Coronavirus Deniers
Murray Rothbard told us during class, “I hate man-on-the-street interviews. Who cares what the average guy thinks.” Now, the man or woman on the street opinion streams 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on social media. The weightiest subjects in the world are left for average folk to voice an opinion on.
For instance, the coronavirus or Covid-19. Is it a threat? Is it a Black Swan? The second coming of the Spanish Flu? A hoax invented by the main stream media to upend the Trump presidency? A small sample from social media:
“Fear Porn - brilliant!”
“Dealing with the Corona virus is easy...stop watching the fear porn that people call news”
“I am afraid of stupid people, milk and snakes, I can handle corona virus”
“I’m as afraid of it as I am the common cold or flu. Mass hysteria is so annoying & dumb…”
There you have it. Mass hysteria? Hardly. Snarky indifference? For sure.
Then there is Raoul Pal, proprietor of the indispensable Real Vision, who posted “Praying for a Miracle: Coronavirus’ Black Swan Risk.”
Pal believes Coronavirus has every potential to be this century’s Spanish Flu, which, by the way, infected 27% of the world's population in 1918-1919, and killed about 30 million people. Pal is praying for a miracle.
Responding to the naysayers, Mr. Pal says,
You see, there's a narrative that's going around about the coronavirus, which is that split off is just the flu. That's not strictly the case, because its death rate is obviously much higher than the flu, in fact, 20 times higher. It's not about all of that. The comparison, the arguments about it being the flu is something completely wrong. You see, it's a pandemic. It has known attributes in terms of its spread rate, its death rate and a number of other factors.
Pal does not blame the president. He’s in the finance and investments business. For him, this is all about coming out on the other side, healthy and financially solvent. He has no political axe to grind.
He points out that the coronavirus spreads faster than Spanish flu, which spread somewhere around 2, while the coronavirus spreads at a rate of 3, maybe 4. “We're not even sure of the numbers, but it's much more virulent as an epidemic and a pandemic,” Pal says and follows with a key point when comparing the Spanish flu to coronavirus: “we're in a less rural, we are in a hyper mobile globalized world of plane travel, if we will back out those same numbers, then some 2 billion people will catch this flu and 68 million people would die. That is a truly terrifying outcome.”
But according to one tweeter, “Comparing the 1918 Spanish flu to the coronavirus is utter idiocracy,”
Our antibiotics are better
Our medical understanding of virus vs. infections are better
We have x-rays and CT scans now.
This is ridiculous…
We also don’t bleed people out now.
So why doesn’t everyone get a shot of penicillin, a CT scan, and claim victory?
The Chinese government quarantined a city of 11 million people. Try doing the same with New York or, more urgently, Seattle.
Covid-19 spread to South Korea, where they tested thousands. Then it spread to Iran, which as Pal points out was totally unprepared.
It didn't know the virus was there, it had no links, and it truly exploded and it continues to explode. I think there's something like some 20% to 50% of the government itself, now have the virus, and something like 10% of all government officials have the virus. Doctors are being infected, the death rates are exploding and the WHO have had to raise the death rate because of what's going on in Iran.
Then, Italy, where the Milan Fashionweek was cancelled. Pal explains, “it's still growing at about 50% a day right now. Italy infected Spain, France, and that's been going on and they've also had infections elsewhere. It's spreading fast. It's spreading in the UK. It's exploding in Germany right now.” France now has 1,000 cases.
In England, Pal says,
Boris Johnson said the right thing yesterday in the UK when he suggested that they may have to quarantine the entire country to try and shut this down as fast as possible. He's talking that their worst case scenario planning is 80% of the population get it and that 20% need hospitalization. Hospitals can't deal with this. Nobody can deal with this.
As I write, New York has declared a state of emergency and the Italian government may lock down the northern part of that country. The New York Times reports,
Italy’s cases more than doubled this week from about 2,500 infections on Wednesday to more than 5,800 on Saturday, according to Italian authorities and the World Health Organization. Deaths rose by 36 to 233.
Pal rightly points out that governments will have to do something, even if it’s wrong.
It's going to be one of the largest potential economic shutdowns the world has ever seen. I don't see a way around it. There's going to be a reality also coming up in the next few weeks of the data from February starting to filter out into the economic data. People are going to start to get a sense of how bad this already is economically, but not including where it's going. When you take into account what has to be done to stop this virus killing so many people, we're set up for what is, I think, probably the biggest economic event of our lifetimes.
Don’t worry, keep posting and tweeting. Nothing to see here.
