
How might the coronavirus change our world? - imartin2k
https://www.exponentialview.co/p/-six-ways-coronavirus-will-change
======
remarkEon
Prepping might become more popular, I think. Maybe supply chains become a bit
more distributed, or less centralized. Skepticism of "official" narratives
might grow, if the virus isn't sufficiently contained soon.

~~~
skokage
>Maybe supply chains become a bit more distributed, or less centralized.

This is one of the things that I've been wondering about the last few days. I
recently read an article discussing how because China is essentially shut
down, the supply chain has been disrupted for manufacturers in other
countries. So much of manufacturing in other areas of the world depends on
components made in china, and when those stop other manufacturers also stop.
People get laid off, and it becomes a cascading problem affecting everyone.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/business/hyundai-south-
ko...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/business/hyundai-south-korea-
coronavirus.html)

~~~
remarkEon
Smart countries should be using this as a trial run for "what happens during
WWIII?", and determining where the critical gaps exist.

~~~
magicsmoke
I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese military is using this outbreak as a
natural experiment for planning responses to a biological attack if WW3 breaks
out. Figure out how well the state can quarantine large parts of the country
while ensuring industrial and warfighting supplies can still get through.

~~~
blackrock
I think there is a site called r/conspiracy for this.

The interesting question is: who would launch a biological attack on them? And
will this trigger a nuclear response?

------
mdorazio
Not mentioned here, but definitely plausible: public health monitoring and
enforcement action via infrared thermometers in public places. China has
already deployed facial recognition all over the place, it would be fairly
easy to add thermal imaging on top and actively track people with fevers if
the temperature resolution is good enough.

~~~
m-p-3
Is there some kind of infrared thermometer someone could buy for themselves
and detect a sickness early and minimize the transmission by voluntarily
isolate themselves for a moment?

~~~
oops
The Whoop[1] does not measure body temperature but it does measure your heart.
Several users claim it has detected their sickness before they realize. FitBit
too.

1: [https://www.whoop.com/](https://www.whoop.com/)

~~~
mr_toad
There are too many confounding factors for resting heart rate to be a reliable
measure of illness - stress, dehydration, a hot climate, alcohol and lack of
sleep can all have an impact.

------
tomatotomato37
Is it still correct that the coronavirus is still only as problematic as the
flu, with the majority of eradication effort going into it with the idea that
having two flus going around is still worse than one around? If so I don't
really anticipate any real long-term effects at all, it'll just be another
seasonal batch of sickness and death for society to deal with.

~~~
imustbeevil
Mortality rate (outside of Wuhan) is 10x worse (0.16%)[1] than the flu
(0.014%)[2].

I'm personally not worried about a virus with a 99.84% survival rate, but it's
still technically 10x as deadly.

[1] [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-
death-...](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/)

[2] [https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/influenza-and-
pneu...](https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/influenza-and-pneumonia-
death-
rate/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D)

~~~
xbmcuser
From what I understand the virus is treatable though highly contagious. China
is having a tough time providing care for all those infected specially at the
epicenter. If the virus starts spreading in poorer countries of Asia and
Africa then mortality rate will go higher as I don't see them being able to
control something that even China is facing hard time doing.

~~~
trevyn
Exactly, there’s

“mortality rate when you have access to a mechanical ventilator”

vs

“mortality rate when you have access to IV fluids and a floor to sit on”.

~~~
sliken
More common is the daily ritual of getting in line at the crack of dawn,
hoping to get medical care and getting at best some IV fluids then kicked out
each evening because you don't officially have the virus. Of course if you
ask, there's no tests available.

There's numerous videos of people passing out in public, which could be just a
non-representative sample. What makes it scary to me, is that everyone around
just looks and seems to think it's normal/expected.

~~~
FooHentai
Those videos are alarming, although we should be cautious that they might be
old videos from something else re-purposed for the sake of stoking panic.

Some videos, such as one showing a bunch of people passed out or passed away
in an apartment, are from earlier unrelated incidents.

~~~
sliken
Agreed.

But if you look at twitter, WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, Aljazeera, Lancet, and
the BBC you start to see a picture not really consistent with "only" 30k
people sick.

After all CDC reported on a fairly normal flu season in 2018-2019
([https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6824a3.htm?s_cid=mm...](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6824a3.htm?s_cid=mm6824a3_w)),
not as bad as the previous year. 43M sick, 647,000 hospitalized, 61,200 dead.
The world didn't notice, no factory closing, no global supply chains halted,
no stumbling economies, no rush to build hospitals, no halt of airlines, and
no $174B injected (like last Monday) into the economy to stabilize things.

Somehow under 30k infected and 565 dead is a big deal? Should we ignore every
crematorium in Wuhan running 24x7?

China is keeping a pretty impressive lid on it, but the cracks are starting to
showing. The official numbers are a joke.

~~~
xbmcuser
If it was spreading and killing as fast as you are thinking we would be
reading a lot more about it from other countries. As much as chinese media is
not to be trusted the western media and people are also not to be trusted to
talk about china as they are biased the other way.

~~~
FooHentai
Spreading fast, sure. Killing fast, no. That's in many ways the issue - If
this thing spreads strongly and asymptomatically, and eventually develops into
conditions with high mortality, that's a really bad situation to be in.

Folks keeling over before they can spread it is one thing, but appearing fine
until long after spreading it to other people means it's spread isn't known
until the symptoms start showing up all over the show.

Not sure I can agree that western media is biased towards _not_ hyping these
kinds of events.

------
spencerwgreene
People will start to wash their hands more, touch their faces less, and avoid
sick people more because of checklists to avoid coronavirus that people are
sharing online.

~~~
scruple
I was at a baby shower recently. Of the ~30 participants, over a dozen came
down with a cold the following day. We later learned that, indeed, someone
there was sick, knew they were sick, and came anyway. I didn't get the brunt
of it, I've just had some minor throat irritation for the past ~2 weeks,
thankfully, but a few folks were actually quite sick and had to take time off
of work.

I'd love to avoid sick people. Can we make them wear signs saying that they're
sick?

~~~
Galanwe
If the only possibility for sick people is to either come, or stay home, then
I think there will always be some of them that would prefer to come even
though they might contaminate others.

In Asia, there is a culture of wearing face masks when you're sick. This
serves as both a signal to others, and also helps reduce your infected droplet
emission. Also it means you can still go to events and not have to stay home.

Enforcing this habit in the west is the best solution IMHO. Currently, it's
too uncommon for people to wear face masks there. Once the critical mass of
people decide to do so, then people won't feel weird about it and will all
start to take that habit.

~~~
ssivark
> Enforcing this habit in the west is the best solution IMHO. Currently, it's
> too uncommon for people to wear face masks there.

Part of the problem is that people might get (subtly) shames/shunned for being
out and about with a cold if they turn up wearing a mask. So they get pushed
into the less obvious but more pernicious solution. (A measure that is managed
ceases to be a useful measure)

------
dfsegoat
I would hope that ultimately, to the authors point #1 - collaboration - that
it shows that we can all still come together to fight a common existential
threat, or to accomplish a common goal.

------
naveen99
Better equipped hospitals: more respirators, ecmo.

Or better yet distributed portable hospitals with icu beds at home with
telemedicine.

Earlier Self driving cars moving people instead of mass infectious transit

~~~
DoctorOetker
>Better equipped hospitals: more respirators, ecmo.

And better supply chain tracking, I am looking for UV-C LED's and products
containing them (desinfection equipment, like baby bottle desinfectors,
desinfection boxes for CPAP masks and hospital equipment, desinfection lamps,
...)

Disturbingly even here in the west, going through sponsored advertisements on
ebay local pages (named marktplaats.nl in the netherlands) I can easily find
20 euro desinfection lamps, supposedly 12W, having 65 LED's.

That is

1) surprisingly cheap: trying to find UV-C LED's through farnell, digikey etc
that would easily cost 300 euros for the LED's alone assuming 250+ unit prices
(5 euro's per LED).

2) surprisingly high radiant fluxes: 12W for 65 LED's gives ~ 200mW per "UV-C"
LED, whereas most datasheets for real UV-C LED's would show just a handful of
mW per UV-C LED.

If ANYONE can find me ~180mW UV-C LED's priced well below 0.30 Euros at bulk
rates, please respond where, as I _may be wrong_ and such incredulous products
are perhaps not incredulous, but I would need proof.

Knowing that such prices and specs are totally realistic for UV-A (note the
A), I can not help but think that somewhere someone decided it was a good idea
to build UV-C type products by using UV-A LED's, both would cause fluorescence
and phosphorescense on such materials and would be hard to distinguish as a
user.

So now a large number of consumers, and possibly companies or even hospitals
(!) might genuinely believe they are sterilizing surfaces because the products
were incorrectly advertised as UV Germicidal Irradiation products.

All for what? A new garage door? A Tesla?

It truly is a dark world.

So I predict there will come a "UV-C Provenance" protocol where:

1) the genuine UV-C LED chip manufacturer keeps a cadastre of ownership of
UV-C LED's

2) resellers or product manufacturers must contact the original chip
manufacturer with the buyer's email to transfer ownership of a number of
contained LED's when selling

3) original UV-C LED manufacturers must contact the buyer to ask for
confirmation of receipt of the UV-C LED (or the product that contained such a
number of LED's)

4) resellers or product manufacturers may not use the "UV-C provenance" logo
if the product does not actually use UV-C LEDs, if they can not prove the
provenance by referencing unsold LED's in their name with the chip
manufacturer, or if they don't perform their roles above

5) governments perform regular randomized trials of buying "UV-C LED" branded
products, and measure the wavelength to verify truthfulness, with hefty fines
for violations

One might think that a product designer could order genuine UV-C LED's, not
use them, order UV-A LED's to use in the product, sell as if they were UV-C,
and then afterwards sell their genuine stock. However who would be interested
in this (genuine) stock if this hypothetical buyer can not sell the genuine
stock under the "UV-C provenance" logo without corresponding UV-C provenance
tokens?

BTW I am not trying to scare people away from UV-C LED desinfection equipment,
they are better in many respects to mercury lamps, for example they don't
generate ozone. The problem is the UV-A LED's being foisted off as UV-C LED's

Also, if _anyone reading this_ happens to be one of the people involved in
substituting UV-A for UV-C LED's in a product or advertisement: you can run
but you can't hide, they are going to find you, regardless of your
nationality, religion, ... by this time it is an international crisis.

------
chrisbrandow
Lost me at vertical farming.

------
rurban
This new flavor of the yearly flu is not much different from other rather
harmless flu's of this kind. There's just no flushot for it.

But it's not as dramatic or deadly as the Spanish flu, which killed the
healthy ones, because of the overreacting immune system. The death rate is
minor, like with other flu's, the expansion rate is normal, should be not much
different to SARS or similar flu's.

------
giarc
>Interesting contrast: a large number of critical Ebola research was
inaccessible during the outbreak, and even today downloading a single paper
could cost $45: a steep price for a healthcare worker in Liberia.

The internet has led me to believe that the authors are allowed to distribute
copies to anyone that requests one. If true, it seems those in Liberia just
need that info rather than the money.

~~~
wyattpeak
I would imagine that during an outbreak researchers don't have a lot of time
or patience to respond to hundreds of requests for their work.

I suspect further that publishers would be less cool if they found you were
sending out copies by the hundred, rather than a few times, but that's
probably a question better answered by researchers.

------
asperous
This might be ill-informed, but if it goes out of control, wouldn't it reshape
worldwide demographics? Young and old would die at different rates. That seems
like the potential biggest impact.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
Imagine the political change that would occur from half of the boomers being
wiped out.

~~~
malloryerik
Wouldn't it be more like ten percent of boomers? But the effect might be
different you'd expect as fear of disease pushed society to adopt more
conservative, insular moods.

------
aaron695
We might take the flu (10,000+ dead so far in the USA this season) and other
diseases (measles 140,000 dead world wide) more seriously.

We might actually prepare properly for a Contagion (2011) movie style
outbreak.

------
tanilama
I would be more curious on why this would change Chinese people's consumption
habits, and how long lasting such change would be after the outbreak.

Will be very interesting to see it through.

------
Apocryphon
Will it be the pin that pops our economic boom into a recession?

~~~
toomuchtodo
It is likely to break the back of China’s debt crisis.

~~~
kortilla
Markets don’t appear to think so. There’s a lot of money to be had for you if
you think so.

~~~
gruez
>Markets don’t appear to think so

It's hard to say whether that's really the case because of interventionist
policies by the PBOC.

~~~
topmonk
And the Fed...

------
derblitzmann
Assuming current trends, it will likely be though of as the 21st century's
Spanish flu, though that is assuming that the trends continue.

~~~
nostrademons
21st century Spanish Flu was the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Literally -
Spanish Flu was also H1N1, though the strains were slightly different. The
2009 pandemic was estimated to have sickened about 1.5B people and killed
about 150,000 for the relatively low death rate of about 0.01%.

We'll likely think of coronavirus the same way we think of the 2009 pandemic,
i.e. it gets a Wikipedia article of its own, an occasional historical mention,
but we forget about it when disease is not specifically the topic of
conversation.

~~~
soared
1.5B is a massive overestimate, where is that number from? 1 in 7 people in
the entire world got sick?

WHO: 8,000 deaths, 630k laboratory confirmed cases, 43-89 million got sick.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_H1N1/09_virus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_H1N1/09_virus)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic)

Spanish flu on the other hand killed 3-6% of the world's population!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu)

~~~
nostrademons
It's estimated that 10-20% of the world population caught H1N1 swine flu. 1 in
7 is a rough midpoint of that:

[http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2011/08/study-
put...](http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2011/08/study-puts-
global-2009-h1n1-infection-rate-11-21)

The CDC estimated 60M cases in the U.S. alone, about 20% of the population:

[https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-
resources/2009-h1n1-pandemi...](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-
resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html)

The WHO gave up tracking cases on July 23, 2009, 3 months after the epidemic
started, when it hit several hundred thousand confirmed cases. At that point
it just became a part of seasonal flu. It's circulating again this year: in
recent weeks it's been the most common seasonal flu variant infecting people,
and with 19M flu cases so far this year, there have almost certainly been more
deaths from H1N1 than from nCoV.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_timeline#Jul...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_timeline#July_2009)

------
magwa101
Overhyped, no change at all.

------
etxm
Curious if it will impact Corona sales.

~~~
spitfire
You know what goes well with coronavirus? Lyme disease.

~~~
etxm
This makes me so happy.

~~~
etxm
I’m allowed to be happy.

------
DoctorOetker
That depends on how we define "our world".

For each individual, the most important parameter of "our world" is probably
how (dis)satisfied we are.

Humans are not solitary animals, but a social species. We should not limit
ourselves to solitary risk, but also consider social risk.

Consider listing your N closest loved ones (I will assume 20).

Consider a case fatality rate F (I will use China's average 2.1% which may
correspond _very_ well with any health care system that is pathologically
overrun by sheer amount of cases, see [1]).

Consider I the fraction of the global population that has been uniformly
infected.

What is the probability that not all of your N loved ones survive?

P( not all of my N loved ones survive corona outbreak)

= 1 - P( all of my N loved ones survive corona outbreak )

= 1 - P( a person was not infected or survives infection) ^ N

= 1 - (1 - P( a person is infected and dies from the infection ) ) ^ N

= 1 - (1 - P( a person is infected ) * P( a person dies given he was infected
) )

= 1 - (1 - (I * F) ) ^ N

For example:

Q: "What is the probability not all of my 20 loved ones survive, assuming 80%
of the populace will experience infection, and a case fatality rate of 2.1%?"

A: P = 1 - (1 - 0.8 * 0.021) ^ 20 = 28.7% that one or more of these friends
will die.

This is remarkably higher than the individual risk of 1.68% (0.8 * 2.1%) which
only holds for egoists.

Let no one tell you what probability is acceptable for you, nor how many
friends you should have, certainly let no government tell you to think only
about yourself, by setting N = 1.

Another example:

Q: "Assume just 10% of the population was infected, with the same case
fatality rate of 2.1% but this time you have 100 friends"

A: P = 1 - ( 1 - ( 0.1 * 0.021 ) ) ^ 100 = 18.96 %

And always remember, you may have many friends, but your best friend is
statistics, like her or not. And this best friend can not die.

[1] According to [1a] China announced an average national fatality rate of
2.1% (their words not my calculation, us world citizens have no access to the
WHO database of anonymized CRF CORE and DAILY forms).

Let us compare with the cases treated outside of China:

According to [1b] at their sum total of international (without Chinese
regions) we have:

TOTAL 216 (infected) 1 (dead) 4 serious

Now 2.1% * 216 = 4.536 deaths expected following official China fatality rate.

Well, internationally we see 1 death and 4 individuals in serious condition.
The out-of-china hospitals are not currently overrun. If they too at some
point get overrun, I would expect those 4 to die as well, and our
international numbers match up with China's 2.1%.

[1a]
[http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3048815/coron...](http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3048815/coronavirus-
china-death-toll-hits-425-new-cases-hubei-jump)

[1b] [https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-
coronavirus...](https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-
cases/)

