Coronavirus – The Status of the Outbreak and 4 Possible Scenarios

They blamed China for taking their jobs, and Trump capitalized on it. A foreign country with people that don’t look like yourself, or even speak the same language, and with a different political system was an easy target to scapegoat.

What they failed to realize was the impact that technology and automation had on their lives.

Do you see people working inside the heart of a car manufacturing factory anymore? No, it’s all robotic. What used to take hundreds of men, is now streamlined into an assembly line of 10 robots.

First, in the 80s and 90s, Walmart came and killed off the small businesses, but at least they provided some minimum wage jobs in their stores. Then, Amazon came and killed off the remaining smaller retailers, and tried to kill off Walmart. No more minimum wage cashier jobs, but more jobs for delivery people and warehouse workers.

Then, the software and hardware got better, that it started to replace those minimum wage cashiers jobs. Then robots got better, that they even started replacing the warehouse jobs.

But the United States had the benefit of creating technology over the past 70 years, and massively benefiting from the royalties that followed. Qualcomm doesn’t physically make any phones or computer chips, but 50% of their revenue comes from China.

Other jobs in technology like software, engineering, design, QA, project management, etc., were created in relation to technology, but these are not celebrated. Microsoft spawned a lot of software companies. Apple spawned a lot of smaller software businesses vying for space in their app market. But it seems none of these are celebrated in the world of Trump supporters.

Meanwhile, the Trump supporters benefited handsomely in one area: farming. Massive windfalls were made in selling grains and soy to China, who eagerly bought it all. The industrialized farms were literally printing money. And they thought they deserved that business, as if it was a god given right to them.

Maybe they got greedy, but more likely, they fell for the charm of a charlatan, and voted Trump into office, to take on the China problem. You know, the exact foreign customer that was buying up all their farm products. This baffles the mind on how they couldn’t make this connection.

Then in one fell swoop, Trump took that all away. Farm bankruptcies went higher and higher under Trump. He came in and demonized the very customer that was buying their products.

And now we have the coronavirus, and those dreams of decoupling the two economies of China and the United States, are about to come true.

The question is: are those Trump supporters ready for the ensuing fallout?

It can be both. The actions of individual citizens in Singapore, HK and other countries with a small number of cases certainly seem to be panic: buying more instant noodles than they could eat in a year, buying every toilet paper roll available, buying so many face masks that rations are introduced, and so on. Some government actions also appear to be going beyond what is necessary to respond; for example banning travel from country A to country B, when country A has fewer cases than country B itself.

> Secondly, it’s possible to trust the experts and also think that the proper measures are not being taken. The experts are the epidemiologists, virologists, doctors, public health officials, etc. who are working on this outbreak, and they seem pretty damn concerned. I’ve read very few statements that suggest this is likely to blow over, and many more that show a widespread opinion among the experts that containment is unlikely and that this is very serious. But the experts don’t run the world, politicians and bureaucrats and business leaders do. And they have different interests and incentives. There are also likely discussions behind the scenes that we don’t know about. The WHO could be urging countries to shut down all air travel but leaders are reluctant to do so for fear of the political backlash.

The WHO, in fact, has mostly suggested a more measured approach to air travel restrictions than what many governments have decided to take. Most of the expert opinions I've read have presented a number of different paths this could take, and suggested a lot of uncertainty as to the likelihood of each. This is sensible. Meanwhile, most of the forum posts and comments that I've read have strongly emphasised the worst possible cases, and continued to do so as the worst path that previously could have happened (which they were implying was a virtual certainty), didn't.

> All you have to do is look at how China treated the doctors who reported on this back in December to see how “trust the people in charge” is not the same as “trust the experts”.

I'd be the last person to suggest trusting China's leadership, but neither am I inclined to assume that the measures taken by other governments in response to this are entirely based on expert advice or even entirely for health-related reasons.

> If China had clamped down on this six weeks earlier than they did, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Maybe.