On Covid-19 and All

On Covid-19 and All

I accept very little that I hear from our politicians or our conventional news media of various stripes.  There are non-biased sources of information available, and in situations like this corona virus issue, I try to go back to the data and to what I’ve found in the past to be reliable sources. 

My first, somewhat flippant response to the looming pandemic was “so what?  We have epidemics and pandemics all the time,” I pulled out cases and deaths for “normal” flu seasons and pandemics, and for various other ones in the 20^th century.  “Normal” flu, for which we have effective vaccines, kills 30-60,000 Americans per year.  The mortality rate is somewhere around 0.10-0.15%, but the CDC will tell you that this is an estimate, since the number of cases (the denominator) is not really known with any precision.  (Sound familiar?)

Similarly, the major pandemic outbreaks, (Asian flu, Hong Kong flu, swine flu) killed 15,000 – 155,000 Americans, with mortality rates of anywhere from 0.02% - 1.9%, so what was all the brouhaha about this corona virus?  The big outlier pandemic was the Spanish flu of 1918-1919, that was said to infect 35 million Americans and kill 675,000 of us.  Now this was serious, but it took place in a primitive America with no vaccines and abysmal sanitation and health practices.

In continuing to research the issue, I realized that just throwing numbers of deaths around from flu seasons or recent pandemics were ill-advised, when it came to covad-19, for several reasons that were being pointed out by respected health professionals throughout the world, including those standing up at daily press briefings in Washington.  Some of these reasons were: Transmissibility and contagion – Covad-19 can be air borne, person to person, up to six feet, or by touch, on surfaces, for many hours, if not days.  Exponential spread – early results from Washington State, Italy and other locations showed how fast the virus could spread, from a few cases, to a rapid exponential increase in cases.  Mortality rate – Though hampered by lack of testing of new cases, mortality rates were running as high as 5-6%, compared to 0.10-0.15% for “normal” flu.  This is a factor of 50 times more deadly, and even more for older or weaker victims.

Admittedly, mortality rates are inaccurate, since not all cases have been tested and identified, and also, deaths from other causes can have been represented as Covid-19 deaths.  But even so, even if there are twice as many cases as currently known, and say 50% fewer deaths from this virus, the mortality numbers are still orders of magnitude higher for Covid-19, than that for more conventional flu viruses.  So rather that a factor of 50, a factor of 20 or even 10 times more deadly is still pretty serious.  

Notwithstanding the undeniably true danger to society posed by the virus, I have to admit that I have concerns about a number of issues relating to how the world (and our country) has responded to this covad-19 crisis.

One of the continuing concerns that I have is that we broke our economy on the advice of unelected expert doctors, somewhat questionable models (at least at first), and will be printing money as fast as we can to try to shore the economy back up.  But it’s not cool to express it that way, because the preponderance of all expert medical thought is that it was all necessary to prevent upwards of 2.5 million American deaths, and God knows how many world-wide deaths, maybe 10-20 million?

Another concern is how ovine was our response to the call for leaving our jobs, shutting down the economy and sequestering ourselves in our residences.  Let’s make a note of that in our “totalitarian notebook”, right next to Russia, 1920’s and Germany, 1930’s.  But we should asterisk our constitution, our checks and balances and our federalist system, as protecting us somewhat.

Not sure whether that docile response is the result of that permissiveness resulting from identity politics and the nanny state, or response to the “big orange bully” in Washington, - probably a little of each.  In any case, I would have expected a more seasoned and libertarian response, at least in intellectual dialogue, to the government taking over our lives.

The country seems to be coming out of its torpor, and loud fringes of the political spectrum are again taking to the warm, spring streets.  How much of this is truly grass roots, and how much of it is fomented by right- and left-wing action groups is problematic.  If there’s “hate Trump’ or pro-leftist theme, look for Soros’ or Bloomberg’s or Steyer’s money.  If it’s right oriented, maybe Koch or Blackstone Group or Tim Mellon.

Of course, we’ll get the economy going again, but what lessons from this?

Truisms – The economy will become healthy again.  People will die.  There will be loud howls from the left that this is cause and effect.

In fact, these are somewhat mutually exclusive.  People will die whether the economy remains shut down or not.  Whether more people will die when the economy is reopened is not calculable.  Compared to what? Not opening the economy for two years?  Five years?  Some people will die no matter when we open the economy, as long as it is not on the exponential part of the death curve.

More truisms – The 2-3 Trillion (with a “T”) that is being used for economic relief, and another $2 trillion for infrastructure being discussed, is not coming from productivity, at least not immediately.  It’s coming from borrowing, which means eventually from the printing presses, and inflation, notwithstanding the early chicanery between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.  On the other hand, with an economy that was quite healthy before all this happened, others will buy our relatively safe debt, even China.  How’s that for a “come around”. 

We will change as we come out of it.  We’ll pay more attention to our health, cleanliness and sanitation.  We’ll wash our hands more and perhaps shake hands less.  We’ll take greater advantage of our conferencing technologies and realize we really don’t have to do that long commute every day to be in front of an office computer when we have a perfectly good computer with conferencing capability at home.  Similar for some church, social and intellectual meetings.  We may have to give up the casseroles or snacks, but save miles of driving and carbon emissions.

There will be dialogue about how much more susceptible to the corona virus were black and brown minorities of the country.  Our left will play a ”racist” theme and call for more money to further enthrall these communities.  A more positive approach would stress better living conditions, a better diet, more attention to health, sanitation, and cleanliness, basically the same as for all society, without any racial or ethnic bias.

Other changes will be to continue the trend toward populism, patriotism and self sufficiency started in this country and in in the EU, and in much of non-Chinese Communist China.  There will be a move away from fragmented globalism and manufacturing almost everything in China because it’s cheap.  Not so cheap after all, when it will take the U.S. upwards of $4 trillion to dig ourselves out of the economic hole from the corona virus, caused and allowed to spread by the Chinese communists.

Ray Gruszecki

April 21, 2020