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> Engineering taught me one very important lesson. We can never get something for nothing. There is always a trade off. If the government is handing out money,
by ekidd 7y ago
> Engineering taught me one very important lesson. We can never get something for nothing. There is always a trade off. If the government is handing out money, it has to come from somewhere. Its either taxes, which means that tax money collected can't be spent elsewhere. Or it has to be printed, which is inflation.
If we leave the money aside for a moment, what we're looking at here is the need to massively reorganize our way of life to fight this virus. We need more medical care, more ventilators, less contact, less travel, etc. This is going to be really expensive. We're trying to turn a big portion of the economy on a dime.
Think of it like WW2, when the US converted automobile assembly lines to build planes.
There's going to be economic dislocation, and it's going to be rough. We need to reallocate resources rapidly. Once we've figured out what we need everybody to be doing, we can work out the money end of things.
And yes, we will pay for this with diminished wealth and higher taxes in the future. But if we allow this virus to spread freely, it will overwhelm our medical system and millions will die.
- abfan1127 7y agothere is so much hyperbole here. Massively reorganize our way of life? Lets keep perspective. We're talking about building some temporary hospitals, temporarily increasing our respiratory support. This isn't the Spanish Flu. We have months of data showing so. Millions won't die.
- macintux 7y agoNo one knows yet how this ends. All we have is informed speculation. The worst case scenarios are still very much in play.
- ekidd 7y agoWhat makes you say that this isn't the Spanish flu? If we look at the mortality rate in places that are doing heavy testing, such the Diamond Princess and South Korea, it looks like we have slightly below a 1% fatality rate among people who test positive assuming adequate modern medical care for everyone. The CDC's worst case scenario is 1.7 million dead in the US. Some British epidemic modelers put it closer to 2.2 million dead in the US assuming no health care overload. But of course, medical systems in Lombardy, Washington and the Bay Area are already stretched to the limit. Wuhan had 80,000 patients and had to be reinforced by multiple Chinese provinces. And these overloads were with just a few 10s of thousands infected. The natural peak, assuming current numbers are correct, would far exceed our medical system's ability to cope. At which point that 2.2 million number goes up. I've been staring at the numbers, running the calculations, and I keep getting roughly the same worst case answers as the CDC. Unless there's some critical number that we're missing, we're in an ugly fight until we have a vaccine, or treatments that allow most people to breathe unaided. Until then, our best hope is to figure how to live life outside lockdown while preventing exponential growth.