How Serious Is Coronavirus Disease? It Kills 20 Times More People Than The Flu

Alan: The following is excerpted from a New York Magazine article titled "Five Ways A Coronavirus Pandemic Could Impact The 2020 Election." https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/how-a-coronavirus-pandemic-could-impact-the-2020-election-economy.html

COVID-19 isn’t exceptionally lethal, but, for that very reason, it is exceptionally contagious. Ordinary influenza viruses kill about 0.1 percent of those infected. The H5N1 avian flu virus had a fatality rate around 60 percent. COVID-19, by contrast, appears to kill a bit less than 2 percent of those who contract it. This makes a coronavirus diagnosis less harrowing for the individual, but it also makes the bug’s emergence a more profound threat to global public health than many more fatal ailments. The severely ill don’t travel much; the dead shake few hands. But the median victim of coronavirus may not know that they are sick at all for the first few days the virus is incubating inside them. And at least some reports suggest individuals can spread the disease even before they are symptomatic. Regardless, many who do present with symptoms will be unable to distinguish the disease from the common cold. In other words, the virus is nonlethal enough to spread widely, but sufficiently deadly to be experienced as a public health crisis and mass killer of the elderly or already infirm.

China’s heavy-handed quarantine measures appear to have been somewhat effective. New cases in the country are declining. But it’s not clear whether this trend will survive the resumption of business as usual, which the Chinese authorities are understandably anxious to commence. Meanwhile, COVID-19’s arrival in Milan — a financial hub and tourist haven frequented by border-hopping E.U. elites — threatens to hasten the its ascent to the status of an official global pandemic.

Ryan Avent, a columnist for The Economist, outlines the potential economic fallout of this increasingly likely scenario:

Beijing is understandably eager to get things up and running again. But now there are serious outbreaks elsewhere in the world. Operating the economy at anything like its normal level therefore opens China to the very real possibility of infections flowing back into the country, and triggering a whole new phase of the epidemic. And even if China were to completely ignore that threat, getting back to 100% operation would be very difficult given the outbreak-related interruptions now coming to other large economies and Chinese trading partners. It is hard to picture a scenario in which China does not continue to operate well below its capacity for at least another month: and you can add to that every day the global spread gets worse rather than better. 

Of course, as costly as an idled China is, the rest of the world features in the picture now. And honestly, we have very little idea how this is likely to play out. In terms of the nature of what we’re facing, well, it’s a supply shock: a reduction in the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services, as opposed to a drop in people’s willingness to spend. Shuttered factories, canceled events: those all represent obstacles to the creation of GDP. When you say supply shock, those who think of anything tend to think of the 1970s and the aftereffects of the oil crises. But as I explain in my most recent column, many—and perhaps most—supply shocks don’t look like that. They are more likely to feature shattered confidence, tumbling stock prices and deflationary pressures…The world has never experienced a supply shock with this disruptive potential in the era of hyperglobalization. 

Avent’s most alarming observation may be this: The past decades of demand-induced slumps have conditioned us to expect we can stimulate our way out of hard economic times. The market’s initial nonplussed reaction to the burgeoning epidemic earlier this month was at least partly predicated on a faith in the Federal Reserve’s capacity to turn economic tides through new waves of easy money. But no central bank can print stable supply chains, or hospital beds, or healthy, fearless workers.

Thus, it is not difficult then to see how COVID-19 could make the Trump campaign into one of its most famous victims. Especially since:

2) The pandemic could throw a spotlight on the Trump administration’s criminal negligence.

Thanks to the economic tailwinds he inherited (and the marginalization of Puerto Rico in American public life), Donald Trump has paid little political price for his slothful ignorance or commitment to purging the executive branch of all experts save for those who specialize in sycophancy.

But the coronavirus could change that. In fact, a COVID-19 pandemic seems almost tailor-made to expose the abject irresponsibility of the sitting president, and rendering his negligence politically salient.

Since taking office, Trump has:

• Tried to slash national health spending by $15 billion.

• Cut the disease-fighting budgets of DHS, NSC, HHS, and CDC — paring back the global health section of the latter so profoundly, it went from operating in 49 nations to just 10.

• Allowed the ranks of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps to steadily erode (after trying and failing to shrink its budget by 40 percent).

• Eliminated the federal government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund.

• Shut down the National Security Council’s entire global health security unit.

But what the Trump administration has lacked in general health-crisis preparedness, it has absolutely not made up for in acute crisis management. As already mentioned, since the onset of the outbreak, the president has baselessly assured the public that the virus was contained, undermining his administration’s ability to credibly counter potential conspiracy theories or misinformation about the public health crisis. Meanwhile, the administration overruled CDC scientists (and the president’s unknown preference) by evacuating 14 Americans on a cruise ship plagued by coronavirus — and then bringing them back to the U.S. aboard a plane filled with other noninfected Americans, who therefore spent hours sharing recycled air with the contagious.

The administration’s ineptide appears to be deepening in tandem with the crisis. On Tuesday, the CDC’s immunization chief warned Americans that the coming “disruption to everyday life may be severe,” even as National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow assured the public that the virus had been “contained” — or at least, containment efforts had been “pretty close to airtight.”