
Why Didn't the 1958 and 1918 Pandemics Destroy the Economy? - nnx
https://mises.org/wire/why-didnt-1958-and-1918-pandemics-destroy-economy-hint-its-lockdowns
======
rowawey
The 1968 pandemic was roughly as bad the 1958 one. What's interesting is that
there was either little/no surveillance in the US or there may have been
censorship about it until after it was almost over, because it wasn't widely-
reported when hospitals were overflowing and turning-away patients. It also
caused severe delirium much like SARS2. I would wager there were asymptomatic
carriers of it: my mom said she was bed-ridden with it while my grandparents
didn't seem to get sick.

~~~
gnusty_gnurc
I'd love to see someone actually dispatch with Michael Levitt's work - as time
goes by his claim that the disease spread of an isolated outbreak is never
exponential seems to hold up. It's confounding that Japan seems to have
limited the disease spread just by doing simple avoidance and hygiene
measures. I pretty much discount people who seem to think we've got this
figured out (the establishment and experts have been next to useless).

~~~
perl4ever
It looks to me as if it went back to exponential as of May-ish. Because while
it slowed in places that did lock down, it got going in the places that were
not locked down. Italy and NY are out, Brazil and Texas are in. Am I missing
something?

See Daily New Cases at:
[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

Early May was generally under 100K new cases a day, now it's up to 130K and
accelerating.

~~~
gnusty_gnurc
I'm saying that isolated outbreak locations themselves don't seem to be
accelerating exponentially. As though there's something outside mitigation
measures that's slowing spread. Obviously if you aggregate the entire US, the
curve will look like it's plateauing.

Here's his explanation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHrx68IT7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHrx68IT7o)

~~~
perl4ever
"isolated outbreak locations themselves don't seem to be accelerating
exponentially"

I don't understand what this means. Different locations are different.
Specific areas are plateauing or accelerating, there is a divergence, and the
result is that overall, the epidemic is accelerating again but at the same
time, the location of the growth has rapidly shifted.

You may assume it's causally unrelated to lockdowns if you like, but the
growth has shifted away from the developed cosmopolitan countries and states
that locked everything down to the populous, not so developed countries that
could not or would not lock down and initially _seemed_ to be doing better,
and this has already happened before the reopening of the original group has
really picked up steam. The wave is already surging before we even get to the
effect of reopening the economy fully in western Europe and the US.

~~~
gnusty_gnurc
Meaning localities that have an outbreak follow a progression. If someone goes
from one city to the next and carries disease, they're effectively seeding a
new outbreak. By the logic you're saying, we're all just Chinese case numbers?
It'd help to watch the video, cause I think you're fundamentally
misunderstanding what I'm saying.

~~~
perl4ever
I'm saying that, for instance, China, Brazil, and the US _didn 't_ follow the
same trajectory and continue to be different. And because of the diversity in
trajectories (for whatever reason, as people continue to speculate) the
location of the majority of new cases has kept changing.

Your first sentence sounds like you are claiming there is a uniformity that to
me obviously doesn't exist.

I feel like people latch onto something that confirms their prejudices and
then studiously avoid acknowledging current events that rapidly show it to be
an error. Like, lots of poorer countries had much fewer cases per capita than
western Europe and the US, but now the new cases are shifting to India,
Pakistan, etc.

