Economic implications of a SARS/Coronavirus outbreak

Signs of a pulse in the airline industry.

NSW has it right imo. No need to look overseas.


As for comparing covid to Spanish flu: 210 million people would have needed to die from Covid-19 to be at the same rate as Spanish flu.

So it does feel like fear mongering to a certain degree. I don't agree with how far government is overstepping boundaries when it comes to people's rights. Especially when it was not science/health backed.

Junior said:

Hi Sdajii, you talk about Sweden a lot. The latest economic data shows a 8.3% contraction in their economy for the June quarter, by far the biggest downturn since GDP records began 40 years ago. Is there evidence that their approach has protected their economy, jobs etc.? Otherwise they have taken a double hit, an economic hit, and high death rate.

Furthermore, if you're going to accept living with the virus, you need to lock away all your elderly from the rest of society. And those elderly who aren't locked away, will be stuck at home and living in fear of contracting teh virus anyway. It's a massive price to pay, so you'd want to see a very strong case that it's worthwhile from an economic and quality of life perspective.

Aside from the pain we are going through in Melbourne, which will end soon, I'm looking at how the rest of Australia (and New Zealand) are functioning, and it seems like a far better outcome thus far, compared with the likes of Sweden or the US.

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To add to your point you would also have to lock away all the work force that work with the elderly (nursing homes) and their families.

Keeping the virus out of nursing care would be very hard just had my mother move into care and asked all the nursing homes we visited about COVID in short they were all terrified about it and made no bones about it but glad they were in virus free WA.

Read this today, I thought it could be of interest..

IFocus said:

To add to your point you would also have to lock away all the work force that work with the elderly (nursing homes) and their families.

Keeping the virus out of nursing care would be very hard just had my mother move into care and asked all the nursing homes we visited about COVID in short they were all terrified about it and made no bones about it but glad they were in virus free WA.

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Did you also ask them if they were concerned with Influenza, poor diet etc

I posed this question a few times in COVID forums on ASF.

"What will be the consequences of a couple of infected people circulating at a big wedding/funeral/ celebration "
What could we anticipate expecting in terms of deaths and serious illnesses ?
From an economic POV how can we talk about opening up our economy when the evidence is clear that such normal activities will create havoc?

To date no one has resonded to the question the issue. I raise it again because , yet again, such an event has created a swathe of death and illnesses. In my original post I suggested 1-2 deaths and 10-15 serious illnesses resulting from the wedding party. The reality is far grimmer.

And guess what ? Not a single person at the wedding has died. It is the people far and wide who were infected from the wedding party who ended up dead.

Some posters on this thread seem completely in denial about the effects of unrestrained transmission of this disease. One would think the facts of hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of serious illnesses should give pause for thought when talking about the consequence of not controlling this disease
Maine 'superspreader' wedding linked to 170 Covid cases and seven deaths

• More than 100 people gathered for August event in Millinocket
• ‘It is spreading in the community with remarkable force’

A rural church wedding and reception on a beautiful day in the shadow of Mount Katahdin was no doubt a happy day. But it has spread misery ever since.
That single event on 7 August is linked to coronavirus outbreaks in at least two other locations in Maine, with more than 170 people contracting the virus and seven deaths since.

....None of those who died actually attended the wedding and reception. The first of the deaths was reported in Millinocket, where no one has tested positive for several weeks, the town manager said on Wednesday.

The ramifications were swift.
The reception venue lost its business license, briefly, and hired a public relations firm. The pastor hired a law firm that specializes in religious liberty.

The outbreak changed the calculus of state health officials, who urged renewed vigilance in a state that had largely controlled the virus previously, Shah said.

“It is spreading in the community in and around York county with remarkable force,” he said.

@bas, I will have a crack at answering your questions.

In my original post I suggested 1-2 deaths and 10-15 serious illnesses resulting from the wedding party. The reality is far grimmer.

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While it is always wise to create outliners to test the robustness of a system, they are just outliners, and your test scenario is not based on any factual information. It is more based on fear of the unknown.

That single event on 7 August is linked to coronavirus outbreaks in at least two other locations in Maine, with more than 170 people contracting the virus and seven deaths since.

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While I would agree this is tragic, it fails again to provide any factual information that decisions or comments can be made upon.

Where the seven deaths related to preexisting conditions? How old were the people?

None of those who died actually attended the wedding and reception.

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So how has it been determined that those attending the funeral caused a chain of infectious events to infect those that died?

Did those that died have no other contact with any other person but those attending the funeral?

The reception venue lost its business license, briefly, and hired a public relations firm.

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That is crap, but until our govnuts take the time to study and analyze the situation and then convey to the public this is something/virus that we are going to have to accept and work with it. The economic carnage is going to be greater than the virus itself.

So will provide some direction to my comments, how people are quite easily manipulated into believing a situation is more real/deadly than actually is.

A headline for a news site:

China reports outbreak of brucellosis disease ‘way larger’ than originally thought
An outbreak of a potentially deadly disease that can lead to inflamed testicles and leave men infertile is “way larger” than first thought.

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It’s usually spread to humans from animals, often via undercooked meat, but also through consuming unpasteurised dairy products such as raw milk and cheese.
However, it can also be inhaled which is how the thousands in Lanzhou were infected.

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Sounds scary, did we keep the borders closed, isolate everyone, until this new disease is suppressed.

BUT NO

However, it has now been discovered that the Lanzhou Biopharmaceutical Plant had been accidentally pumping out the brucella bacteria while, ironically, producing a vaccine for brucellosis.

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Join the dots, you will find your answers, but they may not be the answers to the questions that you find acceptable.

satanoperca said:

Did you also ask them if they were concerned with Influenza, poor diet etc

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Yes along with many other questions, it was a interesting exercise comparing the many options, in the end it came down to how you feel about the carers that look after your love one.

In terms of procedure protocols for dealing with COVID it was across the board that they they would lock down and allow no visitors.

The levels of PPE were below any real acceptable standards for infection control.

Ignoring what should or shouldn't happen and looking at what is actually happening, I see media reports that secondhand car values have increased substantially.

Some of that would presumably be due to consumers avoiding purchasing new cars due to the overall economic situation, thus meaning a lower supply of secondhand vehicles, but it is reported that also many are buying an additional car (eg single car household going to two cars) so as go avoid using public transport and the associated risk of catching COVID-19 and/or the hassles of having to wear a mask and so on.

I'd be surprised if at least some didn't stick with that permanently. Just thinking personally but of those I've known who've switched from public transport to driving to work, I can't recall even one who later went back to public transport. The change was always permanent once they made it.

Duh. This is econ 101 level stuff. Superior vs inferior goods.

over9k said:

Duh. This is econ 101 level stuff. Superior vs inferior goods.

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The issue is that the definition of what is superior is changing for some consumers at least and is reversed. What was seen as superior is now seen as inferior and vice versa.

Not by everyone obviously, but by some certainly and by enough to move markets - cars, property, relevant companies etc.

Junior said:

Hi Sdajii, you talk about Sweden a lot. The latest economic data shows a 8.3% contraction in their economy for the June quarter, by far the biggest downturn since GDP records began 40 years ago. Is there evidence that their approach has protected their economy, jobs etc.? Otherwise they have taken a double hit, an economic hit, and high death rate.

Furthermore, if you're going to accept living with the virus, you need to lock away all your elderly from the rest of society. And those elderly who aren't locked away, will be stuck at home and living in fear of contracting teh virus anyway. It's a massive price to pay, so you'd want to see a very strong case that it's worthwhile from an economic and quality of life perspective.

Aside from the pain we are going through in Melbourne, which will end soon, I'm looking at how the rest of Australia (and New Zealand) are functioning, and it seems like a far better outcome thus far, compared with the likes of Sweden or the US.

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You're applying a false equivalency. The economic harm was not caused by deaths. The economic harm was caused by the global economic situation. It is a completely false narrative that the economic harm is caused by the amount of people getting infected by this virus. Again I remind you of the previous country I was in (which I just use as an example because it was the most recent country I was in, but there are many others demonstrating the same concept) which has had extremely low virus infections/deaths and extreme economic harm. The economic harm is being caused because of the global situation, and this would affect Thailand with or without high virus numbers or lockdowns etc (as it happens, the have very low virus numbers with only a single death in more than the last 100 days and only about half a dozen infections). Sweden was also going to have its economic problems regardless of whether or not it had a virus issue. Like Thailand (and countless countries around the world), even if they magically had 100% immunity from the virus within their own borders, the economic issue would still hit them.

Remember 2008? That wasn't caused by a virus, but when the world had major economic issues, almost all countries suffered, and most significantly, but not all to the same extent; some more than others. Here we have the same concept, but we have some people pushing a false narrative about it being purely/primarily about the virus itself, and then many people are propagating the myth because they genuinely believe it despite how little sense it makes.

Looking at Sweden, like everywhere else in the world, most of people people who died while infected with the virus would have died this year anyway. Most were elderly/disabled/late stage cancer/etc. These deaths don't hurt the economy, they don't change anything, those people were going to die with or without the virus, we've simply changed the label on their death certificate. Economically speaking, even in Sweden, the actual deaths caused by the virus which wouldn't have occurred otherwise is absolutely trivial, negligible, and absolutely positively not the cause of the economic issues.

Elderly people in retirement homes are already locked away. That's what old folks' homes are. People don't want their elderly parents at home with them so they send them to live out their senescence away from society. It's a cruel, cold world, and this is how it's done in the west. Last year, the year before, and for many years before that, those people sat in those homes, generally with little more than a few token visits, sometimes not even that, until they died. The happiness, sentimental value of life, philosophical concepts etc are a separate issue (I'm not debating their level of importance or trying to dismiss them, just saying they're economically not relevant), and we are lying or believing a lie if we think this is the cause of the economic problem rather than literally shutting down businesses and preventing the majority of normal people from doing normal things.

The US is so obviously a unique case with its internal political and social issues at the moment, it's just not applicable to the rest of the world. Australia is playing extreme economic smoke and mirror games to disguise the extreme damage being done. It's much like me losing my job and having massive gambling debts but taking out huge credit card debts and selling all the family treasures to maintain the illusion that things are going okay. That illusion won't last long, and it's incredibly obvious, which makes it disturbing that so many people can't see it. You can't just shut down every shop in Melbourne which doesn't sell food, destroy countless businesses, prevent people from being able to go more than 5km from their own homes or even being out for more than an hour per day, without doing some extreme economic damage.

By the lack of interactions on this thread, it seems the virus has just disappeared?

satanoperca said:

By the lack of interactions on this thread, it seems the virus has just disappeared?

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By the lack of political intelligence in Australia; it seems that the virus driven draconian restrictions don't matter because apparently some businesses are screaming to high heaven (Wizard Of Oz) that they can't find people to work. Now Scomo and Josh seem to think that it must be true and that we can just leave the draconian restrictions in place, trim the social support, and that the economy will just magically bounce back because a few businesses, that nobody knows who they are, have complained to the government that they can't find workers.

You would think that an intelligent government would just help advertise on behalf of these businesses if they were struggling to find workers; rather than take their word as concrete widespread indicative economic analysis to base government economic policy on, which impacts the entire population of the nation.

Chronos-Plutus said:

By the lack of political intelligence in Australia; it seems that the virus driven draconian restrictions don't matter because apparently some businesses are screaming to high heaven (Wizard Of Oz) that they can't find people to work. Now Scomo and Josh seem to think that it must be true and that we can just leave the draconian restrictions in place, trim the social support, and that the economy will just magically bounce back because a few businesses, that nobody knows who they are, have complained to the government that they can't find workers.

You would think that an intelligent government would just help advertise on behalf of these businesses if they were struggling to find workers; rather than take their word as concrete widespread indicative economic analysis to base government economic policy on, which impacts the entire population of the nation.

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I might be on the wrong tangent with your comments above, so do apologise.

I know of several businesses that are looking to employ at the moment, low skilled work and are finding it difficult.

The main reason is many are on either jobkeeper or jobseeker, so why work 40hours a week for a little bit more, when you can do nothing.

I also was helping a mate pack up his business on the weekend, cleaning out the leased premises to be returned to the landlords, he has 15 on jobkeeper, after reaching out to the slack arses, 9 flatly told him to get stuffed, if was not their normal work activities, 6 said they would come and help, 3 turned up on the day.

So how I see if, the 3 that turned up, did 2 days work and have been paid 5months.

Well, the short of it, is 12 people will now be on jobseeker, as my mate is no longer willing to support them, if they cannot get of their fat lazy arses to help and employer out that has employed them for many years.

The quicker, jobseeker is reduced (not back to the dole amount, but to a level that incentivizes people to want to work) and jobkeeper is removed completely.

satanoperca said:

I might be on the wrong tangent with your comments above, so do apologise.

I know of several businesses that are looking to employ at the moment, low skilled work and are finding it difficult.

The main reason is many are on either jobkeeper or jobseeker, so why work 40hours a week for a little bit more, when you can do nothing.

I also was helping a mate pack up his business on the weekend, cleaning out the leased premises to be returned to the landlords, he has 15 on jobkeeper, after reaching out to the slack arses, 9 flatly told him to get stuffed, if was not their normal work activities, 6 said they would come and help, 3 turned up on the day.

So how I see if, the 3 that turned up, did 2 days work and have been paid 5months.

Well, the short of it, is 12 people will now be on jobseeker, as my mate is no longer willing to support them, if they cannot get of their fat lazy arses to help and employer out that has employed them for many years.

The quicker, jobseeker is reduced (not back to the dole amount, but to a level that incentivizes people to want to work) and jobkeeper is removed completely.

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That is a different story; and these people who are lazy and don't want to work should be financially punished. In saying this; many people have been made redundant, and there are just not enough jobs on seek.

I was made redundant due to COVID in March; I am qualified to work in engineering and maintenance, banking and finance, hotels and tourism, and libraries; and I can say that there are just not enough jobs out there.

I was listening to Anne Ruston today and the impression that I got from her superficial and shallow responses was that the complexity of her portfolio under these circumstances is just beyond her to understand and comprehend.

satanoperca said:

I might be on the wrong tangent with your comments above, so do apologise.

I know of several businesses that are looking to employ at the moment, low skilled work and are finding it difficult.

The main reason is many are on either jobkeeper or jobseeker, so why work 40hours a week for a little bit more, when you can do nothing.

I also was helping a mate pack up his business on the weekend, cleaning out the leased premises to be returned to the landlords, he has 15 on jobkeeper, after reaching out to the slack arses, 9 flatly told him to get stuffed, if was not their normal work activities, 6 said they would come and help, 3 turned up on the day.

So how I see if, the 3 that turned up, did 2 days work and have been paid 5months.

Well, the short of it, is 12 people will now be on jobseeker, as my mate is no longer willing to support them, if they cannot get of their fat lazy arses to help and employer out that has employed them for many years.

The quicker, jobseeker is reduced (not back to the dole amount, but to a level that incentivizes people to want to work) and jobkeeper is removed completely.

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So basically either lift all the draconian business and civil restrictions so that the economy can recover and people can get back to work; or keep the draconian business and civil restrictions in place with the full social support of JobKeeper and JobSeeker.

I wasn't too impressed with Anne Ruston's responses today; she came across as a senior minister not across the detail of her portfolio.

satanoperca said:

Well, the short of it, is 12 people will now be on jobseeker, as my mate is no longer willing to support them, if they cannot get of their fat lazy arses to help and employer out that has employed them for many years.

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Not uncommon in my experience.

I've always said the same about employing people. Skills really aren't that important so long as they've got any formal qualifications that the law says they must have. You can train for skills and at most it's just time and money.

Attitude though, well you can't change that really so that's the thing you need to get right. Natural talent and interest too - someone either has it or they don't but skills as such can always be learned.

These changes will get people working again, cannot see wage growth going anywhere.

satanoperca said:

View attachment 112074
These changes will get people working again, cannot see wage growth going anywhere.

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I would say the outcome will look more like this if they trim the JobKeeper and JobSeeker:
As Crime Soars, Furious NYers Paint Giant "F**k Cuomo And De Blasio" Mural On Brooklyn Street

If the government is going to stop people making a living legally then they will turn to crime if the welfare support isn't enough for them to survive or support their families. Essentially the government is just ensuring that they won't get re-elected and at the same time creating more problems for everyone.