The Virus

I don’t think global traffic will decrease after this. It will keep on increasing after this downturn. To suggest people won’t travel unnecessarily is absurd as saying people won’t go out to restaurants post-covid-19. But restaurants will definitely get rocked by this.

The question is how will supply chains change. Will Apple really stick all their eggs on China again or will they change strategies. It probably depends on how much it costs them, ie its easier to keep everything in China and pay downtime costs when a new virus hits. Luckily Tim Cook is an expert in supply chains so he is perfectly positioned for this. Other companies probably aren’t and a few will make the wrong decision.

> I expect society will shift to a new normal pretty fast. Some of these elements—e.g., much less business travel, much less handshaking, much more handwashing—I expect to just stick. Some others—e.g., people working from home all of the time—I expect to not stick.

Why would people working from home not stick? Of all the enumerated changes, this one seems like the most likely to stick. At least for any worker that has no direct contact with clients needed, going to an office seems to be not that useful and a waste. As a remote worker myself for more than 10 years, I don't really see his point here. Anyone?

There are only 37,000 motor vehicle fatalities/yr in the US. Care to show your work, because my numbers come out in the millions on our current no-mitigation, pretend-it-will-go-away trajectory.

More like 360-3600 (dnautics said 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than vehicle deaths).

So this is the plausible worst case - unfortunately I see no reason why it should happen differently if we don‘t manage to keep R0 way lower for a while than it currently seems.

It‘s growing exponentially, so one week we‘ll still have a working healthcare system, the next week it will be overwhelmed by the low percentage of people needing O2 or breathing support for a few weeks.

We‘ll improvise and then there will be next week with a double number of cases. And a further diminished number of healthy people working in health care.

Then our healthcare system will just collapse and those people will die that would otherwise have recovered after a few weeks. It‘s a combination of exponential growth of infections and accumulating numbers of people who need treatment for a while.

As I understand this about is the current situation in Iran, it just happened earlier there.

We‘ll try a lot, maybe find a way of better treatment to mitigate this a little. This will happen until mid april, next year we‘ll have a vaccine, maybe.

Oh, and this is what I fear for my country. We have public healthcare without copay, you can’t be layed off for being sick and if you’re sick (or quarantined) you’ll still be payed.

This is going to be a wild, depressing ride and it will come ‚suddenly‘.