Arising_uk wrote: ↑Sat Mar 21, 2020 10:38 pm
In hindsight wouldn't it have been cheaper and less economically damaging to have told all sixties and overs to totally isolate themselves right at the beginning until the virus had passed through the rest of the population. That's about 20% of the population who would have to register with the state in some manner and the state would provide wages for those still working who can't and medical and food delivery support for all. Most of them won't have young children visiting and elder kids could stay away with little fuss, etc. Rather than this approach where everyone has their lives massively disrupted both socially and economically.
That would be millions of people locked in their own houses and denied social contact for a minimum of 18 months, potentially 3 years. The younger ones being suddenly forced into unplanned but irrevesible retirement. I'd be very suprised if it worked.
The excess mortality among youngsters, who don't have to compete with oldsters for hospital ventilators, would be lower than if we allowed unconstrained spread. But allowing the disease to run its course without intervention among the under 60s would still break every countries health services, even in the rich world.
Excess mortality amon the old may not decline at all in that circumstance. Those millions of isolated housebound not even that old people are going to suffer tremendous psychiatric stresses and quite a lot will die. Social isolation among the old is linkes already to
a variety of physical and mental conditions: high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease, and even death.
This proposal represents a huge experiment in finding out exactly how bad than can get.
for the economic case, I have doubts too.
The truth is that this is a very nasty disease and a lot of the young are going to suffer very badly. So on top of those millions of old people forced into premature retirement, we now would need to socially isolate millions of youngsters who have, for instance, asthma or some other weakness that makes them susceptible to pneumonia. Maybe we can release them in groups as we judge our hospitals to be ready for a new round of deaths door youngsters. Otherise we lock them up and they all have to become front end web designers who can work entirely from home even if they used to be gardeners.
With oldsters locked away I guess we would have an extra few weeks of spread before it looked so bad we closed the bars - or everyone just gets frightened and stops going anyway. Once a few of your mates have direct experience to relate it's possible that everyone will become less prone to panic. Or it's possible they will panic even more once they have a sense that they are being abandoned to a survivial of the fittest situation. It's never safe to suppose you can predict the behaviour of a crowd that might turn out to be a mob.
The belief that we would carry on regardless as both consumers and producers, going to the same restaurants and watching the same movies etc, as long as the old were locked in germ free cages depends on an assumption about how the younger cohorts would respond to risks we haven't yet got data about. My expectation is that when the disease is really well spread, people would shit their pants on a grand scale as the horror stories pile up. And by then we wouldn't even have a containment option left.
And on top of all that. This talk of the economy as some brittle thing that can fall apart so easily is misplaced. Modern global capitalism can absord tremendous shocks. People are scandalised whenever it needs juicing and lubricating with monetary measures or bail outs, but they are missing the point. We have this system that can feed us and let us earn a living doing weird jobs like dog walking, which is great. And when that system by which many of us earn our living doing rather unproductive work looks rickety, we can fix it with these kind of shit looking tools. If you had a car that smash into a wall and then get fixed with just a pen knife and half a roll of duct tape, would you think of it as rickety or seriously fucking robust?
I have no doubts about our economy, it will be fine overall. If this thing goes on for a long time, we might change though. I am interested in how the people who are speding so much extra time with their families right now will feel about going back to exactly the way things were. It might be harder to employ talented staff in future without letting them work from home more. Going further, the time is nigh already for us to switch to a 4 day working week for most jobs, there is a path here for us to make that transition. One thing that often happens after an economic shock is that a series of ideas whose time had come suddenly all come to the fore at once.
Of course the whole thing could be short anyway. Quick cheap testing kits will make it easy to identify the sick and isolate them. There are hundreds of possible medicinal combos being tested, one of them probably works. 6 months from now we most likely will have it dealt with in the rich world.
