The economic damage is only now being seen even though Karl, along with me, have been saying it’s going to be devastating. Well now there’s more second order consequences that are beginning to show themselves. Now that the additional unemployment funds are kicking in there are those that can now see their annual income jump to 55k a year. For many folks that’s much more money than they make working…and so the discussions are happening and some decisions are being made to simply end their employment and stay on unemployment for as long as possible. Also keep in mind there has only been one human virus that has been eliminated…smallpox. Otherwise there is no known lasting immunity to any other virus. Is the world going to go on lockdown every year?
So now we have a new form of social welfare called federal and state unemployment. As per a foxnews article:
The average state already gives out $463 per week in unemployment benefits. When combined with the new $600 per week, that works out to $1,063 per week – the equivalent of more than $26 an hour, or $55,000 a year.
That angers some essential workers on the front lines on the crisis.
“I can tell you as a worker who barely makes over minimum wage, at $12 an hour, the whole thing is complete BS,” Otis Mitchell Jr., who works in West Virginia transporting hospital patients to get medical tests, told Fox News.
Mitchell Jr. added that he has unemployed friends who already are getting the extra $600, and that “I prefer to work, but sadly I’d make more staying home.”
“I work in a hospital of all places and we aren’t being compensated anything [extra],” he added.
He said he also knows people at his workplace “who are just wanting to get laid off, completely because they’d get more money being at home.”
So if you think the economy is going to bounce right back…I can tell you right now that is a fantasy. Once the country is opened up it will take most likely 3 months just to get things back online. During that time the job losses will continue and the damage will continue to grow. Only once things are back online will we be able to see exactly how bad the damage is. Remember the government data is a lagging indicator….it does not show things as they are..it shows what they here..by about a 30 day lag time. The models that have been used have been proven wrong not once..but twice. Once is a mistake…twice means you are lying if you keep using them:
16 million jobs lost so far as of the report this morning; another 6m put on the tape today from the claims print.
Of course the claim continues to be made that “we had to do this or 2.2 million Americans would have died” — without evidence.
In fact, the “evidence” is proved fraudulent; the IHME model updated again yesterday, and again over-stated Florida’s requirement for actual beds by more than double the total number ever in use by a coronavirus patient — not just current bed occupancy, historical occupancy!
Mathematical models can be useful — but the initialization value for a given resource on the day the model runs cannot be wrong, or the model isn’t a model: It is a knowing and intentional fraud. This has been the hallmark of the IHME “model” since the beginning; not once has actual resource use on the day it has been run been anywhere near factual, and the “errors” have all been in one direction. Basic statistical analysis tells us that if an error is all one way it’s no a mistake — it is either worthless or worse, intentionally biased.
I have said since the beginning of this insanity that it is highly likely, in fact nearly certain, that this is not really a “new” virus at all. That is, it’s been in the community for a while — maybe a long while. In fact, back when Diamond Princess occurred I could come up with no other rational set of conditions for why two persons in the same cabin could possibly have one person get seriously ill and the other not at all. There were only two rational explanations: The virus is very hard to transmit without some common factor (e.g. fecal/oral) or the other person was functionally immune.
The latter of course meant that the virus had to have been in the general population for far longer than believed. Now we are starting to see evidence of this — specifically, in Germany. (* Note that the paper is in German, as expected.)
In addition this evidence means the lethality of this virus is not the ~2% being thrown about — it is instead approximately as lethal as a bad seasonal flu, or about 0.15-0.3% including those people at high risk.
Our data here in the United States, under extremely pessimistic assumptions and using the NY death data on co-morbidities, shows that for someone without any of those specific identified conditions, irrespective of age, your risk of death is less than 0.04%. Exactly how much less is very difficult to determine because we have no accurate measurement of symptomatic persons who fail to have sufficient symptoms to be tested and thus are turned away.
This is going to cause closures in such core things such as hospitals. Why? Most of their business is “elective” surgeries. Hospitals are still a business. If a hosptial has not patients that they can make money from they will shutdown. How about the produce growers? Much of those crops are now rotting away. The produce grower now has a 100% loss of their crop. Where does most of the produce go? Restaurants that are shuttered. There are quite a few of them that will not come back. This is going to have a far deeper consequence than the media and the governments are telling you. This will take a decade or more to recover from…IF folks go back to how they did things before. The problem is, the governmetns and the media have bascially instilled into those that have listened,”If you do not permanently stop gathering in a social manner…everyone is going to die”. That’s complete hogwash…but I think things are going to change permanently for the worse…and not for the better.