At least months
“I think this idea … that if you close schools and shut restaurants for a couple of weeks, you solve the problem and get back to normal life — that’s not what’s going to happen,” says Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and author of The Rules of Contagion, a book on how outbreaks spread. “The main message that isn’t getting across to a lot of people is just how long we might be in this for.”
Predictions are that a vaccine will take 12 to 18 months, so that’s probably how long.
Long.
Very long.
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees that the social distancing measures might need to be in place for at least months. “I don’t think people are prepared for that and I am not certain we can bear it,” she writes in an email. “I have no idea what political leaders will decide to do. To me, even if this is needed, it seems unsustainable.” She adds that she might just be feeling pessimistic, but “it’s really hard for me to imagine this country staying home for months.”
It’s really hard for me to imagine how that can even work, given how many people have zero margin. Robert Reich says 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, so…??????
It’s okay to be upset by all of this. And there are still a lot of unknowns about this virus, and how it will all play out. Perhaps the worst will spare us. But we still need to prepare for it and tap into our resiliency. Life may feel very hard and very stressful over the next several months. It’s a real burden, and you don’t have to like it. But know: This pandemic will end eventually. What we don’t yet know is when.
Yes but hard and stressful aren’t really the issue, nor is resiliency. Eviction and starvation are the issue. The Vox article, bizarrely, never addresses that.
This won’t go on for 18 months because it can’t.
With a, at tops, 3% death rate, well before we get anywhere near 18 months people are going to say to hell with this, 97% sounds like great odds to me, especially if the alternative is losing my house, not being able to buy food, losing health insurance, etc.
I’ve already had otherwise-rational people say to me they just want to catch it and get it over with, and if they die they die, but they just can’t take this. And this is after about 2 weeks of stricter controls, and with people who still have an income. Could you imagine 3 months of this if you worked at a restaurant that shut down and you have no income? People are wound up about Amazon firing that worker who wanted them to shut down the facility he worked at, and there were talks of a walkout. If this goes on 3 months, Amazon won’t care about any walkouts, because they’ll have 10 people lined up for each one of those jobs who won’t care if there’s a 3% chance they’ll get covid-19 and die from it.
Everyone laughs at the people, including Trump, who say at some point the cure is worse than the disease, but if the food supply starts breaking down, then suddenly it’s not going to look so ridiculous, especially when people aren’t thinking (to stick with 3% death rate) that it’s going to be 9 million dead and instead they’re thinking 97% chance they’ll personally make it through it. And if it looks like, or people become convinced it looks like, more than 9 million will die of starvation or other issues associated with societal breakdown, then it’s game over.
Well before 18 months we’ll throw in the towel.
The more hopeful alternatives:
A vaccine. Everyone keeps saying 12-18 months (shouldn’t it be 11-17 since I’ve been hearing this at least a month?). This isn’t set in stone, and it could be shorter. If not in a safe way, it will be shorter because if they come up with something that works there’s going to huge pressure to allow people to sign a waiver and get it.
Better treatments. Just because Trump prematurely jumped on one unproven treatment doesn’t mean one or more of the things they’re testing and developing won’t turn out to be a game changer.
The virus becomes less virulent on its own. We can’t count on this, but it’s pretty common.
Effective screening for people who already have it, allowing them to return to normal lives. Despite the scare stories about people getting it again (usually meaning just a positive test), this is likely to be a statistical fluke caused by false positives. The overwhelming majority of people who had it are not getting it again. As Governor Cuomo says, these people can start going back to work. Upon testing we may even find a shocking number of people have unknowingly already had it and can return to normal society. The U.K. and Italy are both pursuing this.
I am personally practicing strict social distancing and believe everyone else should be doing so as well at this point. Who knows what the future holds, but I don’t currently have any financial pressures, and I can work from home. I live with my family and have a lot of books and other things to do. I take my kids for walks and bike rides several times a day. If this current situation continued for me, I could do it for 18 months or more with no problem. But Joe and Jane Public? Not going to happen. And, given that many of them are in worse situations, I’m not blaming them. This won’t go on for 18 months.
Well that’s what I’m saying, or a version of it – I don’t see how the people who live paycheck to paycheck, whether they’re 80% of the population or 60 or 50, can just kick back for a year or more. I can’t see how that’s going to play out.
But the people who actually know stuff about epidemiology or virology are saying that is how long it’s going to take before a vaccine will be possible. I’m not sure if they’re saying the same about effective treatment.
Yes, but then the bodies pile up and the economy goes back to cratering anyways, probably worse. Even lifting restrictions won’t do as much as people might think: airlines, tourism, the entire service industry aren’t going to bounce back until there’s a vaccine.
That’s something people really don’t understand: the cure cannot be worse than the disease because there is no cure. All we’re doing now is making sure that we can set up the hospitals to manage the disease. The US is done as an economic power house no matter what happens.
That. I think Skeletor misunderstood what I’m saying, or what the issue is, or both. “Well before 18 months we’ll throw in the towel.” There’s no towel to throw in. It’s not as if, if we just say “oh well” and stop social distancing, everything will go back to the way it was but with lots of deaths from the virus. Much of everything will be irrevocably broken; there won’t be any everything that can go back to the way it was; there is no towel.
Yeah, I get it, Skeletor. I’m an introvert and a loner, and two weeks at home has been all right for me, especially since it’s giving me time to work on my novel. And I have a job that I can do at home. But…I have worked that other system, where you go to work and get paid for hours that you are physically present. There is no way to survive.
I am getting antsy already. The idea of being like this for months? Horrifying. The idea of ending the restrictions early? Horrifying.
This is truly a no-win situation. This is the kobayashi maru. And unlike Captain Kirk, we will not be able to just reprogram it so we can win. We are at the mercy of something so small it cannot be seen. And Blood Knight is right. There isn’t a way out, because bodies piling up will not be good for the economy. People not flying, eating out, going to theatre, congregating in groups, will not be good for the economy. We cannot fix the economy by ending the restrictions.
For myself, I am hoping this is the wake up call that makes us, finally, understand that our economy is not set up to deal with catastrophe. I don’t hold out any hope that we will realize that, but that is the only way through this, is to find a way to build a different economy, one that doesn’t crash at the slightest whiff of possible catastrophe, and that can weather actual catastrophe. I don’t know what that will look like. I doubt anyone does. But if we were smart, we would have our smartest minds working on that, while our other smartest minds are working on a vaccine.
It should have been obvious for a long time that our economy could not withstand a catastrophe. Hell, I could see it, and I have had a grand total of two economics classes. The interesting thing is, my econ profs couldn’t see it. It was in their own words, you could hear in the words they were saying, that our economy could not deal with catastrophe, but they could not hear it themselves. Now we are learning what a surprising number of people already knew, but never said because the minute we did, we were branded. Communist? Nope, that can’t handle catastrophe, either. Socialist? Maybe. That could handle a small catastrophe, I imagine, but still needs large influxes of cash to handle a large one, and would crash long before months of shut downs. Like I said, I have no idea what it would look like. I just know that I haven’t seen it yet. That doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, somewhere, in some obscure treatise. There are tons (thousands of tons) of books and articles I have never read.
I am sure we will not learn our lesson. We never do.
Skeletor:
Years ago, I had a passing acquaintance with Rewi Alley, a New Zealander who had chosen to spend most of his life in China, and who had worked as a factory inspector in Shanghai. Alley was also a personal friend of Chou-En Lai’s.
Alley wrote in one of his books of reminiscence (Yo Banfa!I think) that In 1927 he had found one factory with a coal-fired furnace which he saw as having a problem. The coal was stored in a giant hopper, from which it could gravity-feed into the furnace below. A worker was assigned to stand inside the hopper and on top of the pile of coal, and to use a steel rod to free any jams. But occasionally, the coal would avalanche, and the worker if he could not scramble out, would go down the chute and into the furnace.
Rewi Alley suggested to the management that they provide the (current) worker with a safety-rope attached to an overhead beam. Easily done.
Their reply: too much trouble and expense. Far easier to just step out onto the street and ask the first man you meet if he would like a job. In no time at all there will be an eager crowd of them.
People used to shrug off Nationalist warnings as the Red Army approached that the communists would kill their children and eat them. They would reply to the effect: ‘So what? It can’t get any worse than it is now.’
(It’s all there in Edgar Snow’s China. Highly recommended.)
Social distancing needn’t be all-or-nothing. A strategy in the UK – which Skeletor might have been alluding to – is to try to tune restrictive measures to keep things ticking along as well as possible without overloading the NHS.
This looks good on paper but there’s little clarity about how it might work in practice, how success or failure will be measured, how reactive businesses and people can be and so on. Various government people have been pictured smiling in front of a graph with a sine wave on it and that’s about the level of detail we have so far. But the thinking is that if we can be sufficiently and meaningfully reactive, perhaps we can limp along.
The bailout scheme to help companies pay their staff wages is structured toward making businesses more reactive and flexible in the number of staff they employ. That’s not close to enough but if there is a way to pull off rapidly changing restrictions then perhaps it’s a start.
I’d be more optimistic if the government had given even the slightest impression that the practicalities had been thought through.
https://www.amazon.com/Edgar-Snows-China-Lois-Wheeler/dp/0394509544
@Skeletor Viruses become less deadly because all the susceptible people are dead. This doesn’t work if you have a nonhuman vector, which is why the flu reappears in new forms on a regular basis.
Even without a nonhuman vector, human pools of viral activity can remain. It depends on the mutation rates and adaptation rate. Smallpox had no nonhuman vector but retained very high CFR’s of around 30% despite being a DNA virus, which typically has low mutation rates. This is because it was able to adapt quickly using another method to defeat the human immune system. (interesting summary here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120816121829.htm)
RNA viruses like coronaviruses tend to evolve much more rapidly. This one is mutating relatively slowly, 2 mutations per month which is similar to flu. Coronaviruses have a longer genome than flu so that mutation rate is comparatively lower because you have fewer mutations per base. And remember, these mutations are random, but they are under selective pressure. Some will break the virus. Some will be benign (to the virus, not to you), some may improve functions etc. This is actually better news than it might sound. It will help us develop the vaccine.
Fascinating fact: SARS-CoV-2 is really heavy. The virion particles are quite massive which is good news because it means it stays suspended in the air for a much shorter time than say a cold or the flu. If it wasn’t things would look a lot worse.
Capitalists are arguing about ‘re-opening’ the service economy rather than shutting down the betting markets—oh, sorry, the stock markets—and keeping the economists locked down and off of television for a few months while the government commands the essential supply chain and keeps everyone fed and housed and medicined until the crisis has passed. It’s a mad suicide pact with a political ideology.
Good luck with that.
I think when people speak of “this” continuing for 18 months, they don’t mean complete (or “all-but-essentials” complete) shutdown everywhere for a continuous 18 months. I don’t think anyone envisions that. (Though Blood Knight makes the good point that “just throw everything open again to save the economy” will have huge impacts beyond just “more people die” — you could end up seriously jeopardizing the supply chain for critical items through mass sickness and job walkoffs.)
As latsot alluded to, it seems much more likely that different regions will hit their peak and then decline sufficiently to permit some relaxation of constraints, at the same time that other regions are just gearing up. In the U.S., that probably means that states like Washington and California could be re-opening many more workplaces (though probably still not concert halls or sports arenas) while, say, South Dakota is in crisis.
And the restrictions might have to wax and wane again if, as some predictions claim, there is another wave in the fall or next spring.
Yes but what are people envisioning that’s less than complete (or “all-but-essentials” complete) shutdown everywhere? That’s what I’m having a hard time figuring out. Not travel, surely – who the hell wants to get on a plane now? Seattle is brightly saying the cruise season is indefinitely postponed (as opposed to canceled for the year) but come on – are people going to get on a cruise ship now? Does eating at a crowded restaurant appeal? Spending the evening at a crowded bar? Shopping at a crowded grocery store? Going to a crowded stadium? Sending the kids back to school?
With or without restrictions, I think a hell of a lot of normal life is going to go on being dead in the water until the pandemic is over.
Oh, yeah, lots of aspects of “normal” life will be on hold for a while. Stadiums and arenas, for sure. Travel — the legality will depend on where you coming from and heading to. Schools will be a tougher call, but social pressure to reopen will be very strong: the parents I know are going nuts with their kids at home, and everyone seems to admit that whatever the merits of “working from home” for adults, most kids are learning fuck-all at home now and many teachers are barely trying. Bars and restaurants I can see being allowed to reopen with tighter limits on occupancy.
No doubt many people will avoid some or all of these activities. But don’t underestimate (1) how eager many will be to get back to normal; and (2) the power of price discounts. You might not be willing to get on a plane for some time, but when the airlines start offering cheap fares, they will get customers.