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So after reading a misleading meme on the internet I was compelled to compare the COVID situation in Canada over the past few months to that in the USA. This is what I notice.
The Canadian stock market has crashed by a thousand points since the beginning of the year and COVID cases in Canada have **increased** 700% since mid june... Compared to america where the stock market has **increased** by 3,000 points since the beginning of the year (thatsa 33% increase) and covid cases has **dropped** by more than 50% since the beginning of july.
The issue with lockdowns is they look great to everyone who is too ignorant to understand whats going on, but they devastate the economy and do no good because the second you let up the lock down no one has immunity and the virus spreads like it is new. So in the long run you get hit hard in the wallet AND in terms of the infection. Meanwhile the americans approach may have resulted in more infection early on but fewer in the long term and without damaging the economy along the way.
@freemo incidentally, stock market indices measure many things - but the health of an economy is absolutely not one of them.
@tim Actually thats not true, at least not most of the time, sometimes it can be...
Typically the Stock Market in all countries, including the USA, shows very close correlation to other indicators of economic grown. For example the gold standard, the GNP tends to very closely correlate with the S&P 500 index.
@freemo thank you for making my point. To make that graph usefully correlate you have to look at > 5 year timespans. Which just goes to show - using the stock market index to try and justify policy relating a 6 month old pandemic is just wishful thinking.
@tim No the graph doesnt make that point at all. As you can see it still correlates during short term variation as well. You can see rather clearly during the 2009 stock market crasht eh GNP also dipped at the same time, showing short term, <1 year, correlation.
Thanks for pointing out **my** point though :)
@tim There are different aspects there that go beyond measuring if a lockdown is a good move or not. A large part of the death rate difference is two fold.. 1) the USA's tactic would and should have high death rate up front, lower death rate long-term if all else is equal. 2) All else is not equal, Americans have twice the rate of obesity, higher rate of diabetes, and poorer access to healthcare.
So because of point #2 we would expect a higher death rate for the same infection rate. Which is why comparing death rate is itself "hand waving" if we are trying to access the viability of the lockdown strategies themselves. So what matters is infection rate, not death rate (as that isnt influenced by the points in #2 nearly as much).
The fact is, since june/july Canada's infection rate has went up, and the USA's has went down, showing exactly what I describe.
The economy, and namely the stock market is **not** the main motivator here. The point is the strategy of not having strict lockdowns in its own right is showing successful based on our own trends of decreasing infection while countries that had strict lockdown show increasing infection rates, so it was a good strategy even without considering the economy. The fact that it also means we have stock market growth and not a crash is only a bonus.
We also cant forget that poverty kills, so it is hardly irrelevant.
@tim Oh and by the way Europe is showing the exact same pattern, since june/july covid cases have been going up and have similarly doubled, meanwhile in that same timespan the USA COVID cases have decreased at the rate I mentioned. Again showing the approach the USA took by ending the lockdowns earlier and not being as strict with them has the best long-term results on COVID infection rates. Strict lockdown means the vbirus spreads as it would have when new when you finally ease up on lockdowns, it doesnt work as a long term management solution.
@freemo you can say you *hope* that to be the case, and it might be an entirely reasonable hope. You absolutely can't say you have any evidence it will be the case yet. Right now, all you can say is a lot more people are dead than comparable economies, but maybe the bet will pay off in the long run.
For the US sake, I hope you're right, naturally. It wouldn't be a bet I'd make - I'd prefer to overreact early, when you know little about the virus, and relax later - but fingers crossed.
@tim Well yes and no.. There is plenty of evidence, the question is how confident can we be that the evidence ensures the outcome I stated. Nothing is 100% in science so there is always some room for error.
What I know from having worked in the past on disease proliferation models is that all the models we have when we deal with diseases that have the characteristics of COVID agree with what I said. What we also know is all the numbers regarding infection so far have matched those models exactly and that we have thus far seen the pattern agree exactly with what I said, Canada and europe has drastically increasing covid infection numbers while the USA has drastically decreasing numbers.
There are of course many other factors that could effect this, so there are no garuntees. But we absolutely have evidence to suggest what I said is valid, and that evidence has been consistent so far and relatively compelling.
@freemo "the wallet" wouldn't matter if we didn't have a capitalist economy where money was needed by so many ppl for survival. End capitalism.
@rbe_expert Yes it would. Even if you could some how figure out a way to make a non-capitalistic society work without everyone starving to death in general (has never been down) the productivity and ability to make progress in terms of infrastructure and resources still has just as much effect on the health of the population as in a capitalist society. If you lock everyone away and prevent them from working resources, including food, become scarce and people start dying.
The only difference you'd have in an idealistic non-capitalist society, say communism, would be instead of some people starving a bit more than others, everyone would starve and die together.
@freemo Ok Thatcher
@freemo I'm obviously NOT saying lock EVERYONE away, just the non-essential people most of the time. Strawman argument.
@rbe_expert Yes I know what your saying. that has the same consequences, just to a slightly lesser extent than locking everyone away.
Point is lockdowns don't work, to any extent, when dealing with a virus that has the sorts of qualities this virus has. A full lockdown would have the worst long-term results, a partial lock down isnt quite as bad but still does more harm than good.
Lockdowns do not work at surpressing a virus that is in the wild globally, has a large portion of asymptomatic carriers, has short incubation periods, and has weak long-term immune response.... it literally has all the characteristics that a lockdown is **not** suited for as a solution.
@freemo I don't understand why any of that is relevant. What you're saying is like "preventing driving through intersections without stoplights is bad because you can still get into accidents!" But the point is to reduce the spread and therefore the deaths. Isolate areas where the virus has been shown to spread to. Introduce randomized periodic testing to determine where it has spread to as a population.
@rbe_expert No your analogy is completely naive to the points of the argument, it isnt like that at all.
The point made here is exactly that lockdowns **do not** reduce the spread overall spread, it will only **delay** the spread. That is the key.
Its easy to understand why that is if you imagine an ideal lockdown where there is absolutely no spread of the virus locally, but where the virus remains in the wild. All that would do is put things on pause, you'd have no cases of any kind but eventually lockdown gets lifted. When it does you are right back at square one, the lock down had no benefit as now you have the whole population in the wild, no immunity, and the vir5us spreads exactly as it would when it was first introduced if no lock down were instituted. So it would effectively do nothing to reduce the spread of the virus in the long term.
If you consider partial (imperfect) lockdowns the scenario is the same except instead of completely pausing the spread it only temporarily slows it down and once the lockdown is lifted it goes back to spreading at its normal pace again and the overall numbers infected long-term would be the same as if the virus had never spread.
Now in the above scenario the total number infected would be the same long-term in both a full lockdown, partial lockdown, or no lockdown, if we were talking about a virus like measles where once you get it you are immune for life, because with such a virus you can develop a perfect herd immunity once a certain level of spread is reached, thus you an upper level which is always a constant for long-term end results.
However in this case we do not have the normal immunity properties we expect with measles, instead we have the same immunity properties we have with all other coronavirus-class viruses (for example the common cold is about 50% of the time a type of coronavirus). What we see is that when someone has a very mild case, particularly asymptomatic, then their immunity lasts only on the order of weeks. In a severe case the immunity appears to be in the ballpark of a year max, just like we see with types of coronavirus.
This changes the dynamics of herd immunity significantly. Consider the simple case where everyone had a severe infection (just to make the mental exercise easier to understand). Also lets pick a random number of 70% population immunity could theoretically cause herd immunity. If 70% of the population got infected overnight we would have herd immunity for a year and no new infections would be seen for a year after that. However if you slowed down the infection so that you stopped all new cases for a whole year and locked down everyone, then when they were released there would be no herd immunity, you'd see the same overnight spike, and you just wasted a year of your life in lockdown with no benefits, in the end the people still got infected.
So in the end the lockdowns dont help. There is in fact only one argument for the lock down, if your hospitals go over 100% capacity then a partial lock down makes sense to slow the virus just enough to get capacity below 100%. But in such a case you want a minimal lockdown such that it is just barely enough to get the numbers under 100% but no more than that. The USA hospitals on average have maintained a margin under 100% so this has not been an issue.
@freemo Can you show to me that a lockdown can't slow spread enough and long enough to prevent mass casualties while a vaccine is developed and distributed within a 2-3 year period?
@rbe_expert you are assuming a vaccine can and will be developed. But every indication is that is unlikely.. for starters we have been trying to create vaccines for corona virus class viruses for many decades now and have never created a successful long-lasting vaccine for a single corona-class virus in the 30+ years we have tried.
Second the nature of this virus suggests even if we do create a vaccine it iis likely to not be very effective. We have seen this virus has exceptionally short immunity time when you have a weak immune response with asymptomatic carriers being able to be reinfected on an order of weeks. It is only with massive immune responses (people sick enough to be in the hospital) do we see any appreciable immunity which current numbers suggest would be on the order of only a year.
Since vaccines by their nature tend to create weak immune responses, and especially given our failure to produce particularly effective vaccines in the past on this class of virus anyway, in all liklihood we will not see a vaccine that will be of any substantial benefit here.
@freemo Yes I am assuming that, because the sense of urgency is different now. We have potentially trillions of dollars being pumped into developing this thing.
@freemo So do you think the Smallpox vaccine is totally worthless? I mean, it clearly works?
@rbe_expert No not at all, smallpox has none of the attributes I just described. With smallpox if you get infected even with a reduced immune response you still gain lifetime immunity in most cases, which is exactly the type of virus a vaccine is well suited for, and totally different than the nature of corona class viruses.
@freemo Even if the coronavirus vaccine is more like a flu vaccine, something we need to reformulate every year, it would still be effective to lockdown till we get that first vaccine. Each year, our efficiency in creating a reformulated vaccine would increase.
@rbe_expert The thing is, its not likely to be even as workable as the flu vaccine.
Keep in mind the reason we need reformulated flu vaccines isnt because a weak immune response produces only short term immunity, as is the case with coronaviruses. In fact the immunity you receive from a flu vaccine lasts for life **on that particular strain**. The reason we need multiple shots is very different, its a process called recombination where flu vaccines in the wild essentially exchange dna with each other and produce entirely new strains every year. New strain new vaccine.
Coronavirus is very different, it doesn't recombinant or change strains, instead our immune system does not retain immunity for it. When you have a cery severe infection your immune system retains immunity for only about a year, but for mild or asymptomatic infections with a mild immune response it lasts on the order of weeks.
So if we created a Coronavirus vaccine it wouldn't need to be reformulated every year, the same vaccine would work with injections. Because vaccines by their nature elicit a weak immune response (you don't actually get sick) the real problem is you'd need to get a new vaccine so often (probably something like every 2 weeks) that it wouldn't be feasible, effective, or affordable. Not to mention with that sort of frequency there is a real risk of complications we don't usually see with viruses such as developing an allergic reaction to the proteins or something as of yet unforeseen.
Either way you cut it even if we create a vaccine at all it isnt likely to be viable if everyone int he country needs to take a shot every 2 weeks for it to work.
@freemo I'm aware of that, and actually the coronavirus spreading globally has actually already mutated several times. That's probably one of the reasons we'd likely need an annual shot.
@rbe_expert The mutations are very minor as such things go. They arent likely to effect the vaccine actually. The reason we would need a shot every 2 weeks has nothing to do with mutation.
@freemo What data do you have that shows we'd need a shot every 2 weeks?
@rbe_expert Well two points of data 1) past research on corona class viruses that all have a similar pattern to them (I've read through hundreds of lab reports on this topic).. and 2) the evidence we have regarding infected people with the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus, which we see following the same pattern in terms of immune response (there are dozens of reports of people showing the anti-body who were asymptomatic and then a few weeks later no longer registering the anti-body)
The two combined make for a pretty compelling pattern.
@freemo Do you have data on actual immune (antibody) response to coronavirus vaccines?
What stocks do you own? Seems like you probably own stocks.
@rbe_expert I mostly invest in ethical stocks.. green energy mostly. Though i also do some algorithmic trading.
Any responsible person not living in poverty should, and often does, have stocks. A 401K is pretty standard among the lower-middle class and above, anyone with a savings account really
@freemo I really think you're prioritizing money over people's lives and using motivated reasoning to try to create excuses for it.
@rbe_expert You are welcome to think that, but its wrong..
Peoples lives are more important, and poverty kills just as sure as a virus. Which is why I dont want to see more people die by increasing the poverty line in a lockdown that is wishful thinking we will have a vaccine to save us that is almost certainly never going to come.
@freemo The free market has also killed many people through denying people basic human needs.
@freemo So why not just have the govt provide people with basic human needs during the lockdown period and have a smallish % of essential workers employed in doing this? Seems you're ideologically opposed to this.
@rbe_expert because without a vaccine that means people would be in lockdown forever. Not really a viable solution.
@rbe_expert Yes it has, which is why being a free market the last thing we want to do is put people in a position of poverty where they are denied their basic needs and die...
So yea I agree, and that is an argument for, not against, what im saying.
@freemo This is essentially your whole argument, and like the dinosaurs you're arguing humans have no way to mitigate the disaster. Seems like you have an ideological reason to dismiss universal government services during a lockdown out of hand.
@rbe_expert Urgency cant circumvent basic biology. A vaccine will always produce a weaker immune response than the actual disease, that is the whole point. No getting around that.
@freemo The vaccine would save many lives, locking down gives us / gave us time.
I hope those stimulus checks helped the poorest citizens too ๐
Thats a very different argument. How and if we help those who are financially speaking a burden to society is a very important discussion but it is different from if we are talking about economic growth of society as a whole.
You could argue, and I'd agree, we could and should do more to help those in poverty, but doesnt really change the fact that for all those who have sockets (lower middle class and above) they are seeing pretty good results.
@freemo @HappyWizard Fact: Poor and working class people mostly don't give a shit about your Robinhood account.
@freemo @HappyWizard I'm really not sure if this works in the long-term. It seems more like we are setting up the conditions for a future system-wide crash with the amount of inflation, national debt, and corporate debt, and the earth's resources are already almost fully leveraged.
@freemo Active cases US: 77 per 10,000. Active cases Canada: 2 per 10,000.
Also your metric that the US doing better purely because the value of the stock market hasn't declined is pretty silly. There's mass unemployment and hunger in the US and a lot of people can't pay their bills, don't have medical care. Look at US labor participation rates, if you can find them, because unemployment rates are calculated to shield a lot. US economy is in the shitter rn.
@bryanreynolds Thats not how you properly analyze statistics. For one you cant look at numbers, they must be "normalized" (adjusted according to the base rate) to be meaningful.. Second, since we are looking at the effectiveness of a policy change (ending lockdown quickly) you would the valid and accurate measurement would be the percentage rate of change of infected cases, not the absolute numbers. It is the only way you can show actual causality against a policy change as well as adjust for the population size and other factors.
I am not saying the US is doing better "purely because of the value of the stock market".. I am stating they are doing better because since lockdown was let up there was a 50% decrease in the rate of infection while Canada had a 700% increase in rate of infection after letting up lockdown. The stock market is simply an added bonus on top of that.
@freemo So I work in data science, and giving you population-adjusted active case rates is a great way to measure to measure virus activity in a country, albeit with the caveat that most lab reporting in the US has a significant lag of a week or more. That's all I'll say on the matter, because your first paragraph made me laugh ๐
@bryanreynolds My claim was not "measure to measure virus activity".. What we are trying to measure is if a policy change from strict lockdown to early and quick locking up is an effective policy change (what USA did).. vs if the canadian policy of implementing strict lock down over a longer period with an extremely gradual reopening is more effective.
For that, as you should know as a data-scientist, means you employ causality tests like the granger causality test. For that you would not compare the numbers in the way you did instead you would compare the rate of change in the virus following the change in policy, which is what I did.
@freemo Canada's economy was almost certainly going to nosedive in the pandemic in any case - CAD is a petrocurrency. Lots of segments of industry globally, most severely air travel, cut way back on energy consumption since March. When selling oil is your business and everyone starts buying less oil, the value of your business is going to decline. Forgoing a lockdown can't change that.
Just a reminder to be cautious about interpreting correlation as causation.
@khird We see the same pattern across europe as well with a 6% yearly drop in stocks too.
Also the air travel, as you mentioned, is entirely connected with the lockdown. There is a much more dramatic reduction in air travel in large part due to the lockdown (travel restrictions).
@freemo To be more specific, *global* air travel reduction is the issue. A lot of that fuel is exported to foreign countries, and their choice to implement a lockdown, not Canada's, reduced their airlines' demand. Even Canada's domestic airlines are more dependent on international travel than American ones - because Canada is on the great circle routes between the eastern USA and Asia, and between the western USA and Europe & the Middle East, a lot of their business is sixth-freedom traffic. Travel restrictions between America and the rest of the world hit Canadian airlines hard, and Canadian lockdown policies were more or less incidental.
@khird Yes there is some truth to that, lockdowns hurt not just local economies but global ones as well.. But the point still stands lockdowns result in pretty big hits to economies.
@khird Also keep in mind the canadian dollar being a petrodollar is only loosely connected. the stock market isnt showing the CAD value directly it is showing the stock market.
If the candian dollar crashed due to petrol but everything else remained the same then the stock market index wouldnt go down as it is displayed in canadian dollars, even though its effective value has went down. So it is somewhat a moot point since we did not normalize the stock market to the candian dollars value.
@freemo I'm not sure you can handwave away the 200,000 people who are dead. The US has a death rate 17 times Europe; you can argue that's OK because the economy is more important, but you can't just ignore it.
The evidence of Sweden though is that avoiding lockdown doesn't protect your economy much - their economy slowed just as much as their neighbours, they just have more dead people. In a global market, it's hard to mitigate the effect of a global pandemic through local action.