clutch

That is the life. Existence is suffering. You have to embrace the chaos and move forward. And we will.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/world/asia/coronavirus-south-korea-second-wave.html So only few days after they have lifted social distance measures, there is now a community outbreak created by a single spreader. The latest number of confirmed cases from this incident is 54. Compared to the numbers in the US, that might look trivial. However, people are now pushing for delaying the reopening of high schools. Well, that sounds like an overreaction... but I believe this is what a lockdown does to your society. Even if what you have done so far is considered as the gold standard by other countries. As restrictions are lifted, and as the public sees the sudden increase in cases, the fear spreads again and you have nowhere to go but to return to your restrictions. In fact, this rebound effect might be stronger for those countries who have taken more stronger measures and been successful so far. The chance of a big 2nd wave is greater while the public expectation is much higher. It's a double edged sword situation. At one hand, you can go to the Swedish route but risks many more deaths immediately. On the other hand, stronger lockdown measures can prevent such deaths now but now you are stuck in a limbo always fearing the 2nd wave and almost impossible to return back to normal. And I believe that we will only know which was better after this pandemic is over. Disclosure: has many relatives in S. Korea

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3083627/coronavirus-hong-kong-records-no-new-cases-covid While these are success stories now, I'm afraid once they open up the borders/businesses again... Boom. Boom? They'll keep screening people at the border and international travel will be pretty low until there's a vaccine or at least better therapies. Any time they gain now by crushing the curve and containing it is fewer deaths before a vaccine. Well, let's see what happens. I'm just very curious to see how these countries start to easy the lockdown measures, and how they will handle potential 2nd or 3rd waves... Just look at Singapore, and now S. Korea where a single club goer has caused another possible outbreak... which led the government to shut down bars/clubs again. Seems like they will have to go back and forth with measures, for the next 12+ months... At some point, I'm afraid that the whole society will lose its patience/integrity. The whole society will lose their integrity because they can’t go to bars? C’mon. Also, we keep talking about lockdowns, but the US and Europe never had any “lockdowns”. We had “shelters in place” that are quite leaky, in some countries/ states more so than others. In my state, many stores were open (hardware, groceries, liquor and of course drugstores), parks open, takeout food available and many business declared essential etc so people still went to work as usual. That’s not what I call a “lockdowns. lockdown is what the Chinese did when they prevented people from leaving their apartment for any reason. We never had a lockdown in the US or Europe. The bars were just a recent example from S. Korea... Nice reading comprehension. I'm talking about all the measures as a whole... and i'm just using "lockdown" in the sense used by the media.

That's why you need a crapload of testing, good contact tracing, people wearing masks, discourage large events, etc.. This is how you avoid huge outbreaks that lead to large shutdowns. Easier to keep it to a simmer and crush little embers when they show up if you have measures to keep R0 as low as possible (under 1 ideally) and good testing to immediately catch things when they begin. If you don't have that, outbreaks go undetected long enough that you can't contain them and you have to do larger shutdowns again and again. Doing it right is easier than doing it wrong, which is the huge problem with the incompetence at the federal level in the US. A lot of all this could've been avoided with a competent early response (and I don't even mean super early like in January, but even later it would've made a big different because of the inherent properties of exponential growth). Yeah, too late for the US. So not sure how these success stories would help them at this point. Also, I'm not even sure how the measures such as "a crapload of testing, good contact tracing, people wearing masks, discourage large events, etc." would be able to be sustained for a year... If you look up images of schools that have opened up so far in other countries... I see the perfect resemblance of a dystopia and make me depressed.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3083627/coronavirus-hong-kong-records-no-new-cases-covid While these are success stories now, I'm afraid once they open up the borders/businesses again... Boom. Boom? They'll keep screening people at the border and international travel will be pretty low until there's a vaccine or at least better therapies. Any time they gain now by crushing the curve and containing it is fewer deaths before a vaccine. Well, let's see what happens. I'm just very curious to see how these countries start to easy the lockdown measures, and how they will handle potential 2nd or 3rd waves... Just look at Singapore, and now S. Korea where a single club goer has caused another possible outbreak... which led the government to shut down bars/clubs again. Seems like they will have to go back and forth with measures, for the next 12+ months... At some point, I'm afraid that the whole society will lose its patience/integrity.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3083627/coronavirus-hong-kong-records-no-new-cases-covid While these are success stories now, I'm afraid once they open up the borders/businesses again... Boom.

The Swedish models isn’t different than the US model effectively except the Swedes do with intend what the US does wby accident and of course the Swedes have a much better outcome (no collapse of their health care system in Stockholm vs NYC). What I do not get is - even if Stockholm reaches heard immunity until fall, that’s only 10% of their population (Stockholm has ~1M people vs 10.3M Swedes), so they still will have 10x more cases overall when Stockholm is done. NYC probably reaches some level of heard immunity too, and possibly some hard hit areas in the NE (Boston, Connecticut), but again that’s only a small part of the US population. There is still a lot of uninfected humans in both countries to work through. If that’s our strategy anyhow, how about estimating some numbers. US 340M people, let say we infect 60% with a 0.75% mortality rate and get there without crashing the health care system somehow. That’s 1.53M dead by my math which needs to be seen relative to the ~2.8M natural death rate in the US. Maybe that’s what it is, but I have not seen this spelled out in a WH meeting - this is our strategy and that how much it’s going to cost us and that is how we minimize the damage and the risk of the health care system crashing etc. Instead, the WH says, we are going to have 100k dead and we are winging it and see what happens. The mortality rate will be lower as the older/vulnerable population die first and as schools open and more kids get infected. (I know, that sounds horrible) But I 100% agree with you that these projections are never brought up by the government. It's not just the WH, but many other governments who have gone the lockdown route and are now stuck on what to do next. I think we will have to learn how to live with this virus...

It's a motley fool article... probably wrote after half an hour of research...

We have crappy diets, resulting in first world problems like high blood pressure, diabetes etc. In rural China and rural Africa, people have 110/70 blood pressure well into their old age. In the western world, with processed foods and high salt and high sugar, we have extremely high blood pressure and diabetes rates very early in life. Our bodies don't fight off viruses as well as healthy people. My view is it's largely diet based. All, the above and second and third world countries also have reporting issues, plus the epidemic has not run its. course yet. There are reports of bad situations in Ecuador (Quito) and Brazil but numbers are hard to come by. While these and other points mentioned above are all valid, I highly doubt they can fully explain the huge discrepancy between the developed and the developing countries. And especially considering the big factor that should make situations worse in developing countries -- their lack of good healthcare systems. I do wonder whether how some countries do not care much about this virus and this is being reflected in recognizing/reporting the COVID death numbers. My wife's coworker (they work in healthcare), who has families in Bangladesh, told her yesterday that while COVID is spreading there, people are more worried about going hungry than the virus. Suppose your people, media, and government do not really recognize this virus as anything novel or serious... In such countries, even if people die due to COVID or related illness, they might not warrant much attention and won't be tracked like some doomsday counter. In that sense, is COVID another "first world problem"? Yup. I think this is on the money. Media coverage and fear mongering have made this what it is. Its now widely recognized that this was here much earlier than some people thought, and guess what? Life was totally normal and folks got on with their normal business and the economy was humming along just fine. So yes, its a shame we manufactured a horror story and certainly did impair parts of the economy, probably unnecessarily. But, in other news. Shanghai Disney tickets sold out. RCL is reporting normal booking volume for 2021, guess not everyone is living under a table in their basement. Huh? Maybe I am missing something but the denominator for per capita death rate is simply total population of a country (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/). So China and India will show a small number for a very long time unless this is allowed to spread unhinged. I know there is general distrust of death numbers (numerator) attributable to covid but even if/when they start reporting "correct" ballpark numbers in the numerator, the denominator is what will skew and influence interpretation. This is really a very bad metric to compare countries on some kind of effectiveness or other theories on why deaths are higher because of the effect of denominator that has no direct relevance to deaths. It is simply an accident of population growth trajectory. Here it is without the denominator. I see a similar pattern, still.

We have crappy diets, resulting in first world problems like high blood pressure, diabetes etc. In rural China and rural Africa, people have 110/70 blood pressure well into their old age. In the western world, with processed foods and high salt and high sugar, we have extremely high blood pressure and diabetes rates very early in life. Our bodies don't fight off viruses as well as healthy people. My view is it's largely diet based. All, the above and second and third world countries also have reporting issues, plus the epidemic has not run its. course yet. There are reports of bad situations in Ecuador (Quito) and Brazil but numbers are hard to come by. While these and other points mentioned above are all valid, I highly doubt they can fully explain the huge discrepancy between the developed and the developing countries. And especially considering the big factor that should make situations worse in developing countries -- their lack of good healthcare systems. I do wonder whether how some countries do not care much about this virus and this is being reflected in recognizing/reporting the COVID death numbers. My wife's coworker (they work in healthcare), who has families in Bangladesh, told her yesterday that while COVID is spreading there, people are more worried about going hungry than the virus. Suppose your people, media, and government do not really recognize this virus as anything novel or serious... In such countries, even if people die due to COVID or related illness, they might not warrant much attention and won't be tracked like some doomsday counter. In that sense, is COVID another "first world problem"?

Shouldn’t be an issue any more. For regular surgeries etc, hospitals are open for business. I think some truly elective stuff (mild hernia) may still be pushed out depending on the area. The bigger issue is that some patient fear going to hospitals or doctors now out of concern contracting COVID-19. This is not true in Ontario, Canada -- they still haven't opened up hospitals for elective or even cancer surgeries, although our hospital beds are empty. There was a report that 35 people died due to delayed cardiac surgeries: https://globalnews.ca/news/6879082/coronavirus-delayed-surgeries-ontario-deaths/ At that point in time, the number of covid-19 deaths was around 950. So, I'd say 35 compared to 950 is a significant proportion. And this only counts people with cardiac conditions, not ones with cancer who may die sooner due to delayed surgeries.

Do you guys ever wonder why deaths per capita are higher in the "first world" countries?

A couple? NO.

Don't look elsewhere guys, this is the swamp right here.

All right, this is really fucked up... https://globalnews.ca/news/6910721/coronavirus-researcher-shot-dead-pittsburgh/ "U.S. researcher ‘on verge of making very significant’ coronavirus findings shot dead: reports" Killed by another Chinese person...

couldn't resist BPY.UN...

This is pure gold...*shakes my head* https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-politics-52553229 "Coronavirus: Prof Neil Ferguson quits government role after 'undermining' lockdown" Ferguson is the author of the famous Imperial College modeling paper (has not been even peer-reviewed, btw) and arguably was the biggest influencer in implementing the lock-down policies in Europe. And now he himself broke the social-distancing rule!

Interesting observing the age differences there. The young feel invincible, the old not so much? I think the virus strikes a greater fear on older folks (rightfully so) and it's being reflected on their investment decisions...

Also maybe, the disease doesn't spread at homes because while they live together, they never hug or kiss the elderly in Asian countries. ;D

Sons/daughters living with elders could make things worse. This was one of the theories as to why Italy had such a bad outbreak--elderly in frequent, close contact with younger relatives. Massive outbreaks at nursing homes are less likely, though. In many countries, the majority of deaths occurred in nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

I'm pretty sure that large scale nursing homes are less common in East/Southeast Asian countries. It's customary for sons/daughters to live together with elderly parents and take care of them. Might explain the lower death rates in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea.

The depression story hit home for me. Maybe we won't get another big dip again, but the market could be stuck at around the current level for a prolonged period of time...

I do miss Munger and his no BS jokes, though.

I feel like he is overly worried about this virus, possibly due to his old age.

Isn't it obvious to you? ::) Don't bother...