country that is nearer its limit will be more affected by fluctuations in locust numbers, regardless of the cause.
My first thought when I read about donated hay bales being sent to NSW was, “Isn’t hay a very good starter for fires?” We hope that there are not lightning bolts that set fire to hay bales. I remember watching my uncles’ big wooden barn, which was filled with hay bales, burn to the ground when I was a child. The fire was spectacular.
T2M, I think you nailed it. World food supply > world population: happiness! But how far does that food have to travel? If from the farm to the town, all is well; if from another continent, food stranded at the other end of a 5000 mile supply line is no help to me. And that, as you say, is the problem.
Too bad we didn’t start relocalising 15 years ago. Now it may be too late for a lot of people.
Do you feel that this is our planet trying make a sustainability correction?
Yes!
As the old Anglo-Saxon prayer put it:
‘Mother Earth, who makes all things to grow, and all things to rot….’
A global, self-adjusting system of balances and checks, which pays no heed at all to the vanity of individuals and ascribes no absolute value to any species.
Airline companies are cancelling flights to China. It looks as if the world is imposing a quarantine on entire China. The world seems to behave as if this is a serious event.
“The latest clinical report on 2019-nCoV: 99 patients from Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital. Important: a key group of patients progress rapidly to ARDS, septic shock, and multiple organ failure. 23% ITU admission, 17% ARDS, 11% mortality.”
This is just a small sample in a hospital…but still.
I wonder what the “key group of patients” is. Is it elderly patients, or ones that have been referred to that hospital by another hospital?
A person always wonders how many people have had the disease and never were sick enough to go to the hospital.
We really don’t have very good statistics at this point in time. Also, China is not noted for reporting things the way that they really are.
Gail, I agree. A “key group of patients” tells us only that the associated data are worthless as a guide to the future course of events. Unfortunately, so are most of the other data. For example, say 4000 people are infected and 40 have died. That’s a 1% death rate, no? No. Suppose it takes a patient 5 days to die. Then the denominator is not the number infected now, but the number infected five days ago. Getting out the Fibonacci calculator, say that number was 1000. The better estimate for the death rate is therefore 4%. And as long as the spread is exponential, all estimates based on current data will be far too low.
Moreover, what about all the people who are infected who don’t show any symptoms and then shake off the bug without even being aware they had caught it? What about all those who exhibit mild or moderate symptoms but don’t go to hospital or to a doctor and are therefore not counted as infected?
The fact is nobody knows how infectious this virus is or what percentage of those infected will develop symptoms, require medical attention, or die, because the number of people infected is an unknowable unknown.
I agree, I have 6 kids and I’m concerned not enough us being done to stop this spreading world wide. People are travel from country to country, forget china, we know of outbreaks starting and spreading almost everywhere now.
If the virus is as communicable as it seems to be, and if there is quite a bit of transmission by people who don’t even seem to be sick yet, there is simply nothing that can be done to keep the disease from spreading worldwide.
All it seems to be possible to do is slow down the rate of spreading somewhat. The virus can be expected to spread especially rapidly in countries where people are closely packed together–riding in buses, planes or trains, for example, or riding in elevators together. Also going to meetings.
Yes, this is a concern since if we dont know someone has the virus they will be spreading it but no one will know where it came from. I dont see how this will die out and it just seems that more and more people will get it.
We would like to think that people build up immunity to the disease if they have had it, but we really don’t know the extent to which this is the case.
If people build up immunity, then the virus will eventually run out of enough people to make sick and disappear for a while. It may come back later, for example, in a year or two, and find pockets of new people to affect, including children who have not had the virus.
If the virus mutates too much from year to year, immunity from one year may not help in a later year. It may come back again, in a different form. In fact, it could be worse.
We don’t know if we can ever find a vaccine. There is some hope that a vaccine will be available in 12 to 18 months, but the virus may have made its rounds by then. Or, as Duncan says, the coronavirus may be like MERS and SARS. No one has found a vaccine for them.
Hmm, I would think children would get some immunity through DNA ?
I heard that people got re infected by the virus also.
I wonder how super spreaders and people who are asymptomatic are that way? What causes them to not be as affected ? Blood type? Genetics ? Very odd.
I also read that when a person is in the incubation period the virus isnt as dangerous as it is when they are in full blown infection
A lot of things we just don’t know about.
Smoking history, old age, obesity, being male, high blood pressure and having diabetes all seem to contribute to the risk of dying from the disease.
Young women tend to have stronger immune systems in general, and it helps here as well.
A person wonders whether the reinfections are truly reinfections, or whether they are relapses. Did the infection truly 100% go away?
This is a good question. I’m tired of hearing the media say, what we know about coronavirus and clearly now they are eating their words each time and have resorted to showing alot of the ‘fear mongering’ clips people shared weeks ago.
Unfortunately my husband suffers severe obstructive sleep apnea the worst case seen in uk according to the drs he saw when he had his sleep study. He is pre diabetic mostly due to his apnea as his diet isnt bad and blood pressure on the low end of being high.
I suffer pneumonia almost every time I get the flu and we have 6 kids. One of whom is immune compromised as she was born at 31 weeks. She is generally healthy .
This all put together in my mind knowing others have worse cases to worry about but, this is my family and I cant help but worry.
My mother, isnt so concerned and thinks it’s just like the flu, should all be fine etc etc
This is the biggest issue I’m having with the media. My mum wants to come visit and it will be 23 hour flight. I told her wait it out for now since we arent sure and i cant risk her bringing this into my home. Also my mothers age, its concerning
Governments won’t disclose the reality on the ground to avoid panic. This is not an insignificant move on the part of the Chinese government to lockdown entire cities. I feel that this story and virus has a fair long way to go yet.
Nicely done, well put. Reality is life, we are part of the ecosystem and what you describe is how it works.
Ah, I assume you are not planning on running for a public office in the near future?
Dennis L.
As you might guess, I am not good at politics. I just tell things the way I see them.
Viruses work well against overpopulation and too much economic activity. Our just in time global economy cannot cope with this, but that is of no concern to the little nasty bug. It’s just the way it works. Everything is attached and way too complicated, and so become possible solutions. Until hammertime that is.
I am afraid that epidemics have been a feature of economies for an awfully long time.
Scientist today make models of the future, assuming that epidemics are long gone. The future is more uncertain than most people would assume.
It’s also the case that dealing with death and disease – with the utmost best of intentions – is largely what has caused our civilisation’s resources pressures. It’s not birth rates that have caused our numbers to grow to 8 billion strong, but reduction of death rates. Especially those diseases that killed off fertile people. Success in dealing with one of the last big people killers – malaria – is what everyone would be positive about, but which would add about another half billion to world population.