Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”? What I mean is: When will stores be open again, when will we do meetups again, when will we be able to travel again? |
Ask HN: When do you expect life will get back to “normal”? What I mean is: When will stores be open again, when will we do meetups again, when will we be able to travel again? |
A lot of local business owners who were doing alright (making money and paying several employees) are not at all interested in getting back to it. The risk in the next few years due to future waves of infection is too great, and government assistance is incredible here in Canada but only enough to help you limp along. That's a scary condition to run a business.
I think this will be great for large companies. Jobs and economic opportunity might relatively shift towards them for quite a while.
I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see a significant change to isolation practices any time soon and the economic impacts seem likely to change our lives in a very noticeable way.
Around 10 weeks for stores and meetups, longer for travel depending on the destination.
However, Covid-19 will likely be a lesson in single point of failure, supply chain dependency, and failure planning. To that end things will take decades to go back to the way they were. Companies will not be willing to accept massive losses again, so they'll change the way they operate. That will continue until the cost reductions from going back to the way things were win out.
For some things, like remote working, I don't think we'll ever go back. It'll be a thing companies plan for, implement, and accept as normal after this.
(I'm in the UK though, which probably makes a difference.)
This could go two ways:
(a) people realise that remote working is very doable, because they managed at short notice, during a crisis, and thus it will increase.
(b) people will believe that remote work is not doable, because they didn't manage at short notice, during a crisis, and thus it will not increase.
I would be very surprised if anyone who didn't handle the change well, would accept "well you realise that you changed to this overnight, with zero planning some of us have spent the last decade or so 'making it work'?" and try again in a better scenario (i.e. time to make a proper home office, time to adjust to a different way of working, etc).
To what extend is travel restricted at the moment? What happens when someone from - say - Germany flies to the UK?
As far as I can see, flights can still be booked.
In that case I think it's still allowed, but there are a lot of entry bans and visa restrictions in place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_restrictions_related_to...) that probably won't be lifted for a long time.
In the US in particular, public schools get money from the federal government conditional on administering state tests. It doesn't look like the stimulus bill is leaving them off the hook, so schools have a very big incentive to give the test by the end of the school year (around 25-June). There was no official statement that state exams are cancelled for this year, and what's more my son's teacher resumed the exam prep with the kids yesterday.
So, I'm not sure when stores will open, but I give a more than 50-50 chance that schools will open at some point before the Summer vacation, maybe second half of June or early July, in order to give the state exams.
But consider: the doubling time is around 4-5 days. We'll hit 1M worldwide maybe Friday.
40 days after that, we'll hit 1B people. That's about the estimated total that typically get infected by a pandemic. Peak infection.
Two or three weeks after that, everybody will be through it. No problem; scars and health issues; death; whatever, it'll be over.
So 60 days to do anything and everything we hope to do with this. No more than that.
Instead, we're trying to "flatten the curve" in most countries. This means we're directly trying to lower the doubling time, which means that we won't develop herd immunity the same way. Lots of pockets of never-infecteds will exist where COVID can crop up again.
I'd also caution estimating based on current "confirmed case" counts. Almost every country has suffered from test shortages, and even those that haven't had shortages haven't been testing everyone -- in most cases, if you aren't having trouble breathing, you're advised to just stay at home and assume you're infected. So honestly nobody knows just how many people are infected.
No, the reason to try and delay is only to give time for vaccines, better processes and treatments. That's the only path forward.
And it isn't happening fast enough. So there will be some suffering.
Some societies will choose such that their medical infrastructure will be at 10x capacity for ten times as long rather than be at 100x capacity.
Others will manage to stamp it out, only to endure subsequent flare-ups.
Unconstrained doubling is only a popular policy among oligarchs in power. To be fair, they do have a lot of power...
If you want to posit some slight flattening, then 70 day? No more.
The terrible power of geometric growth cannot be resisted for long. You need to change the growth rules entirely to beat it. No half-measures will do it.
https://neherlab.org/covid19/ indicates maybe sometime between July and October things will normalize (ICU's will no longer be over capacity).
https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ The phase space plot from Johns Hopkins dataset still shows no recent improvement of trajectory, in contrast to the NYT dataset.
Of course, the impact will be felt for a long time.
There's a limit on how far pandemics can go, even considering mutations. It's funny that when we try to lecture people about pyramid schemes, we always say : "you'll run out of people on Earth pretty quickly to sustain this scheme", but when it comes to pandemics, we forget this advice.
Economically: 10 years (a long time) because bouncing back isn't possible when ancillary businesses close and cause others to close. Right now, unemployment is going to around 35% whereas the Great Depression peaked at around 23-25%. This is, in essence, the Greater Depression. There were most recently structural problems and the global economy was overdue for a contraction, but not to the depths as being experienced without a pandemic; in essence, it is a forcing function that artificially-depresses economic activity in a lasting manner.
Overall: Not everything will be the same, but some things will. Don't let fear or magical wishful-thinking be guiding forces.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-th...
The push for suppressing entire populations for months and years are coming from those that want to dis-empower these populations the rest of the time.
If by "normal" you mean the neo-liberal/neo-marxist agenda "progressing"... that is increasingly unlikely
Meanwhile, NYC's mayor has suggested that it's unlikely for schools to resume this school year at all: https://www.silive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/mayor-nyc-schools...
Definitely depends on your region, though. I think you might be jumping the gun a bit w.r.t. serology tests -- consider that the entire United States can only complete something like 20,000 tests per day right now, we're likely going to have to wait for normal tests (like what we're doing now) to become less important before we can even begin to focus resources on serology tests. And when only a small portion of the population has caught COVID, it's still going to be very important to test flu-like illnesses and isolate contacts of infected individuals for months.
http://www.nysed.gov/news/2020/statement-board-regents-chanc...
As for serology tests, I may be jumping the gun, but only a bit. My employer started paying for coronavirus home test kits in the UK, with the aim of having people come back to work if they show the antibodies. They don't have anything similar in the US simply because there's no FDA approved similar kit. But this will probably change soon.
We won't really know until much more analysis is done, but there's a ton of reasons to suspect an over-reaction now. See some of the daily update links here:
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
The basic problem is confused data e.g. 100,000 deaths expected from what? Given how often COVID-19 seems to give people a little push over an edge they were very close to anyway, it's extremely hard to even define what a C19 death means, let alone do so in a way that's comparable across countries.
Meanwhile healthcare systems have been scaling up a lot but actually the projected collapse isn't close to being here even in Italy, where many hospitals are still mostly empty outside the core hotspots (leading to a question of whether it's not ventilator capacity that's needed but patient transfer capacity). And where hospitals are under pressure it may be partly due to huge numbers of staff isolating themselves as they tested positive, sometimes with no symptoms (i.e. could be false positives?). Hospitals can be overwhelmed even by normal admissions if 30% of the staff are gone due to self-isolation.
Interestingly, there seems to be a collective delusion developing about when the action could of/should of been taken. Late January...early February...really? That long?
Also, the state of quarantine is happening at a global level, not just the US.
I was answering the poster's question with my opinion. You do not have to like it.
Me neither - my intention was to pose a neutrally-worded question, which I think I did.
Non-sequitur.
I don't consider it ethical to do that. Quite the contrary.
But the ongoing incentives have existed for many years, and the numbers of companies supporting true remote working has been essentially a rounding error.
The problem is that these companies are adopting it because they had literally no other choice - not because they wanted to try it - so there's automatic friction there.
I think a lot of society (particularly big city issues) could be reduced greatly if remote working was adopted more broadly, but I've also heard all manner of arguments about why remote working "doesn't work" for the past decade or so I've been doing it.
You not being aware of something does not mean it does not exist.
What is this political ideology of mine you are identifying?
That's not true. "new daily deaths" are fairly flat in Italy over the last week, not doubling geometrically at all.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
If the lockdown is working in other countries, then a similar state will be reached 3 weeks afterwards.
Daily new cases is down in Italy since peak on 21 March - that's a leading metric compared to deaths, although it is less precise because it can be swayed by changes in testing.
E.g. click on a country on the left, select 'logarithmic' on the lower right and see what you think: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
This is the UK 2.5 weeks ago: https://twitter.com/stereophonics/status/1238944498006274048
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
So lockdown won't be reflected in death rates until _over_ 3 weeks have passed.
This is the UK, 3 weeks ago: https://twitter.com/stevethewall/status/1244249363427328003