COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[parochial boy]

Great schools are too stupid to optimize computer programs to make passing times more dispersed between students or move teachers around instead using carts.

Apparently they don’t teach much grammar either

[parochial boy]

I think what happens is that the virus has to adapt to be less deadly, since it needs living hosts who can spread it.

Smallpox was around for thousands of years and was still pretty deadly even in the 20th century. Even if Coronviruses are much less stable than smallpox, a disease mutating to become significantly less deadly in the space of a few months is pretty far fetched.

snip

Actually, this makes me thing of another thing. If we move beyond just COVID, we know as a pretty much certainty that these sorts of zoonotic events are going to become more and more common as humans and intense levels of industry and agriculture expands into previously uninhabited areas. Which really begs the question as to how we are going to be better at the outset or at dealing with these sorts of things at least. Because, regardless of what your thoughts on the lockdown this time round would be, there's no way we can cope with sticking the whole world on lockdown every 10 years for every new unknown disease that rolls out of China or Borneo or Cattle farms in the Amazon.

[parochial boy]

Our national debt is at a dangerous level. Therefore, I oppose any new massive stimulus packages.

and we have almost 28 TRILLION DOLLARS of national debt! No more major stimulus packages please. I am done with this bull.

There is literally 0 danger from the "national debt" to anything. The only danger is an imaginary danger that is infecting your mind and causing you to support sabotaging the economy and making people worse off due to insufficient spending power circulating through the economy.

Late, but Greece circa 2013 agrees with this statement

The key difference you are overlooking is that Greece does not control its own currency and have its own central bank, whereas the USA does. Greece is in essentially the same position as US states and municipalities are in, as well as in the same position as you, me, other individuals, and private companies. You and I (and US states, and Greece) do have financial constraints to how much debt we can take on, but the US government is in a very different position because it has a money printing machine. Do you have a money printing machine? No. If you did though, you could print as much of it as you wanted. That is the position the US Federal government is in. There is no financial constraint to how much money the US government can create. The only constraints on what the US government can do are questions of how much money it is wise to print/create. The risk of creating too much money is that at a certain point, if you make too much of it, there may be inflation. So the US government does and should have to worry about macroeconomic considerations like inflation and the unemployment rate when setting its fiscal policy, but there is no reason to ever worry that the USA will run out of money. Currently, since inflation is low and unemployment is high, that is a signal that it is macroeconomically warranted for the government to run larger budget deficits. Of course, if we spend too much and inflation gets too high (and if the reason it is getting too high is we don't have underutilized productive capacity), then that would call for smaller budget deficits. But that is emphatically not remotely the current situation, and it won't be the situation in the foreseeable future, in particular if the Republicans keep blocking additional much needed stimulus.

Ok, if your solution is "money printer go brrr" change that from 2013 Greece to 2013 Venezuela I guess. Or Weimar Germany.

Actually, little known secret - most money is not created by central banks, but by commercial banks, and monetary creation is a prerequisite for economic growth. Point being, at the this moment at time, the pressure is deflationary. When the economy is not turning at full capacity, injecting money won't lead to excessive inflation, as monetary injections would only cause excessive inflation when there is no capacity in the economy to increase production to meet the extra demand generated by an increased monetary supply. That clearly isn't the case at the moment, when the proverbial factory has stopped running and when the commercial banking system's monetary creation isn't working because it has no incentive to risk lending into an economy that is in recession and might therefore not be able to pay back the debt. It's a hell of a different situation to Weimar Germany's inheritance of the war machine or Venezuela's crashing oil prices. You need the state to be putting money into the economy, whether through the central bank or through debt. Inflation is not a worry right now.

As for debt, well you're Spanish, you literally come from the country that had a budget surplus and the lowest public debt in the EU - even better than Germany - in 2008, and still got stung almost as hard as anyone else by a sovereign debt crisis that you did a better job than literally anybody else - again, including Germany - in preparing for. The problem isn't debt, it's being vulnerable, and now is not a time to make yourselves vulnerable by believing in voodoe economics about budget surpluses or discredited monetary policy.

[parochial boy]

Actually, little known secret - most money is not created by central banks, but by commercial banks, and monetary creation is a prerequisite for economic growth. Point being, at the this moment at time, the pressure is deflationary. When the economy is not turning at full capacity, injecting money won't lead to excessive inflation, as monetary injections would only cause excessive inflation when there is no capacity in the economy to increase production to meet the extra demand generated by an increased monetary supply. That clearly isn't the case at the moment, when the proverbial factory has stopped running and when the commercial banking system's monetary creation isn't working because it has no incentive to risk lending into an economy that is in recession and might therefore not be able to pay back the debt. It's a hell of a different situation to Weimar Germany's inheritance of the war machine or Venezuela's crashing oil prices. You need the state to be putting money into the economy, whether through the central bank or through debt. Inflation is not a worry right now.

As for debt, well you're Spanish, you literally come from the country that had a budget surplus and the lowest public debt in the EU - even better than Germany - in 2008, and still got stung almost as hard as anyone else by a sovereign debt crisis that you did a better job than literally anybody else - again, including Germany - in preparing for. The problem isn't debt, it's being vulnerable, and now is not a time to make yourselves vulnerable by believing in voodoe economics about budget surpluses or discredited monetary policy.

At the risk of deraling the thread...

I mean, yes inflation is low enough that printing money is a decent idea, but it is not one that can be sustained indefinitely.

As for the Spanish comparison, yes, Spain circa 2008 had pretty good finances, but it pissed them all away in absolutely awful stimulus programs that did little to actually stimulate the economy (not to mention the double dip recession that all of Europe went through)

I actually have a positive opinion of PM Zapatero, but his handling of the economic recession was, by far the worst in all of Europe outside of Greece (who was making up its economic numbers so it's not a fair comparison)

I dare say it's a more interesting subject than going on and on about Covid Nobody is really suggesting printing money forever and ever, but one of the lessons we can take out of the Euro crisis is that not having the Central Bank be able to fund government spending / create money to buy back bonds is insane economic policy. That was precisely the problem with the ECB; the German ordoliberal ideology essentially meant the ECB had no ability to bail out struggling economies by bond buy backs - which meant having to borrow further and exacerbating the problem and creating a totally unneccessary lost decade for Southern Europe. All because the Germans are traumatised by what happened in Weimar and tried to insist on keeping on applying the same solutions to totally different situations.

One of Spain's biggest problems in particular was the massive housing bubble, coupled with the completely mad fact of it being impossible to default on your mortgage (ish, you can, the bank reposseses your home, but you still have to make up the difference that they can't recoup, after a housing bubble bursts... ouch...). This meant people would lose their homes but still have their disposable income taken up by paying off the debt, rendering the stimulus programmes ineffective. But it also mean the banks where in a fictitious zombie situation where they were claiming they weren't bankrupt when they essentially were, and the state blew an enourmous amount of money on trying to prop them up.

The worry right now is that central banks printing money combined with very little demand in the economy is creating a similar bubble for second-hand assets (the stock market especially), which will eventually pop just as the housing bubble in Spain did. Simply because there is very little incentive to invest in the real economy when there is essentially no demand. That's why it is absolutely that an institution like the state is able to actually pump demand, and get people to actually buy things, into the economy again.

[parochial boy]

Code:

The cost of doing nothing is so great that governments need to be going at least as far as they are now. If Omicron does turn out not to be more dangerous than Delta or even somehow less dangerous, that's great but it's better to take a precautionary approach and act to prevent the pessimistic scenario when our knowledge is so poor.

Really?  What are the costs of doing nothing, exactly?  And what are these effective measures governments need to take - more masks?  They've worked so well to stem the tide of Delta (not), I'm sure they'll be effective against a variant that is far, far more infectious.  Travel bans?  Its already in Europe, across multiple countries.  Its almost certainly already on every continent by now.  The last thing governments should do is ineffective, virtue signalling travel bans and NPIs just to make it look like they're "doing something" to their scared, sheep populaces.

Mass death and lockdowns obviously. The cost of preventing the pandemic at the very beginning, or keeping out later variants, is so much less than the cost that America has ultimately suffered.

Or what? Like it or not, Covid is becoming an endemic disease and we are beyond the possibility of ever eradicating it. So what are we supposed to do? React like this to every new variant and make this an annual tradition for ever and ever and ever? Because now we have the vaccine and the ability to adapt that vaccine within weeks for what is, at the end of the day not the deadliest of diseases - we are going to have to accept that that is the only way we are going to be able to control the disease without restricting ourselves forever on the hope that it someday goes away.

Because like it nor not, lockdowns and travel bans are not cost free options. And the more we do them, the heavier and heavier those costs become relative to the actual costs of the disease. Especially for people who are isolated or vulnerable; or who are lower income; or those of us with families abroad. I missed my grandfather passing away because of travel restrictions earlier this year, I have just lost the opportunity to meet my nephew for the first time because of the hysterical overreaction to this variant. Plenty of other people have far, farworse or more harrowing stories because of the fact that some people have developed and irrealistic overreaction to what is becoming a treatable disease.

[parochial boy]

Mild symptoms? Pancreatic cancer first manifests itself with mild symptoms.

Pancreatic cancer has a 10% 5 year survival rate. Are you suggesting COVID does as well?

To this date, not one single person has surviced for 5 years after a Covid infection

maekes u think 🤔