Generational Dynamics World View News

[MrGuest]

Why are we so confident that there will be a vaccine? From what I've read we've never actually succeeded in developing a vaccine for previous coronaviruses. I suppose now that the whole world is focused on COVID-19 and plenty of money and resources will be thrown at the process the chances are better, but still it's hard to predict when the major breakthrough will occur.

[John]

** 07-Mar-2020 World View: Covid-19 Vaccine

> Why are we so confident that there will be a vaccine? From what
> I've read we've never actually succeeded in developing a vaccine
> for previous coronaviruses. I suppose now that the whole world is
> focused on COVID-19 and plenty of money and resources will be
> thrown at the process the chances are better, but still it's hard
> to predict when the major breakthrough will occur.

As you suggest, there are a lot of companies working on a Covid-19
vaccine, but you make a good point: They might all fail.

Here are two articles on current developments:

These nine companies are working on coronavirus treatments or vaccines
— here’s where things stand
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these ... 2020-03-06

A simple guide to the vaccines and drugs that could fight coronavirus
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/ ... -drug-cure

[FishbellykanakaDude]

... So once a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available, hopefully early next year, the Covid-19 pandemic will be controlled within a few weeks in most developed countries, and within a few months in less developed countries.

Amen.

The pandemic will be "controlled", yes. Mostly because it will have shifted into the "endemic" stage.

I agree with you entirely, by the way.

Do you agree that Covid-XX will be a nearly worldwide endemic disease eventually (after about 2 to 3 years [6 "seasons" at 2 seasons per year, north and south]), and will closely track the evolution of what the Flu is to us now,.. except that it will probably be somewhat slightly more "deadly" than the flu?

Thanks Chief! Nā mahalo a aloha nui. Nā pōmaikaʻi ʻoe. <shaka!>

[John]

** 07-Mar-2020 World View: Lebanon defaults on $1.2 billion loan payment

• Lebanon's prime minister Hassan Diab on television on
  Saturday announcing Lebanon's debt default

Months of government chaos and street protests, cause by corrupt
politicians, culminated on Saturday with an announcement that Lebanon
will default on loan payments scheduled for Monday. The $1.2 billion
loan payment is due on a portion of Lebanon's $91 billion debt.

Prime Minister Hassan Diab gave a televised speech to the nation,
saying the following:

"Today, we are paying the price for the mistakes of
past years. Must we bequeath them to our children and the coming
generations? The Lebanese lived a dream that was a delusion, as
though things were just fine, while Lebanon was drowning in more
debt and its interest, including in foreign currency, until the
gross public debt exceeded $90 billion, which makes up around 170%
of the domestic output.

The economic model which past policies imposed has proven to be a
failure, especially with its inability to stimulate investment and
create job opportunities. The state was stuck in a spiral of
deficit and endless borrowing. The reality today is that for every
1,000 Lebanese pounds of the state's revenues, more than 500
Lebanese pounds go to servicing the debt, instead of spending it
on healthcare, education and infrastructure.

This approach is not sustainable and cannot go on, especially as
Lebanese is today on the verge of becoming the most indebted
country in the world relative to the size of the economy. ...

Our debt has become greater than Lebanon can bear, and greater
than the ability of the Lebanese to meet interest payments.

This decision is, today, the only way to stop the bleeding and
protect the national interest. The Lebanese state will strive to
restructure its debt in line with the national interest by holding
fair, good faith negotiations with all creditors.

How can we pay creditors abroad when the Lebanese can not get
their money from their bank accounts? ... How can we pay creditors
and there are people in the streets who do not have the money to
buy a loaf of bread?"

Protests began on October 17 of last year, when the government
announced tax increases. The street protests have become increasingly
violent, with rock throwing and molotov cocktails. The economy has
gone from bad to worse. Inflation is soaring, and the banks are
restricting people from withdrawing their savings. The country is
running out of foreign reserves (dollars).

Part of Lebanon's problems is that Iran has had to cut back on aid to
Hezbollah, as a result of US sanctions on Iran. Lebanon's government
is largely controlled by Hezbollah, which is considered in the West to
be an international terrorist organization. Because of Hezbollah, and
because Lebanon's government has refused to implement much needed
structural reforms, Western nations have been reluctant to extend more
aid to Lebanon than they already have.

The debate in Lebanon is whether they should appeal to the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) for debt relief. Hezbollah opposes
going to the IMF, since they consider the IMF to be a tool of the
United States. Furthermore, the IMF would insist on the structural
reform that Lebanon has been avoiding for years, and possibly decades,
including raising taxes.

As I've described in detail in the past, Lebanon has a "confessional
system of government," where power is divided based on sectarian
affiliation or confession, with Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Shia
Muslims each in total control of one portion of the government.

** 19-Jan-20 World View -- Violence surges in street protests in Lebanon as economy collapses
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e200119


Because each sect has complete control of one portion of the
government, there are no checks and balances and corruption is
rampant, with the leaders of each sect able to steal as much money as
they like from their own part of the government. The three sects have
been fighting among themselves to gain as much money and power as
possible, leading now to economic default.

Next week, Lebanon will go around to the EU, IMF, World Bank, and
other organizations, begging for a bailout. However, no bailout will
be possible without structural reforms and severe austerity measures,
resulting in even larger and more violent street protests.

And, of course, it's worth noting in passing that Lebanon is right
next door to an ongoing international disaster in Syria's Idlib province,
which can blow up in any of several different ways.

** 6-Mar-20 World View -- Turkey's Erdogan travels to Moscow to beg Russia's Putin for Idlib ceasefire deal
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e200306



---- Sources:

-- Why Divided Lebanon Has Left a Decision on Bond Default So Late
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... lt-so-late
(Bloomberg, 6-Mar-2020)

-- Lebanon to default on debt for first time amid financial crisis
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... ial-crisis
(AFP, 7-Mar-2020)

-- Hassan Diab / FACTBOX-Lebanon was living a 'delusion' - excerpts
from PM's speech
https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/in ... pms-speech
(Reuters, 8-Mar-2020)

-- Lebanese leaders oppose paying sovereign debt: Presidency
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/07/lebanes ... dency.html
(CNBC, 7-Mar-2020)

-- Lebanon defaults on its $1.2 bn Eurobond debt, PM says corruption
‘has eaten the state’
https://www.rt.com/business/482578-leba ... orruption/
(Russia Today, 7-Mar-2020)

-- Lebanon to default on debt amid financial unrest
https://www.dw.com/en/lebanon-to-defaul ... a-52676967
(Deutsche Welle, 7-Mar-2020)

-- Crisis-hit Lebanon to default on $1.2 billion loan payment
http://www.therepublic.com/2020/03/07/m ... -eurobond/
(AP, 7-Mar-2020)

[Guest]

Some people are predicting that America's medical system will be facing systemic collapse by May because of the outbreak. Oh, this is great.

[FishbellykanakaDude]

Some people are predicting that America's medical system will be facing systemic collapse by May because of the outbreak. Oh, this is great.

Rubbish!

..carry on, troll. Thou art amusing. <chuckle!>

[Guest]

Some people are predicting that America's medical system will be facing systemic collapse by May because of the outbreak. Oh, this is great.

Rubbish!

..carry on, troll. Thou art amusing. <chuckle!>

https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/12 ... 03909?s=20

[Guest]

Some people are predicting that America's medical system will be facing systemic collapse by May because of the outbreak. Oh, this is great.

Rubbish!

..carry on, troll. Thou art amusing. <chuckle!>

It's obvious to me that a lot of middle-class Americans will die because they can't afford medical treatment. Thank God that illegals and people on welfare will get free treatment on my dime. We really need those them.

[FishbellykanakaDude]

Some people are predicting that America's medical system will be facing systemic collapse by May because of the outbreak. Oh, this is great.

Rubbish!

..carry on, troll. Thou art amusing. <chuckle!>

It's obvious to me that a lot of middle-class Americans will die because they can't afford medical treatment. Thank God that illegals and people on welfare will get free treatment on my dime. We really need those them.

Quite a few things are, no doubt, pretty obvious to you that non-trolls might not find so obvious.

How'boutcha clue us in on another several bits of the your "obvious" things, trolley?

[FishbellykanakaDude]

Some people are predicting that America's medical system will be facing systemic collapse by May because of the outbreak. Oh, this is great.

Rubbish!

..carry on, troll. Thou art amusing. <chuckle!>

https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/12 ... 03909?s=20

Let's move that twitter thread over for perusal:

• Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Replying to
  @LizSpecht
  Let’s conservatively assume that there are 2,000 current cases in the US today, March 6th. This is about 8x the number of confirmed (lab-diagnosed) cases. We know there is substantial under-Dx due to lack of test kits; I’ll address implications later of under-/over-estimate. 2/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  We can expect that we’ll continue to see a doubling of cases every 6 days (this is a typical doubling time across several epidemiological studies). Here I mean *actual* cases. Confirmed cases may appear to rise faster in the short term due to new test kit rollouts. 3/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on. Exponentials are hard to grasp, but this is how they go. 4/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  As the healthcare system begins to saturate under this case load, it will become increasingly hard to detect, track, and contain new transmission chains. In absence of extreme interventions, this likely won’t slow significantly until hitting >>1% of susceptible population. 5/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  What does a case load of this size mean for healthcare system? We’ll examine just two factors — hospital beds and masks — among many, many other things that will be impacted. 6/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  The US has about 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. With a population of 330M, this is ~1M beds. At any given time, 65% of those beds are already occupied. That leaves about 330k beds available nationwide (perhaps a bit fewer this time of year with regular flu season, etc). 7/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Let’s trust Italy’s numbers and assume that about 10% of cases are serious enough to require hospitalization. (Keep in mind that for many patients, hospitalization lasts for *weeks* — in other words, turnover will be *very* slow as beds fill with COVID19 patients). 8/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  By this estimate, by about May 8th, all open hospital beds in the US will be filled. (This says nothing, of course, about whether these beds are suitable for isolation of patients with a highly infectious virus.) 9/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  If we’re wrong by a factor of two regarding the fraction of severe cases, that only changes the timeline of bed saturation by 6 days in either direction. If 20% of cases require hospitalization, we run out of beds by ~May 2nd. 10/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  If only 5% of cases require it, we can make it until ~May 14th. 2.5% gets us to May 20th. This, of course, assumes that there is no uptick in demand for beds from *other* (non-COVID19) causes, which seems like a dubious assumption. 11/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  As healthcare system becomes increasingly burdened, Rx shortages, etc, people w/ chronic conditions that are normally well-managed may find themselves slipping into severe states of medical distress requiring intensive care & hospitalization. But let’s ignore that for now. 12/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Alright, so that’s beds. Now masks. Feds say we have a national stockpile of 12M N95 masks and 30M surgical masks (which are not ideal, but better than nothing). 13/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  There are about 18M healthcare workers in the US. Let’s assume only 6M HCW are working on any given day. (This is likely an underestimate as most people work most days of the week, but again, I’m playing conservative at every turn.) 14/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  As COVID19 cases saturate virtually every state and county, which seems likely to happen any day now, it will soon be irresponsible for all HCWs to not wear a mask. These HCWs would burn through N95 stockpile in 2 days if each HCW only got ONE mask per day. 15/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  One per day would be neither sanitary nor pragmatic, though this is indeed what we saw in Wuhan, with HCWs collapsing on their shift from dehydration because they were trying to avoid changing their PPE suits as they cannot be reused. 16/n
  
  
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  How quickly could we ramp up production of new masks? Not very fast at all. The vast majority are manufactured overseas, almost all in China. Even when manufactured here in US, the raw materials are predominantly from overseas... again, predominantly from China. 17/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Keep in mind that all countries globally will be going through the exact same crises and shortages simultaneously. We can’t force trade in our favor. 18/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Now consider how these 2 factors – bed and mask shortages – compound each other’s severity. Full hospitals + few masks + HCWs running around between beds without proper PPE = very bad mix. 19/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  HCWs are already getting infected even w/ access to full PPE. In the face of PPE limitations this severe, it’s only a matter of time. HCWs will start dropping from the workforce for weeks at a time, leading to a shortage of HCWs that then further compounds both issues above. 20/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  We could go on and on about thousands of factors – # of ventilators, or even simple things like saline drip bags. You see where this is going. 21/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Importantly, I cannot stress this enough: even if I’m wrong – even VERY wrong – about core assumptions like % of severe cases or current case #, it only changes the timeline by days or weeks. This is how exponential growth in an immunologically naïve population works. 22/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Undeserved panic does no one any good. But neither does ill-informed complacency. It’s wrong to assuage the public by saying “only 2% will die.” People aren’t adequately grasping the national and global systemic burden wrought by this swift-moving of a disease. 23/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  I’m an engineer. This is what my mind does all day: I run back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to estimate order-of-magnitude impacts. I’ve been on high alarm about this disease since ~Jan 19 after reading clinical indicators in the first papers emerging from Wuhan. 24/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Nothing in the last 6 weeks has dampened my alarm in the slightest. To the contrary, we’re seeing abject refusal of many countries to adequately respond or prepare. Of course some of these estimates will be wrong, even substantially wrong. 25/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  But I have no reason to think they’ll be orders-of-magnitude wrong. Even if your personal risk of death is very, very low, don’t mock decisions like canceling events or closing workplaces as undue “panic”. 26/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  These measures are the bare minimum we should be doing to try to shift the peak – to slow the rise in cases so that healthcare systems are less overwhelmed. Each day that we can delay an extra case is a big win for the HC system. 27/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  And yes, you really should prepare to buckle down for a bit. All services and supply chains will be impacted. Why risk the stress of being ill-prepared? 28/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Worst case, I’m massively wrong and you now have a huge bag of rice and black beans to burn through over the next few months and enough Robitussin to trip out. 29/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  One more thought: you’ve probably seen multiple respected epidemiologists have estimated that 20-70% of world will be infected within the next year. If you use 6-day doubling rate I mentioned above, we land at ~2-6 billion infected by sometime in July of this year. 30/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  Obviously I think the doubling time will start to slow once a sizeable fraction of the population has been infected, simply because of herd immunity and a smaller susceptible population. 31/n
  
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  But take the scenarios above (full beds, no PPE, etc, at just 1% of the US population infected) and stretch them out over just a couple extra months. 32/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  That timeline roughly fits with consensus end-game numbers from these highly esteemed epidemiologists. Again, we’re talking about discrepancies of mere days or weeks one direction or another, but not disagreements in the overall magnitude of the challenge. 33/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  This is not some hypothetical, fear-mongering, worst-case scenario. This is reality, as far as anyone can tell with the current available data. 34/n
  Liz Specht
  @LizSpecht
  ·
  Mar 6
  That’s all for now. Standard disclaimers apply: I’m a PhD biologist but *not* an epidemiologist. Thoughts my own. Yadda yadda. Stay safe out there. /end
  
  (( also: https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/123609 ... 60483?s=21 ))

Interesting! Excellent catch there Guesty..!

I personally think that conjecture is severely overblown, but we shall see, rather quickly, if there's any accuracy in it.

Working with exponentials is tricky. They tend to wander off into "physical impossibility" rather too easily, as system change tends to break down due to the realities of the limits of the parts changing within the system.

In other words: Some other system change regime will emerge (emergent behavior) that brings the "exponential-ness" of the prediction into a more "tame" behavior.

..perhaps it will be zombies?