More plague updates
The city is sending non-essential workers home.
Cirque du soleil has now laid off 95% of its workers.
The cases of COVID-19 at the Jewish seem to have been contracted in the Caribbean. That coronavirus sure travelled fast.
Are Quebec’s health care facilities ready for the surge?
Douglas 23:59 on 2020-03-19 Permalink
This is worst than the great recession of 2009 in the US.
The bailouts will make 2009 look like nothing.
Kate 00:49 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
Yes yes, but you have to get a grip, Douglas. Money is a fiction. Health is not.
Douglas 09:39 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
Money is fiction until you need it to buy food.
DeWolf 10:13 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
We’ve never lived through anything quite like this so it’s impossible to say how sticky the recession will be. Businesses are laying off workers like mad but only because they are temporarily shut down. Unless the government throws up its hands and lets everybody in the country go bankrupt, those businesses will reopen in a month or so when we’ve gotten through the worst of this, and they’ll need to hire back the workers they laid off.
Raymond Lutz 12:40 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
Hmmm, moi aussi je crains les répercusssions économiques des lock-downs… (even if I’m a self-described socialist) see for exemple https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/03/11/it-is-easy-to-overdo-covid-19-quarantines/
We should organize adaptive triggering of suppression strategies as mentioned in “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand” (10.25561/77482)
ie tuning schools, commerces lockdowns at a finer spatial and temporal granularity than at province level and for long periods.
The authors predict US and UK “Critical care beds occupation” peaking well into 2020 and even in 2021…
Douglas 15:40 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
Raymond
From the article:
“deaths from the loss of the economy would be far greater than the direct deaths from the coronavirus.”
Very very true. Absolutely true.
walkerp 17:20 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
We are drowning in excess. I am hearing at this point an economic downturn equal to the Great Depression is a possibility. That is going to be rough, but I don’t know how you possibly conclude that will lead to more deaths than the disease itself.
The reason there is so much anxiety about the economy is because it is the elites who will suffer the worst. They still think they are shielded from all the woes of an unequal society, including a disease that does not discriminate. Thus the delays by the Trump administration.
We can survive poverty and in many ways this bloated economy was doing more harm to the world and the planet than a depression will. Almost all the wealth generated in the last two decades has gone entirely to further pump up the 1% and increase the social divide.
Fuck the economy. We need to turn society’s attention to our health and to the planet’s health. That means we all tighten our belts. We had a choice and we didn’t take it and now we don’t have a choice.
Douglas 18:44 on 2020-03-20 Permalink
“Fuck the economy”. Lol. That’s rich. Good decent people are being laid off, suffering financially, and going more into poverty. The poor are getting poorer here, the middle class is being crushed.
Contrary to what you may believe, the rest of the world doesn’t actually want a bolshevik revolution.
Elites aren’t suffering. Trust me on that one.
Uatu 00:43 on 2020-03-21 Permalink
I’m interested to see the outcome of this pandemic. Social security was the result of the great depression. Britain’s NHS was formed in the aftermath of WW2. Social programs are usually the result of collective misery so maybe there’s a similar result coming? Some articles I’ve read suggest basic income maybe the next thing especially in a world where pandemics are recurring and effect everyone regardless of political bent…
Raymond Lutz 08:57 on 2020-03-21 Permalink
Well said, Uatu. Isn’t Trump wanting some kind of emergency UBI? “Jimmy Dore – Pelosi Is Blocking Direct Cash Payments To Citizens.WTF?”
https://youtu.be/NKtB9f2ezzg
Kate 10:10 on 2020-03-21 Permalink
The thing I wonder about that $1000 to Americans is that the Trump administration is doing this in the spirit in which you give a persistent panhandler $2 hoping he’ll leave you alone. “What else can they possibly want? I gave them a thousand bucks each!”
Trump and his coterie have no idea about the real cost of living.