Coronavirus and You - Page 67

1. It is true that there are tremendous problems in the supply chain for many industries. E.g. the main reason named by German car manufacturers for stopping production is the inability to receive all necessary components to continue production (personally, I’d say that an expected dive in demand for new cars is another major reason as well). It is expected that a large part of the higher tech industry in Europe is having the same issues right now. However, I very much doubt that this applies to essential items for one’s daily needs. Chicken farms are not sourcing parts from 30 different countries on 5 different continents, neither are bakeries, cow barns, or toilet paper manufacturers for that matter. The ability to feed the population and provide supplies for daily needs is probably guaranteed within every single EU country, and Germany is among the very last EU countries to fear any shortages of basic supplies, since all necessary items are produced locally with locally sourced precursor products. I cannot guarantee you that you will be able to receive Australian kangaroo meat or Ecuadorian shrimps in the next months, but it would pretty much require an apocalypse and then a couple of years until you cannot get German bread, milk, potatoes, chicken wings, beer, toilet paper, etc. The EU as an institution and multiple member countries have been heavily criticized for their heavy subsidies to the agricultural sector for at least a decade, and for all the issues these subsidies have caused in developing nations, they also mean that the EU is the last place on earth to worry about food supplies in any crisis: The EU as a whole has been the largest food exporter in the world since 2013.
The empty shelves you are seeing in the supermarkets are due to the fact that the local stock in the supermarket has been calculated for a certain level of demand. This calculation has not taken into account morons that buy a year’s worth of toilet paper and pasta. Thus the contracts with producers and the scheduled deliveries are currently out of sync with the momentary spike in demand. The production itself is unaffected; the stocked supplies are there, but simply have not been moved yet. Essential items will remain in stock and supplies currently sold out will be back in normal qualities (at least in Europe) within 2-4 weeks after restocking schedules have been adjusted to the new situation.

2. I do not know what you mean by “essential workers”. If you happen to have people like grocery store cashiers in mind, then yeah, they are not protected. But they are also rarely 70+ with multiple comorbidities. It may sound a bit cynical, but objectively on average they should be about as much at risk from Covid-19 complications the general population. Taking into account that Merkel and the RKI announced that 60-70% of the German population could eventually get infected with the virus + Show Spoiler +, it just means that these workers will be among the first ones to get infected, but not that they will be dying more often than others.
If you happen to have medical professionals in mind… then yeah… they are indeed in danger of lacking sufficient protection very soon, which would cause a whole lot of issues down the line. One of the main reasons for the movement restrictions in Germany is to buy more time for medical preparations, which includes the sourcing of sufficient protection for doctors and nurses. It is anyone’s guess how this will unfold. Personally (and my opinion on this topic is nothing but a wild guess), I feel like the German government is currently taking pragmatic and decisive measures that will eventually largely (hopefully completely) alleviate protection issues for medical personnel, but I would not bet my life on it…

3. People did not understand “it” and unfortunately way too many people still do not understand “it”. Fortunately, regular people do not need to understand everything. The important thing is that governments and people in relevant positions have a sufficient understanding to implement the correct measures. If that’s the case or not is beyond my judgment, but it seems nearly impossible that everywhere will end up like Italy. For one, I feel like Bulgaria is taking the right steps in a timely manner and fully expect the country’s results to look much better than Italy’s despite having a much poorer state of health care and significantly less resources. Germany also seems to be (finally) heading in the right direction and I doubt it will be as bad as in Italy here, but the early delay may still end up costing many lives. I cannot comment at all on how other countries will fare. Odds are that there will be other places that are heading towards the same disaster as Italy… Either way, the last few sentences are solely my uneducated opinion, which nobody should put too much stock in.

4. Once again everywhere is too strong of a statement. Italy was absolutely not prepared and had the bad luck of being hit much earlier than anywhere else in the West. Additionally, there is vast number of socio-economic and cultural factors who in the end may turn out to have been hugely contributing to the overall development (or not, who knows). Either way, it is extremely unlikely that the entire world gets hit the same way as Italy was. Living in Germany, I feel like the country still has a chance to “skate by” at least in comparison to Italy. For obvious reasons, I cannot say how much of my guestimate is based on the political measures taken, the health care system in place, the available resources and experience, and how much on wishful thinking and my personal biases.

5. At this point, it is obvious that there will be a significant recession. It also appears to be anyone’s guess just how bad it is going to be. I have read estimates and predictions from renowned institutions and random “experts” ranging from -0.6% GDP growth for Italy this year (which I feel is utopian) to over 20% unemployment across Europe within a couple of months. I certainly cannot say what is going to happen, but it appears that so far nobody can. As of yet, there seems to be no solid indication if it will be any worse for the general population than previous crashes in the past 50 years.





First of all, the death ratio is not underestimated. As a matter of fact, any calculation based on recorded cases of recovered vs died is with 100% certainty guaranteed to be an overestimation for any country with communal spread (which is effectively every country with more than 10 recorded cases and without a shred of doubt every country with more than 1000 cases). As deacon.frost already said, there is a lag due to the fact that on average dying occurs much faster than being announced as recovered. The much more significant reason, however, is the fact that it is absolutely impossible to register every single infection. People without symptoms will never be checked for the virus. They will get infected and beat the virus without anyone ever knowing that they were infected to begin with and thus they will never show up in the statistic. People with mild symptoms are also unlikely to ever reach out for any testing. According to the official estimates, 80% of the infected will have either no symptoms or only mild symptoms. These people will for the most part never appear in any of the recorded cases since they will never be tested. It is not a secret that most countries have neither a sufficient amount of test kits nor the personnel and capacity to process enough tests to check everybody. Some countries like Italy and Japan + Show Spoiler + are openly saying that they test very far from everybody who could have been infected (albeit for different reasons), the US for example admitted to not having enough test kits for widespread testing, in Germany a virologist who came to fame during the crisis said in an interview today that they are not able to trace everyone infected and they do not care to trace everyone infected (quote: “if a healthy student is sitting in home quarantine and watching Netflix, I, as a doctor, do not need to know that she would test positive… But when my 70 yo patient gets sick and is isolated at home, I would like to test him and then call every other day to see how his breathing is), instead people should abide to the hygiene and self-isolation rules + Show Spoiler +. Then you have cases like Testie in this very thread when a person is rightfully worried of possibly being infected but not being able to get tested. An isolated instance cannot be used as proof of anything, but similar stories are being heard all around where I live in Germany, which makes me believe that it is not particularly rare.
On the other hand, one can assume that the overwhelming majority of people who die of the new virus get recorded in the statistic.
Nobody can say how many of the asymptomatic and mild cases get recorded, but there is not a shred of doubt that many such cases do not get recorded, which makes the death ratio calculated based on the recorded numbers an overestimation. Given the lack of testing capacity in most places around the world, it appears fairly safe to say that a large portion of the infected people are not part of the official records, which means that the death ratio you calculate is a significant overestimation. If we go by the official estimate of 80% mild cases, if none of those get recorded, you need to divide the numbers you calculate by 5, resulting in 2% mortality instead of the 10% you get from the previous calculation. It is of course not that simple, since there are mild cases that are indeed being recorded. However, due to the exponential growth of infections in the West currently, your basic calculation is significantly skewed by a lag in testing and a lag till people are officially declared recovered.

There is one more component that significantly distorts any calculations on death rate based on recorded cases. The official estimates say that 5% of the infected will be in critical condition. The estimates, I have seen, on the mortality from the virus vary between 0.5% and 2%. Let’s say you have 100.000 infected people at a given moment. Out of those you would expect 5.000 to be in critical condition. Let’s say that with the right treatment, you will still end up with 1.000 people dying (1% overall mortality). However, without the right treatment, you can expect that all 5.000 will die. This is an issue that is currently affecting Italy (and was previously affecting Wuhan till the lockdown took effect). There is no capacity to treat everybody, so the death rate is much higher than it would else be. For this reason, varying degrees of lockdowns are being implemented all around the world. The goal is to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed. It also has an effect on any mortality calculation based solely on the recorded cases. As mentioned in the beginning, deaths occur on average significantly faster than labeling people as recovered. If using the fictional numbers I mentioned above of 5.000 people dying instead of only 1.000, it means that the time difference between people being declared as dead to people being declared as recovered is now 5 times more impactful on the mortality calculation based on recorded cases. If we add the fictional assumption that all 80% of mild cases do not get recorded, which also impacts the calculation by a factor of 5, your mortality calculation is suddenly off by a factor of 5x5=25, which would mean that your calculated 10% mortality is in reality only 0.4%. I want to make clear that I neither claim nor believe that the mortality of the virus is only 0.4%. I have every reason to trust the official estimates of 0.5%-2%. + Show Spoiler + I just wanted to show examples why one cannot calculate the mortality with any degree of certainty simply based on the recorded cases of deaths vs recovered (or infected for that matter).