Comments by "dixon pinfold" (@dixonpinfold2582) on "CNBC Television"
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It strikes me that the goal of flattening the curve is probably at odds with avoiding the impoverishment of us all, perhaps for no payoff whatever in lives saved. Lives may be at first be saved by slowing an otherwise uncontrolled spread, but slowing the spread roughly means shutting down the country until most people are vaccinated or have caught the virus and recovered. Pausing the economy for a full year or longer would likely be a disaster in many ways worse than letting the disease run its course whilst the sick and the old are safely hunkered down for several months.
And drawing out the spread over time is not guaranteed to save a great many lives anyway, as hospitals may be overwhelmed even by a relative trickle of patients: it's clear that they can't handle an influx of the sick amounting to 5% of the population, but what makes anyone think they could handle even 0.5%? Hospitals will no doubt rise to the occasion in astonishing ways, but they operate within realistic limits against which there is ultimately no remedy.
Thus the best way to save the most vulnerable might be to focus on isolating them in the most thoroughgoing manner possible, a task more achievable if people are working at their jobs and circulating freely, maintaining the normal functioning of things needed to support such an effort. It would also free up things like masks and medicines for those who need them most, including medical workers. To isolate those most at risk for, say, half a year is not only much easier on them and all of us than doing so for twelve months or more---it also gives the virus much less time to get through to them.
Imagine on the one hand emerging from the summer with herd immunity achieved at the cost of tens of thousands of lives and with a quick economic and social recovery at hand, versus having the disease hanging over us all for a year or longer whilst it slowly but inexorably picks off the vulnerable one by one, at the cost of a similar (or greater) number of lives but also an economic and financial hole so deep that it takes several years or a decade to climb out of it.
All the while we would swing back and forth agonizingly between tantalizing reprieve and resurgent outbreaks which continue through 2021. Quality of life and standards of living, obviously, but also the health of the people in all other respects would be sure to be seriously impacted. Do we know whether society could hang together throughout all that? We are most certainly (whichever anglosphere nation we inhabit) not the same people who withstood the Second World War with such stoic resilience.
And what if the net effect of an unnecessarily protracted struggle against the disease is a sudden massive transfer of political and economic power to China?
The UK’s national science advisor may have been right to float the herd immunity idea. The country which gets through this soonest will enjoy an enormous feeling of gladness and will also be the envy of the world. Possibly it could mean considering how many lives we permit to be ruined in favour of the uncertain chance of saving a single one. Possibly it could mean sacrificing a certain number of younger lives for a vastly greater number of older ones. As Orwell said, "It is disagreeable to weigh human lives like groceries", but in the worst circumstances that may be precisely what is wisest.
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This analyst appears to realize what few do: that a rare event in the history of business is unfolding before us. Falling sales, falling stock prices, mergers and bankruptcies await a great many auto makers. How many is unclear but the total could be reduced to a mere several in the West and China each. A lot of brands are going to disappear. Musk is going to make superior cars that are five, ten or twenty thousand dollars more profitable, and that'll be the end of them.
Talent usually enters the auto industry to suffer and die, but Musk is making sure it rules at Tesla. Musk alone makes its C-suite bolder and more brilliant than any other the auto industry has to offer. The minority that believe this have awarded Tesla over half the global auto sector market cap.
Only Apple could spoil things, because they can attract and manage talent fairly well, and for every hundred billion Tesla can muster towards its efforts, they can raise perhaps half a trillion. Two sumos are set to go at it, it appears. One is an absolute behemoth already, but the other one is huge and getting much bigger with astonishing speed. I'm betting on the second one, who is half sumo, half badger, half Einstein, half Tesla, half Edison.
There, that's the same as what you said; it's just my way of expressing it.
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