Scenarios

Welcome to chaos. That was fast! Chaos was my most negative scenario, the idea is that it is too negative to be true. And here we are. Clearly my scenarios were too short term, so I am going to give some thinking to longer-term scenarios.

Looking to the future, where we will be a year from now I think the biggest uncertainties are Whether our systems hold up or not and whether we continue to see the world as a zero-sum game or not. Dear reader, I am interested in your thoughts, please share.

Where we are

As of March 25, 2020, we are seeing cases explode in New York despite locking everything down. What is clear is that the pandemic will operate on biological, earth scale and terms rather than human economic terms.

Trump declares that he wants the government back up and running by Easter even as the pope cancels Easter. One of them gets it.

Why are we seeing a dramatic increase in cases in New York despite locking down everything? Because it takes that long. With an incubation period of maybe 1-14 days (WHO), an ability to spread before symptoms appear and 2-3 weeks of symptoms we have a lot of backlog in the system. We are still counting now people who got the disease days or weeks ago.

So it will be days, weeks, maybe months before we do actually flatten the curve. (Hope for days, but this situation has not yet surprised us to the positive, so prepare for months, that sounds crazy right? Please be crazy. It isn’t, but we can hope.)

Italy leads New York, New York leads the rest of the country.

Writing from New York I expect the rest of the country to be wiping its forehead with the back of its hand exclaiming; “Whew, at least we are not in New York”.

You will be.

Governors and mayors around the country are waiting to see what happens and as they do the virus is growing in their communities. By the time they act it will be too late. We know that because that is what we did, and what Italy did.

Why do we insist on not learning the lesson? Oh, we want spring break revenue.

What is more important health or the economy and can we have both?

Ultimately the big question for me is what will we learn from this.  I think today in this country every word is viewed through the lens of world view.  You are a liberal or a conservative, you are serious or not serious, you are trapped by the thought machine or you are a thinker.  

But we face real problem as a society that requires real thinking.  Will this crisis give us the opportunity to realize that we must work to define the real truth not just believe what we want to believe because it feels good?  

Why is this virus so contagious?

This is a question that I have been asking myself so I looked into some answers. First, this virus seems remarkably resilient. The CDC found the virus in Princess Cruises Cabins 17 days after the rooms had been vacated.

Think of all of the surfaces that you touch on a moment by moment basis and all of the people who might have touched that surface over the last 17 days.

Makes you want to wash your hands right?

But there is something else that is interesting: we have no immunity.

With flu viruses and cold viruses, we all have a bit of immunity. Antibodies float around in our system form past infection and vaccines that help our immune systems fight similar infections. This means there is a degree of herd immunity. That slows down transmission.

But with this virus nobody is immune, nobody has antibodies. So it finds a very hospital environment in all of our bodies.

Not good for us.

The problem is not the virus itself

In an interview Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (69) said: “No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

This is the rough and tumble, I am more manly than the virus, approach. Which is great until they fall ill to the virus, get sick and ask for help.

They say things like “oh, I didn’t know”, just like Trump’s claim that he had no idea this could become a Pandemic or that we weren’t prepared for one (after he closed the Pandemic office),

But I digress, back to its not the virus:

If we have that many sick people trying to access the scarce million beds and 172,000 ventilators we have available in this country, that run on the hospitals will be a disaster.

Is it unreasonable to expect in that scenario that we would have people dying in hallways and streets? What about all of the people who need normal healthcare, how will they get care?

And, here is another challenge someone pointed out to me the other day: with all of the hospitals focused on treating Covid-19 for people who don’t have much insurance (because they all lost their jobs), and not performing elective and expensive surgeries, how do they stay solvent?

So it isn’t the virus that will kill us. I mean it may, many people will die from the virus, which is bad enough, but an all out run on the healthcare system would be much worse.

Those are my thoughts for the moment. What are yours?

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