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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Don’t fear the reaper. How Covid-19 will change us
Breaking News: Italy is weighing a plan to restrict the movement of a fourth of its population in the most extreme effort to contain the coronavirus outside China https://t.co/ya71OUTBXA
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- Air travel is over
- RL conferences are over
- Offices are over
- Commuting is over
- None of the above will be missed
To which I would add that Jeff Bezos will get half.
And shepherd's huts.
I thought this was a really astute point: 'Fernand Braudel hypothesised that crises such as the South Sea Bubble and the Wall Street Crash marked the passing of the baton from one dominant economy to another.'
The US has been exposed by this and is heading for an absolute disaster. Those of us who know the country, by which I mean those of us not immunised inside our 4x4's: the real America, the one where down and outs are now the dominant population in city centres, where the social and healthcare structures have disintegrated, the one where a few are immensely successful at the expense of everyone else, those of us who know this America are now watching in horror as the edifice comes crashing down a thousand times more viscerally than the twin towers.
Leaving aside the enormous profit margins, the incentives are wrong and we need a better system which gets us more research on the biggest health problems in a proactive fashion.
Home just long enough to re-pack for skiing in Switzerland I hope to be OK.
I have cancelled all other holidays, and cancelled a new car purchase. Lucky I chose Switzerland for skiing and not Italy.
It will be the economic problems that will hurt if everyone else does like me and stops spending and travelling.
Areas that rely on tourism, like Spanish Costas, will have a torrid time.
Using a well known spreadsheet I fitted a quadratic curve to this plot and there appeared to be a good fit. It is of course risky to extrapolate this model into the future, but the spreadsheet provided the equation of the curve. A quadratic has a maximum/minumum and I calculated that this would happen around Thursday 12th March at a value of 3.842, equivalent to 6950 new cases per day. Let's see how that projection turns out. I cannot yet see any corresponding downward curvature in the UK figures for log (cases).
In my view the implications are going to be comparable to a world war. In 1914 or 1939 could anyone predict what the world would like after a war? With difficulty because it was so dependent on how the war played out. This is similar. However, my gut feeling is that the world will remain within the 21st century but opinions and politics will shift back in time.
Internationally I'd expect a closing down of borders. Globalisation will be in serious retreat. Expect nationalism and extremism to grow. Take Italy as an example. What will this do to their politics? I would be surprised if the winners will be centrists. Difficulties ensue with the EU about borders, policy, currency etc.
On a more mundane level and something I noted three weeks ago. UK universities are currently working on a business model which includes a large number of Chinese students. In every University city high rise luxury towers are being thrown up, paid for by private finance to house these students. Bad news for those investors and for universities I'm afraid.
So that's some of the bad. But remember, WW2 brought us the NHS and the welfare state more broadly. Perhaps we can get some positive social improvements too. The US might catch up with a welfare state, after 70 years, for example.
In theory I can do a lot of my work remotely. I have a large quantity of good legal resources a available online, most of my instructions come by email and nearly all of my product is sent back the same way. I also do what amounts to piece work so my productivity and how long I choose to spend on PB is my concern, not an employer’s. And yet going to Edinburgh makes me more productive even allowing for a lot of travelling time. It is more sociable. I get to discuss my work with pals who do the same in kind. There is a qualitative difference between a consultation in person and one remotely. Even in pretty optimal circumstances I use the working at home option maybe one day a week.
I reckon we are about 8 weeks off the peak. I am not buying food or big roll as I cannot work from home. I will shop normally.
I have prepared my home medicine cupboard, and am preparing my body for optimal health. Plenty of vitamins, and minerals, physical fitness, no alcohol, healthy eating. I have kitted out Fox jr the same. I reckon that I have about a 1% chance of not making Christmas because of COVID19, but as any gambler knows 1/100 is good odds.
The huge disparity in drug prices between the US and here is not so much down to big pharma (though if course they take full advantage) but rather the utterly fucked up health system which is the purchaser.
A similar consideration applies to both vaccines and antibiotics. No one will develop them if no one buys them (or gives rewards for developing them).
The structure of health service provisioning is the bigger - and more tractable - problem.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n05/wang-xiuying/the-word-from-wuhan
Never heard of this phrase before:
Since the Wuhan lockdown began, there have been tensions between local government and the central organs of the state. There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’. ...
There are two problems with using data from deaths. 1) There is much less data as most cases result in recovery. 2) There is a significant time lag of days or weeks between diagnosis and outcome in some cases, meaning that the data for confirmed cases is more up to date. The number of deaths has to be roughly proportional to the number of cases.
No alcohol is smart. I’m also trying to get more sleep.
I have one client that's quite traditional (not tech) and although in theory I can do everything with them remotely, I find if I don't go in and talk to them I find people try to work around problems I could have solved for them, and often that results in them escalating so they're bigger problems when I finally find out about them. It's not so much the distance that hurts as the *perception* of distance.
But that dynamic changes if *everyone* is online, and also people adopt tools that work better. So for a lot of my other stuff the collaboration is international, everyone is remote and most people only meet face-to-face for conferences, and all the communication happens on offline channels like Discord. When that happens the perception of distance doesn't matter so much, so you much more of the little things are accessible and you don't miss out on as much.
This is really hard to phase in, because you need everybody to be using the remote tools, even for things that don't feel like they even absolutely need to be communicated. I can certainly see that covid19 could provide the kick to get a lot of organizations off the local maximum they've been stuck on.
Isn’t the real issue that - if the doom mongers are right and we are heading for billions of infections within a matter of months - then the data points we have are from the tiny beginning end of the curve, and it simply isn’t possible, mathematically or otherwise, to project a dataset running from zero to a hundred thousand forward into the billions with any degree of accuracy.
Not least because, even if the worst case scenario, the curve will eventually be constrained by the number of uninfected people available and their accessibility, yet this constraint won’t bear on the data at all at the moment, when most of the world has tiny handfuls of cases only.
F1: bizarre that the special on Racing Point winning a race is down to 2.75.
https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1235963670255071237
Best guess is that summer might slow it, but won’t stop it.
https://twitter.com/Adrian_Bourne/status/1236397406050226177
Edited extra bit: just broken that Bahrain is to go ahead, but behind closed doors.
We’re not a paid team of researchers for you to direct as you please.
Edit: for example I don’t think Corbyn is being controlled by the French, but I couldn’t provide you with any evidence for that statement. Does that mean we should assume he is?
https://twitter.com/mugecevik/status/1236372854171750400
We reach the limit of hospital ICU capacity at about 100 prevalent cases per 100 000 population, that is an important threshold. We need to implement the lockdown control measures at a lower threshold than that, probably somewhere in the 25-50 per 100 000 range.
COVID19 emerged in Wuhan, probably via the live food market, but ebola made the jump from monkeys in africa. This is thought to be from the bushmeat trade. HIV probably the same way in the rainforests of the Congo in the Seventies. Before we get too prissy about these things, we created BSE by our own eating habits on these very shores.
It is almost as if meat eating is the root of the problem.
Anyway Salmonds rape trial starts tomorrow - spotlight on the Scottish justice system..
Optimists are studying English. Pessimists are studying Chinese. Realists are studying AK-47s. As the Russian joke goes...
https://twitter.com/JP_Biz/status/1236371358910726144
Coronavirus: Six dead in China quarantine hotel collapse
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51787936
As far as trade goes I don't think it's obvious that everything localizes. A lot of the time it's just not practical to make stuff locally, and if we're seeing a lot of shutdowns but staggered depending what breaks out where, there may be times when a lot of your local production stops, but logistics are still working, and you're actually more dependent on imports. Like remote working this may shuffle the pack and jolt people off a local maximum, moving production permanently from one place to another, which may well be from local production to somewhere overseas.
Finally, I think it's really hard to tell what the political effect will be. It's certainly plausible to see panic, fear of outsiders, economic collapse leading you to fascism. OTOH the countries that are screwing things up really badly right now are the populist-run ones: The US and Italy. I don't know much about Italian politics but as far as the US goes the obvious outcome is for Trump to lose the election to someone who looks less incompetent. So it could just as easily be the jolt that makes people pay attention to reality-based politicians instead of reality-TV ones. Or maybe we get both those trends in different directions, in different places.
The major problem has more to do with what happens in a lock down to all those who physically need to be at work to do their jobs (e.g. I spend some of most working days putting physical bits of metal together. One of my best friends spends half her time at work in a fume hood doing synthetic organic chemistry for early stage drug development). Do I get paid to sit at home, and if so by whom? Who pays my employer's rent and rates if we can't get into our workshop to use it?
I've no idea how the Italian scenario is playing out, but unless they are very careful it could result in an enormous economic collapse.
Ticket sales are the only way the promoter has to make back the massive hosting fee paid to F1 for the rights to hold the race, presumably lots of talks with governments and insurers are going on at the moment.
I don’t see any possible way that Vietnam goes ahead with a crowd either, I’m not sure a Grand Prix has ever happened with closed doors before. International sport is going to end up severely curtailed this spring, no government is going to want a massive crowd from all over the world turning up in town.
Presumably the Italian participants are all going to fly from Melbourne to Bahrain without going home, sitting it out for a fortnight to avoid Bahraini quarantine.
Edited extra bit: the Chinese postponement/cancellation might come in handy, allowing Ferrari to actually get parts without falling foul of quarantine.
Chris Witty told us the scenario last week based on what they know so far. From widespread local transmission there will be 3 months to the peak, then 3 months downwards again. We are not yet at widespread local transmission but very close. There is your timeline then.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/08/russian-jets-heading-to-uk-airspace-intercepted-by-raf-typhoons
Knock yourself out...