Economic implications of a SARS/Coronavirus outbreak

Spaniel14 said:

The latest medical evidence is pointing towards showing that pathogens developed in the body to fight COVID, only remain for around 3 weeks. Meaning after 3 weeks of having it, you can get it again (and there is no guarantee it will hit you easier/harder than before), you’re not “immune” to it. .

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I'm no immunologist, (and I'm guessing you mean antibodies?) but wouldn't that mean a vaccine is an exercise in futility? Doesn't that mean any antibodies created by the vaccine would also only last 3 weeks?

wayneL said:

I'm no immunologist, (and I'm guessing you mean antibodies?) but wouldn't that mean a vaccine is an exercise in futility? Doesn't that mean any antibodies created by the vaccine would also only last 3 weeks?

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You’re correct, I was thinking of writing something different than I did. I have corrected my original comment.

Not necessarily, we may end up with a vaccine like the flu vaccines, which would be made available annually. Vaccines can be manufactured to boost the antibody response above levels that being exposed to the virus/bacteria would through transmission, and cause the antibodies to remain active far longer than they otherwise would without the vaccine. We’re not going to get something like the MMR vaccine, where you take it a couple of times as a child and you are set. Ideally, if we can immunise enough people against COVID (meaning 90+% of the population), we may be able to eradicate COVID completely from most countries (think smallpox/polio).

We haven’t eradicated the flu because 1) not enough people get the vaccine every year, 2) the effects of getting the flu are short term only for 99% of the population, and 3) the cost for a government to have a nation-wide flu vaccination program to attempt to eradicate it is simply not worthwhile. Smallpox, polio, MMR on the other hand are devastating and worthwhile the cost of attempting eradication.

basilio said:

Glad you appreciated it.

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You always find the interesting ones

qldfrog said:

Anyone knows the reasoning preventing Australian to get OUT?

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I’m assuming it’s due to the inevitable sob stories that will be hyped up by the media about such people not being allowed to re-enter Australia when they wish to or at least not without proper quarantine.

If they can’t leave in the first place then it avoids that problem when they come back, are sent immediately to a prison-like facility and then moan about it.

Klogg said:

People have choices.

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In practice they don’t.

They need to go out in public to various shops, work and so on.

This isn’t a free market choice sort of thing where everyone gets to make their own decision. By its very nature it’s one decision for society as a whole.

Sdajii said:

The alarmists seem to not realise the simple fact that unless you completely erradicate this virus from the whole planet (impossible, surely everyone realises that by now)

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The bit I’m not convinced about is that eradication is really impossible.

NZ seems to have done it and likewise some Australian states seem to have at least plausibly achieved it.

Why, exactly, can others not achieve it?

Even if we’re going for the “flatten the curve” approach, basic maths says it was always going to take a long time to get through the population at a rate slow enough to avoid overloading hospitals. Nobody thought we’d have that done in 2020 surely?

Where it’ll get interesting economically though is overseas. Australia obviously has relevance to individuals here but at the global level the US is going to matter far more as will many other countries.

Spaniel14 said:

The latest medical evidence is pointing towards showing that antibodies developed in the body to fight COVID, only remain for around 3 weeks. Meaning after 3 weeks of having it, you can get it again (and there is no guarantee it will hit you easier/harder than before), you’re not “immune” to it. Early days and not enough data to categorically prove it, but evidence is suggesting so. It’s not like the flu where once you’ve been exposed to a specific strain (which they vaccinate against the most common strain every year) the pathogens hang around for months, by which point we’re into summer and cases have dropped significantly. This is one of the primary reasons why doctors are so concerned about COVID versus the flu, and why they are urging governments to contain the spread, because COVID now is a strain on our medical system, but the long-term strain could be worse.

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This is mostly or at least partially true. Assuming it is correct that you can get it again after a few weeks/month or two, we are all going to get it many times, a vaccine is completely impossible (nothing is going to work better than the virus itself, at least nothing we're going to come up with in a relevant number of years), so the perfect time to get my first dose and see how my own body reacts to it would be during a lockdown where I can't do anything anyway and at a stage where the hospitals are still underwhelmed and hey, people are still bothering to be scared about it and I'll probably get some sort of government assistance, as opposed to in a year or two when we've all stopped considering it to be a thing to particularly concerned about. I do think that there will at least be a fair degree of consistency within individuals in terms of severity, and repeated cases of the same virus should either be less severe or at least no more severe. Difficult to be 100% sure about that, but we can make some reasonable guesses. One thing which we can be almost certain of is that it won't mutate to become more severe. The same evolutionary tendencies exist, it doesn't help the virus to kill its host, if such a strain does mutate (and no doubt it will) it will knock itself out quickly and be less successful than milder strains. This is a respiratory virus and the same laws of nature apply to it as with others.

There’s also possible evidence towards longer term neurological and respiratory effects, which given the virus has only been widespread for a few months, we may not see the actual effects for a long time yet. Potential for chronic lung disease, cognitive and psychological impairments. And these affect you, whether you were asymptomatic or in ICU (obviously the degree to which you are affected changes, but affected nonetheless).

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There's also the possibility that it will give us superpowers!

Come on, there are literally millions of cases, it's the most intensely studied virus in all history. It hasn't been around for a long time but it is a virus the immune system completely eliminates, it's a respiratory disease, and it's not like it lays some seed in the respiratory system which causes damage later. This is just scaremongering. Asymptomatic people aren't going to end up with collapsed lungs, that's just over the top fearmongering.

I understand your points about how difficult lockdowns are, and that governments need to think more about who should be locked down - but keep in mind governments work to give a solution that works for the entire country. It’s not perfect, and it will undoubtedly be hard on some people; but it is better than the alternative which is great for some people, and literally kills others.

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The lockdowns have already killed far more than 10 times the number of people the virus has (in Australia) and we've barely begun to experience the grief they will cause. You are so one-sided in all of this. You are happy to ignore the problems caused by the lockdowns as though they don't matter or don't exist, you speak as though the virus deaths are the only ones that matter.

They have a duty to keep all of their citizens safe, not just some of them.

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Why do you not care about the harm the lockdowns bring to citizens? If we need to care about all citizens, which I agree with, why do something which harms so many people and kills more than the virus? Especially when you believe the virus can not be stopped anyway!

If you do have friends who are having mental health issues, and you are concerned about suicidal tendencies, you should be urging them to seek professional help, and if they refuse to do so because they are “fine”, you should be highlighting them to the appropriate people so that they can act before it is too late. People think psychiatry isn’t for them and that it doesn’t work, but it can absolutely change somebody’s life and their perspective of it.

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I don't know everyone in Australia. People all over Australia kill themselves. Multiple people per day in Australia. My own personal situation is not relevant in this discussion, neither are my friends. I'm not asking for your help in dealing with my own social circle.

Smurf1976 said:

The bit I’m not convinced about is that eradication is really impossible.

NZ seems to have done it and likewise some Australian states seem to have at least plausibly achieved it.

Why, exactly, can others not achieve it?

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There are currently people in New Zealand who have the virus. One literally broke out of where he was locked up, went out and bought alcohol a few days ago before being recovered. It's entirely possible that he infected someone else.

An outbreak in New Zealand is inevitable, it's just a matter of time.

For New Zealand, an island nation, fragmented, small population, it's possible to eradicate it. Keeping it out will require extreme measures (completely unrealistic).

For Australia it's extremely unlikely. For the New World it's obviously completely and utterly impossible. For the Old World, obviously it's stupid to even talk about it.

Unless you eradicate it from the whole world, eradicating it from an island only makes sense if you plan to keep that island permanently isolated or under extreme measures. New Zealand would be one of the few places where it might, maybe, sort of, make some sense... but probably not.

This time last year no human had the virus, and the virus possibly didn't exist. The only point in wiping out the virus is to allow us to live normally. If we live normally, one single case (which is inevitable) will result in the same thing happening again and again, every time a new case pops up.

Even if we’re going for the “flatten the curve” approach, basic maths says it was always going to take a long time to get through the population at a rate slow enough to avoid overloading hospitals. Nobody thought we’d have that done in 2020 surely?

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The flatten the curve models assumed the virus was far, far worse than it is, both in terms of severity and contagiousness. The goal was to have a lower peak later in the year rather than a spike earlier in the year. The assumption was that people could only get it once (the jury is still out on that one, though I suspect more is known than is being made publicly available). It was assumed that our best efforts would still only delay the peak by a few months and that doing our absolute best would have the peak later this year and by the end of the year we'd be over the worst of it with most people having had it and immune. As we now know that's not the case and very obviously the methods employed make no sense. At this point, it's months beyond obvious that we either need a curve or we need to eradicate or (I cringe to say it) we need to establish a new normal which gives us an acceptable level of indefinitely ongoing disease transmission in the community (this applies if it's a virus which can be caught no limit of times and each time gives no increasing level of immunity).

Where it’ll get interesting economically though is overseas. Australia obviously has relevance to individuals here but at the global level the US is going to matter far more as will many other countries.

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People say they know the media is garbage, dishonest, propaganda, etc, but still, people believe it. The media is scaremongering about the virus but radically understating the economic problems on the way. They're also not commenting on the current cold war, and they're barely touching on the very real possibility of an upcoming hot war.

Sdajii said:

Assuming it is correct that you can get it again after a few weeks/month or two, we are all going to get it many times, a vaccine is completely impossible (nothing is going to work better than the virus itself, at least nothing we're going to come up with in a relevant number of years),

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I would recommend understanding how vaccines work, vaccines work far better than the virus itself. If they didn’t, smallpox, MMR, polio would all be rife in modern society, which they are not due to vaccines being widely administered.

The remainder of your first paragraph is predominantly opinion, which differs from my own so I won’t comment further on it.

If we draw similarities with the Spanish Flu, there are really two outcomes of COVID. We leave it (as per the Spanish Flu) with no vaccine, it will last years, kill millions worldwide, and eventually burn itself out. Or we minimise the spread, press on to develop a vaccine to prevent, or a treatment to reduce the effects of the virus, and have significantly less deaths and get rid of it in less time. Ultimately the result is a herd immunity, the question is do you want more deaths and the pandemic lasting longer, or less deaths and shorter?

Sdajii said:

There's also the possibility that it will give us superpowers!

Come on, there are literally millions of cases, it's the most intensely studied virus in all history. It hasn't been around for a long time but it is a virus the immune system completely eliminates, it's a respiratory disease, and it's not like it lays some seed in the respiratory system which causes damage later. This is just scaremongering. Asymptomatic people aren't going to end up with collapsed lungs, that's just over the top fearmongering.

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There are multiple medical reports circulating of scarred lungs and recurring inflammation to the brain stem, across a broad range of COVID patients with varying symptoms. Not scaremongering, just commenting on early medical findings of longer term viral damage. These might prove to be statistically insignificant, and there may be no long term health issues after having the virus; but as it stands that is what the evidence is showing. Only time and further research will allow us to understand it fully. The damage suggested is primarily similar to what a very bad case of pneumonia would leave behind.

Sdajii said:

The lockdowns have already killed far more than 10 times the number of people the virus has (in Australia) and we've barely begun to experience the grief they will cause. You are so one-sided in all of this. You are happy to ignore the problems caused by the lockdowns as though they don't matter or don't exist, you speak as though the virus deaths are the only ones that matter.

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Do you have a citation for that figure? And do you have a correlation that shows those deaths were as a result of the lockdowns directly? I highly doubt there is any evidence for that, but happy to be proved wrong as I obviously cannot disprove it.

Sdajii said:

Why do you not care about the harm the lockdowns bring to citizens? If we need to care about all citizens, which I agree with, why do something which harms so many people and kills more than the virus? Especially when you believe the virus can not be stopped anyway!

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The answer to that is tied to the above comment regarding a correlation between deaths in lockdown and lockdown being the cause of those deaths. Has there been an increase in suicides which occurred in line with lockdowns being imposed? How do you draw this conclusion?

Sdajii said:

I don't know everyone in Australia. People all over Australia kill themselves. Multiple people per day in Australia. My own personal situation is not relevant in this discussion, neither are my friends. I'm not asking for your help in dealing with my own social circle.

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I never implied that you did. Your previous post stated that a friend of yours was likely to commit suicide due to being separated from his wife for such a long period due to border restrictions/lockdowns. I recommended that they seek professional help. If you stand at the sidelines and watch it happen, having raised the concern before it happened, you are implicit in their suicide. You cannot bring personal information which directly relates to somebody’s life and their potential suicidal tendencies into a discussion and then act like people are encroaching on your personal life and you are keeping it impersonal.

Spaniel14 said:

I would recommend understanding how vaccines work, vaccines work far better than the virus itself. If they didn’t, smallpox, MMR, polio would all be rife in modern society, which they are not due to vaccines being widely administered.

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Yeah, I just went to university where I earned a degree in biological science, I studied microbiology and earned a major in genetics. What would I know?

Smallpox was eradicated using a vaccine because everyone could be given the vaccine and it didn't harm them and made them immune. Smallpox wasn't a disease people routinely caught and got over using their own immune system, and if it had been, it would have worked better than the vaccine at giving immunity.

When you get various diseases you're often immune for life. No one who got chicken pox as a kid gets a chicken pox vaccine, but people who get the chicken pox vaccine need booster shots every few years.

This virus isn't like smallpox. It's a coronavirus. It works in a very different way.

The remainder of your first paragraph is predominantly opinion, which differs from my own so I won’t comment further on it.

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Thank mercy.

If we draw similarities with the Spanish Flu, there are really two outcomes of COVID. We leave it (as per the Spanish Flu) with no vaccine, it will last years, kill millions worldwide, and eventually burn itself out. Or we minimise the spread, press on to develop a vaccine to prevent, or a treatment to reduce the effects of the virus, and have significantly less deaths and get rid of it in less time. Ultimately the result is a herd immunity, the question is do you want more deaths and the pandemic lasting longer, or less deaths and shorter?

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I take back my thanks to mercy and wish you'd kept to your word. I think I've answered this enough times in this thread already.

There are multiple medical reports circulating of scarred lungs and recurring inflammation to the brain stem, across a broad range of COVID patients with varying symptoms. Not scaremongering, just commenting on early medical findings of longer term viral damage. These might prove to be statistically insignificant, and there may be no long term health issues after having the virus; but as it stands that is what the evidence is showing. Only time and further research will allow us to understand it fully. The damage suggested is primarily similar to what a very bad case of pneumonia would leave behind.

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There's a difference between 'multiple reports' (out of over TEN MILLION RECORDED CASES) of lung damage and absurdly unlikely delayed onset extreme lung disorders which don't show up until long after the virus is completely out of the system. To be concerned about something so utterly unrealistic is only not scaremongering if it is unrealistic enough not to scare anyone.

Do you have a citation for that figure? And do you have a correlation that shows those deaths were as a result of the lockdowns directly? I highly doubt there is any evidence for that, but happy to be proved wrong as I obviously cannot disprove it.

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They were saying it on the news this afternoon, I can't remember the record, but since literally hundreds of people die literally every day in Australia from all manner of causes and the total number of virus deaths in Australia is just over 100 (over the entire 'pandemic'), amounting to around half a person per day, it's hardly difficult to use your own critical thinking to figure that it's an underestimate. And that's not even taking into account that the majority of the virus deaths were people already close to death before they caught the virus.

The answer to that is tied to the above comment regarding a correlation between deaths in lockdown and lockdown being the cause of those deaths. Has there been an increase in suicides which occurred in line with lockdowns being imposed? How do you draw this conclusion?

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A mental health expert was making that claim on the Australian media today. Of course that means little, but it's extraordinarily obvious that since a lack of human interaction and a fear of it are one of the most extreme ways to cause depression, and financial distress is another, and lack of vocation is another, and these are literally three of the most extreme, possibly the three absolute top ways to cause depression, and depression is one of the main causes of suicide and all three of these things very strongly correlate with suicide and we know the restrictions are causing a huge increase in all three... it's really not that hard a stretch of the imagination, right? Don't be obtuse.

I never implied that you did. Your previous post stated that a friend of yours was likely to commit suicide due to being separated from his wife for such a long period due to border restrictions/lockdowns. I recommended that they seek professional help. If you stand at the sidelines and watch it happen, having raised the concern before it happened, you are implicit in their suicide.

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Thanks for assuming I've stood at the sidelines watching it happen to the point of being implicit in a suicide! Good grief, hang your head in shame. I've gone to extreme lengths to do everything humanly possible, while also doing what I can for multiple other people with extreme problems due to this situation, not least of whom is myself after literally losing virtually all my wealth and worldly possessions earlier this year. Earlier this year I faced a literal struggle for my own survival and required the help of friends and it was a struggle to get back on my feet. Honestly, just surviving this year in my circumstances is impressive enough, you have no idea what I've been through, and for the last few months now I've managed to keep busy, save money, and do what I can to assist multiple others, but hey, you make yourself feel better by suggesting I may be complicit in someone else's suicide through passive negligence.

Sdajii said:

The lockdowns have already killed far more than 10 times the number of people the virus has (in Australia) and we've barely begun to experience the grief they will cause. You are so one-sided in all of this. You are happy to ignore the problems caused by the lockdowns as though they don't matter or don't exist, you speak as though the virus deaths are the only ones that matter.

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You keep saying that, but where is the evidence ?

Sdajii said:

There's a difference between 'multiple reports' (out of over TEN MILLION RECORDED CASES) of lung damage and absurdly unlikely delayed onset extreme lung disorders which don't show up until long after the virus is completely out of the system. To be concerned about something so utterly unrealistic is only not scaremongering if it is unrealistic enough not to scare anyone.

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What % of those who've had COVID-19 have actually been subject to proper examination for lung damage?

The impression I get is "very few" unless it's so bad they're showing immediate and obvious symptoms. I could be wrong there, but that's certainly the impression I have, that if I get this virus then a chest x-ray isn't a given to even be done unless I end up in intensive care.

Regardless of what happens with this medically going forward, one thing I think is clear is that there should now be a greater awareness that it most certainly is possible to have irrecoverable situations. That's a point both sides of the debate agree on whether they acknowledge it or not. The "lock everything down" side is basically saying this is a crisis and whatever it costs well so be it. The "let it rip" side is basically saying that this is unresolvable, humans can't deal with this so there's no choice other than to let it go through the population.

Like it or not, both of those arguments amount to acknowledgement that humanity has a problem that no amount of money can solve and that message is one that probably won't be forgotten by many.

Things like those who mess about with viruses, chemicals or whatever which, if it does go wrong, cannot be effectively dealt with are likely to face very much tougher regulation and scrutiny going forward. Things where once the genie's out of the bottle it can't be put back in if the results are bad. The argument against that has been given a pretty hefty blow by this one given that both sides of the debate rest upon it being true.

I wouldn't be surprised if, long term, that's the main outcome. A much greater wariness of anything which, once done either intentionally or accidentally, cannot be reversed.

The USA is running a real time experiment for us. At the very least we should do is wait a few months to see how it pans out.

Knobby22 said:

The USA is running a real time experiment for us. At the very least we should do is wait a few months to see how it pans out.

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True but for a real model Sweden did it earlier
US is fragmented so if you add coro deaths from Florida and suicides from lockdown NY or California, it become messy
Sweden is more valid as it is the worst case scenario in term of letting it run its course
They did not use masks..now we know it can help, and the sicks had a lower chance of survival than now due to improved knowledge and treatments
So assuming that Sweden is the worst result we can have, with cold weather added for free, what is the best for a country?
They are the clear winner .
As for anyone in july 2020 thinking that permanent eradication in any place on earth is even possible, defy belief..maybe Antarctica?

qldfrog said:

True but for a real model Sweden did it earlier
US is fragmented so if you add coro deaths from Florida and suicides from lockdown NY or California, it become messy
Sweden is more valid as it is the worst case scenario in term of letting it run its course
They did not use masks..now we know it can help, and the sicks had a lower chance of survival than now due to improved knowledge and treatments
So assuming that Sweden is the worst result we can have, with cold weather added for free, what is the best for a country?
They are the clear winner .
As for anyone in july 2020 thinking that permanent eradication in any place on earth is even possible, defy belief..maybe Antarctica?

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Yes.
We could use a version of the Sweden model but what I want to know from the USA uncontrolled reality is statistics. In such a large population, we should find out a lot of data indicating long and short term effects. The Morrison Government aim was suppression not eradication. I know we have to stop any further lockdowns in the future as it is destructive.

After this latest (Victorian) lockdown which is meant to end in 5 weeks, there needs to be a clear direction from the Prime Minister as to the path we take and how we take it. What should the limits be? Should we be retaining state borders? International travel protocols etc.

The delay has been good, more treatments are available, we have more knowledge, hopefully more of an idea on whether a vaccine is practical. I think wait 6 weeks till September then make some changes. This is when the present government largesse ends so I think the Government is thinking this.

Smurf1976 said:

In practice they don’t.

They need to go out in public to various shops, work and so on.

This isn’t a free market choice sort of thing where everyone gets to make their own decision. By its very nature it’s one decision for society as a whole.

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It's not black and white, you're correct. But I could argue that for almost everything.
If I don't care take of my health and develop diabetes, your taxes fund my health bills
If I don't/can't get work, your taxes fund my unemplopyment benefits

The list goes on. We don't ban sugar, or mandate certain lines of work, just because you're funding my existence at some point.

The aim is to maximise freedom within limits. My argument is we've locked-down so much, we're trading off too much freedom for minimal gain.

I'm saying I'd rather lose 0.5% of the Victorian population (far less in # of human years) and have the remaining 99.5% live normal, healthy lives. Yes, one or many of those lives could be my close family, or even me.

But the need for a 'state of emergency' is far from clear, yet we just sit back and let it happen, as if there's no other alternative. I'm yet to see a rational argument for the lockdown - show me what we're trading off, and why it's worthwhile. Instead, we just quote # of people dead as if that's all there is to this equation.

Klogg said:

I said 'they will be' better off.
More people will have died. But they will on average be deaths brought forward by a few years.
Meanwhile, their economy will not have been destroyed as badly by rolling lockdowns.
In other news, dictator dan is now threatening stage 4 lockdowns. In other words, he wants to kill any form of economic activity to save a few 85 year olds.
What a joke.

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You believe deaths is the issue here.
It is not.
It is the number of people being infected and the multiplier effect on the economy.
You cannot have a sound economy with high rates of infection.
More importantly, you cannot have a functional economy with an increasing R (ie. basic reproduction number).

Knobby22 said:

The delay has been good, more treatments are available, we have more knowledge,

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No denial : fully agree and initial lockdown was required as we were first in line with china, but everything should have been released a month ago at least as for the current Victoria one, what a waste of lives and economic health.
Anyway, what can i do, prisoner in my own country, on jobkeeper dripline

qldfrog said:

No denial : fully agree and initial lockdown was required as we were first in line with china, but everything should have been released a month ago at least as for the current Victoria one, what a waste of lives and economic health.
Anyway, what can i do, prisoner in my own country, on jobkeeper dripline

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No reason to complain actually, i live the leftist dream

Exactly. Half the population too sick to work does not an economy make. The combined man-hours lost due to lockdowns is waaay lower than whatever it would be if we just let the virus run rampant.