Not ... the same as it ever was

Back in the day, Gramps bought a Caddy every year. This 59 edition was the year of the fins where every car had to have them but ... as my loyal readers know, this blurb's not about old cars and grandfathers but rather about how it's Not ... the same as it ever was as everything's different and ... hopefully for the better as hyper-capitalism no longer works as seen by the impact of COVID-19 on countries like the good ole USA where shortages of all things medical directly relate to whether said manufacturer of the item in question is making his nut and not to the safety of the populace at large. 

Why? Because there's never been a social contract, like that of Scandinavian countries, defining the proper roles of government and business while meeting the needs of the people i.e. universal healthcare, free education, separation of church and state, term limits, sustainable energy policy, protection of the environment, sane defense budget, etc., etc., etc.

Even though Wall Street's "amazing" ability to defy gravity continues to defy reality, the world is forever changed, where people are finally willing to question what does and doesn't work, notions that terrify the status quo as it should as new ideas are dangerous entities, especially if said ideas become the driving engine for change, something drastically needed as this nation moves further into the 21st century.

According to  Charles Hugh Smith, who has been quoted many times in BRT, everything is different now and here are some of the reasons why.

Specialization has long been central to capitalism's relentless drive to increase efficiencies and thus profits, and globalization has pushed specialization to extremes globally dominant corporations can arbitrage currencies, wages, political corruption and lax environmental standards in ways that localized competitors cannot.

The net result is increasing reliance on one globally competitive industry for jobs, tax revenues, etc.--in essence, the modern-day equivalent of a monoculture plantation or single-industry factory town.

When the plantation or factory closes, there's no economically diverse ecosystem to pick up the slack.

If tourism doesn't rebound very quickly, all the local economies that became hyperspecialized to serve global tourism (enabled by low-cost airfares and credit cards) will be gutted.

The second order effect of the pandemic will be the wrenching transformation of these local economies into a much broader economic ecosystem that will have to be moated from globalized competition. For example, grapes flown in from locales 3,000 miles away will be banned or heavily taxed so local grapes can compete.

A great many inefficiencies have been sustained by hidebound, self-serving institutions and cartels which have moated their industries from competition. These include higher education, healthcare, the defense sector and the recent crop of Big Tech monopolies (Facebook, Google, et al.).

A number of people have already noted that remote online classes have become the norm out of necessity, and this has revealed the incredible inefficiency of maintaining enormously costly campuses and bureaucracies for coursework that can be completed anywhere.

And this ...

The Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic is a far more profound event for the global economy than the great financial crisis of 2008-9. It will have more significant consequences for the simple reason that it is operating at a more fundamental level of our economic relationships than the 2008-9 crash ever did.

It will cause a recession, but it will also fundamentally reshape the way our economy operates. We can think of typical recessions – of the kind we used to have before 2008 – as being the result of a fall in demand from whatever source, which in turn causes fewer goods and services to be sold. The knock-on effect is that unemployment rises as firms lay off their workers because they are not making enough money.

Covid-19 is different again because it does not just threaten a recession. It does not just threaten the stability of major institutions (and the $700bn intervention by the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, is of a comparable scale to the assistance offered in 2008-9). Rather, it threatens the most fundamental institution of all in capitalism: the labour market itself.

Yet again ...

As research has progressed, the data suggests that the infection rate is higher than previously thought — possibly much higher. A study published on 24th February concludes that:

“Even under best-case assumptions, we estimate that screening will miss more than half of infected people. Breaking down the factors leading to screening successes and failures, we find that most cases missed by screening are fundamentally undetectable, because they have not yet developed symptoms and are unaware they were exposed.”

This implies that the infection rate is at least double what was previously thought.

Another study suggests it could be even higher. Epidemiologists at Imperial College London have found that two-thirds of infected people travelling globally are not being detected, which seems to be “resulting in multiple chains of as-yet undetected human-to-human transmission outside mainland China”. This suggests that the infection rate maybe two to three times higher than assumed, and that a significant number of infections are going on without detection.

Why the virus is a wicked problem - Courtesy MIT Technology Review

Eighteen months!? Surely there must be other solutions. Why not just build more ICUs and treat more people at once, for example?

Well, in the researchers’ model, that didn’t solve the problem. Without social distancing of the whole population, they found, even the best mitigation strategy—which means isolation or quarantine of the sick, the old, and those who have been exposed, plus school closures—would still lead to a surge of critically ill people eight times bigger than the US or UK system can cope with. (That’s the lowest, blue curve in the graph below; the flat red line is the current number of ICU beds.) Even if you set factories to churn out beds and ventilators and all the other facilities and supplies, you’d still need far more nurses and doctors to take care of everyone.

In all scenarios without widespread social distancing, the number of Covid cases overwhelms the healthcare system. Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team

How about imposing restrictions for just one batch of five months or so? No good—once measures are lifted, the pandemic breaks out all over again, only this time it’s in winter, the worst time for overstretched health-care systems.

If full social distancing and other measures are imposed for five months, then lifted, the pandemic comes back. Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team.k.

And what if we decided to be brutal: set the threshold number of ICU admissions for triggering social distancing much higher, accepting that many more patients would die? Turns out it makes little difference. Even in the least restrictive of the Imperial College scenarios, we’re shut in more than half the time.

This isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s the start of a completely different way of life

Yes indeed.