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Economic implications of a SARS/Coronavirus outbreak

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What false assertion ?
 
SirRumpole said:
International borders are not "locked". People can still get in as long as they quarantine. And quarantine is where the majority of cases arise.
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It's appalling how blatantly you are willing to misrepresent things. If I could leave Australia with the only obstacle being an affordable 14 days in quarantine, I'd have been out in March. I have foreign friends in Australia desperate to leave, but flights are simply not available to them. I have several friends separated from their families due to international border closures. I am trapped in Australia after intending to be here for only a week or two, absolutely desperate to leave. I know plenty of people wanting to come to Australia but it is not possible at this time.

If you think international borders are not locked you have no idea what you're talking about, and if you do know, you are extremely dishonest. Heck, I can't even currently travel interstate with a simple 14 day quarantine being the only obstacle. I'm literally not currently allowed more than 5km from my current location, and in a couple of hours I won't be allowed 20m from my current location. Literally about 5 million people, around 20% of Australia's population, are in the same situation. It's very easy for you, completely ignorant and willfully so, to dismiss other people's problems are unimportant or nonexistent, but it just makes you a bad person.
 

Idiot. Locked means no one can get in or out, but people are getting in and out, the fact that it's not easy is beside the point.
 
SirRumpole said:
Idiot. Locked means no one can get in or out, but people are getting in and out, the fact that it's not easy is beside the point.
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It's not beside the point when it is impossible for people. Again, your attitude is utterly shameful and disgusting. Your lack of empathy is appalling. There are literally many people desperate to return to their home countries and/or families who would do anything within their power to move, but they are unable to.

And you have the nerve to act like the challenges are beside the point!

Even if we completely ignore any human suffering. Even if we completely discard every last shred of our humanity as you are close to having done, making it effectively impossible to move, even if it is technically possible for a few individuals, means it is effectively impossible, and this is the case for the economy and community as much as for individual human wellbeing.

And you have the nerve to call someone else an idiot, while in a situation like this claiming international borders are not closed.
 

BTW, were you on Hard Quiz last week ?
 
I agree that's the likely outcome but as a concept it has a lot in common with someone surviving what turned out to be a very minor heart attack and failing to heed the warnings. Back on the smokes, back on the chips and burgers. We know how the story ends in due course.......

It seems that places the size of Adelaide (1.3 million) can deal with this sort of thing but places the size of Melbourne (5 million) can't. Whilst I expect you're right, ultimately it's setting us up for another problem sometime down the track if we continue having 40% of the national population in two places which are problematically large in terms of controlling any disease outbreak.
 
SirRumpole said:
Not many are perfect physical specimens and prefer not to take the risk of getting this virus.
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Take out the two thirds of the population that's overweight.

Then take out the smokers, alcohol drinkers, illicit drug users, those with poor diet, lack of exercise or some existing health problem or damage from past things.

What's left would be stuff all.
 
Plus those of us over 60 whose lives aren't worth saving apparently.
 
The economic outlook is a difficult one to assess whether you live in a high covid-19 catchment area or a low one. Remembering that the virus can lurk in unexpected places like dank spots in rivers. After all it was thought to have originated in animal carcasses.
The effect on an economy may still be bad even though there are few cases as other countries are in desperate trouble and demand for produce from abroad is dropping. Many countries are now piling cash into their economies whilst borrowing at very low interest rates and often below 1%. It cant go on and reality will hit home in 2021 when they raise taxation, unemployment grows and recession arrives fast turning into the worse depression since the 18th century for a few.
 

You may be right about this, conceptually, with people having a tendency to discount a problem if it comes and goes without biting. You do indeed see smokers continuing to smoke even after having a lung removed, etc (and honestly, they probably might as well, because at that stage there's already a heap of genetic damage done, cancer is inevitable from all the previous smoking, and the fresh smoking won't have time to kill them before the damage from their earlier smoking will, so why torture yourself quitting at that stage if it was obviously already such a problem for you?), while a smaller number of individuals will quit due to the scare. Same with being fat and having a heart attack, etc. We see people follow convenience and money to their own detriment. Plenty of people take on dangerous or destructive occupations, they work in jobs they hate and find stressful (stress being not only unpleasant but also quite deadly), etc etc. We'll definitely see a move by a few individuals away from the cities, but in the big picture little will change. But I really don't see it as being that big a deal. Property prices will probably crash in Melbourne and to a lesser extent regional Victoria over the next few years, and all the economic destruction down here will take a good long while to recover, and in some ways it will have a permanent effect.

Working from home will be a bigger thing, I think we would all agree on that, but I think city structures will remain relatively unchanged. Think about this: What percentage of the population do you think would rush over to join a crowd if I was giving away free smartphones or laptops or pizzas? I dare say most of them, even though if you'd asked them five minutes earlier most of them would have said they're concerned about the virus and want to avoid crowds. If people have to travel further or pay more or have less access to popular bars, etc etc, this day to day comfort, pleasure, convenience and economic benefit will entire them and drive their decisions far more than some vague threat of an event which 'will probably never happen'. Most people will still commute, and those in corporate work from home jobs will still want to be available to come in at short notice when the need arises, because the guy who does that gets the promotion and the guy who says he can't, doesn't. Over time, a similar number of people to before will be willing to take the same risks as before.

If everyone took actual serious, tangible, legitimate dangers seriously we wouldn't have people having unprotected sex with strangers, we wouldn't have people smoking or being fat or sharing syringes. There are plenty of these things I wouldn't do, but the older I get, the more I see that fortune favours the brave, those who throw caution to the wind in the pursuit of glory. I'm not sure what percentage of the population will be affected in what way, but at least some people will come out of this desensitised to the threat of pandemics. 'Is that all a pandemic is? I don't even know anyone who so much as coughed!' and to some extent we'll have a lower level of concern than before the pandemic, at least in some individuals. People who are scared into isolating themselves will fare more poorly, and while some will do it, it won't be a particularly common strategy; it never has been and never will be, and this is a fundamental biological concept which isn't even restricted to humans, because it goes against the fundamental principle of fortune favouring the brave.
 

The virus originating in animal carcasses at the wet market is just one of the early media stories which were pushed, which are now totally debunked. The wet market one was the most popular, but for various reasons it doesn't make sense, including the fact that the host species (Horseshoe Bats) has never been sold at the wet market dead or alive and don't naturally occur within a thousand km of the location.

One of the really obvious things (or at least it should be obvious) is that there isn't all that strong a correlation between the prevalence of the virus and the amount of economic damage caused. The damage is caused by human choices (shutting down businesses etc, and the choices/abilities of countries they would generally be dealing with). A very good example is the country I was in just before getting trapped in Australia, Thailand. Thailand has had almost no cases of the virus, I think they've found only 2 individual cases in the last 4 months or so, but their economy has been utterly devastated this year. Sweden is often being used as an example of high case numbers and high economic damage, but that damage has not been caused by a reduction in ability to be productive, it's caused by interactions with other countries (much like Thailand, although their damage hasn't been as bad despite higher case numbers).



This is pretty much the story. We're not going to fix things until we get moving again, and the only thing stopping us from doing that at the moment is irrational fear. We'll either get out of it by just snapping out of our insanity, as countries see each other moving forward and following because they don't want to be left behind, whether it's the government making the decision or the population demanding it. Likely a vaccine (which at best will have moderate efficacy, more likely minimal) will allow countries to safe face to some extent; currently they would simply have to admit to having made a mistake in order to move forward, which would be political suicide, and this is clearly one of the reasons the fear narrative is so widely being pushed in the mean time.
 
I think it's fair to say that Melbourne's population on 1 January 2022 (to pick a date) will be lower than it would have been without the pandemic.

By how much and what that means for house prices is a harder question but I think it's a fair assumption that the overall impact will be negative.

Where that thinking goes is that markets are made at the margin. It only needs a few % imbalance in the housing market to have at least some impact on price, especially so if there are forced sellers in the mix as seems plausible.

A lot of assumptions on my part there but I think they're reasonable given the circumstances. Overall it's going to be a trend break from "business as usual" which isn't erased quickly.
 

If this article is correct about sewage there is every reason to think twice before entering rivers, streams or anywhere similar that is fed by a river. If this is so it could explain how animals can be affected. Probably covid-19 was there all the time.

SARS-CoV-2 found in river water, flags risk for humans, wildlife and livestock

Now, a new study by scientists in Ecuador and published on the preprint server medRxiv in June 2020 shows that the virus is present in river water too, which could imply a significant transmission risk in developing countries with inadequate sanitation facilities.
www.news-medical.net
Global Economic Outlook - September 2020
7 September
 

Absolutely. Housing is a fairly inelastic market. More or less, people need a building to live in, and the degree to which they can squeeze more people into buildings is limited. When you have an inelastic market, a small change in supply or demand dramatically alters the price. The desire for people to come to Victoria will be dramatically reduced given this year's insanity, the desire to leave will be higher than ever, and there will presumably be significantly fewer than usual foreign students in Melbourne. Add to this a significant number of people unable to meet their mortgage repayments, and you have a setup for a housing price crash in Melbourne, which of course will have a non trivial flow on effect for the economy of Melbourne, Victoria and Australia (about 20% of all Australian people live in Melbourne, it's quite significant).

On top of this, you have so many closed businesses in Melbourne, so many people unemployed, there will be widespread depression/mental health issues (these tend to be chronic once the occur), once the government handouts are cut back over the next however many months you're going to see an increase in crime, there has already been a huge increase in domestic violence incidents, and public attitude towards the police is utterly collapsing... I really think people aren't understanding the problems being caused here, especially people currently comfortable living elsewhere in Australia imagining that the issues here don't exist. The media certainly isn't painting the same picture I'm seeing at street level, and I've been getting the opportunity to see it in a range of locations in Melbourne (which do actually differ substantially from each other in some cases).
 
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