How to Outsmart a Plague
By: Conrad Shaw
Tags: Economics, Disease, Health, Basic Income, Coronavirus

The Skeptics — “You’re not going to get sick and nobody you know is going to get sick.”

Trump is one of many downplaying the size of the outbreak based on current infection number.

People are pointing to the still-quite-low total numbers of cases of infection as a reason to write off the virus as non-newsworthy.

However, what they’re failing to account for is COVID-19’s high level of contagion, difficulty to detect, inability to test effectively, and lack of a vaccine. All of these factors increase the overall danger of this pandemic, especially now that it is being reported in most of the world’s countries.

And, counterintuitively, the fact that it doesn’t have the nightmare-inducing mortality rate of other diseases of recent memory actually means it is more effective at spreading to massive numbers of people. If it doesn’t kill you or confine you to your bed, you’re out in the world and much more able to share the bug with your fellow citizens.

Notice that coronavirus has already jumped to the second most lethal on this list overall, and the outbreak is only just beginning. (source)

What’s more, in comparing coronavirus to the common seasonal flu, which itself kills tens of thousands of Americans each year, coronavirus is estimated to be 1.5–2.3 times more infectious and 10–50 times more lethal. Please take a moment to let that sink in.

As of March 11. 2020, these are the countries reporting cases of coronavirus. (source — CDC website)

This thing is just getting started, and the window to stop the spread is narrowing very rapidly, if it is even still open at all.

Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch thinks there’s no way to stop this thing from spreading far more significantly, and he predicts that, without strong countermeasures, “between [20–60%] of the world’s adult population could end up infected with coronavirus.” That’s a number in the billions. Even with a lower-end mortality rate estimate of 1%, that means tens of millions of deaths, at minimum. If this thing isn’t slowed down, and if just about everyone gets this bug, you will almost certainly know people who will die.

Essentially, left unchecked, we could see the number of cases multiply by a factor of 10 every two weeks. That adds up to a very large number very quickly.

Maybe that seems far-fetched. You might point, as Trump did in the tweet above, to the fact that we’re still at only about .001% infection rate for the global population, and even less in the United States. But one must understand, here, how exponential growth works. This video provides an incredibly helpful visualization of this phenomenon.

One bit of hope comes from the possibility that the coming warmer weather might help slow or delay the outbreak, but even that is highly uncertain. It all comes down to the growth rate, as in how quickly and unrestrictedly the virus is allowed to spread.

We’re in a situation of when, not if, this deadly disease spreads, and to what extent. At this point, many more people will die regardless of what we do, but the video above should hopefully make it crystal clear just how incredibly important efforts to contain and slow the virus are.