The Health Cost Of Lockdowns- Death Tolls From Increased Suicide, Blood Shortages, And Other Effects

[tankasnowgod]

The virus has not come close to peaking yet.

Prove it, using existing facts and data. No predictions allowed.

 

[tankasnowgod]

Who said lockdown forever? A few months or six months or so isn’t forever. I am following basic guidelines because I don’t want to spread it to essential workers and burden the healthcare system. The death rate, while higher than stated, is second to that.

This statement is insane and suicidal. No small or mid size business can survive for that long without any income, or a seriously reduced one. The Fed already estimates that 47 Million people will be out of work by the end of April. Six months could lead to unemployment numbers of 70-90% or more. Many industries and even large corporations would close forever if this keeps up for six months.

All of this for something that is only associated (not even provably causal) of 40,000 deaths worldwide over 4 months. Even that 40,000 number is inflated.

 

[Jing]

I go outside and shopping often. I wouldn't have changed a single thing in my life, had things not changed beyond my control. I would eat out at restaurants, travel, go to large events. I would have no problem "betting my life" on that. One, because I think the risk is vastly overstated, the risk of being injured or killed in a car wreck is far greater than dying from 1 particular virus out of 320,000, possibly trillions. Two, if I was wrong, well, I'd happily die, because I don't particularly want to live in a world that basically turns into a years/decades long version of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Well said.

 

[S.Seneff]

81 millions more people this year on earth : World Population by Year - Worldometer

We are in the era of mental slavery !

Now that everyone is informs of the potential threat of this disease and of the potential overload of the so called healthcare system, impose a lockdown for everyone is an overreaction.

 

[Regina]

People who think things will go back to normal are foolish. These are very well planned and organized event.

LOCK STEP: This is No Futuristic Scenario

Coronavirus and the Gates Foundation

Most 401k Holders, people expecting pensions, home owners, landlords(slumlords), service workers, are going to get CREAMED.

About the only safe place right now is a 100k+ single tech employee with Rent and a Tesla.

I completely agree with you.
I don't even know why the luxury high-rises under construction right now have not abated one bit since the plandemic. There are 100's or maybe 1000's of construction workers banging away on projects all around.

 

[Deleted member 5487]

They will be building day and night. Remember the goal is

1) Internet of things
2) High density living-Compact in the cities
3) No cars, lots of walking/scooters/
4) Tracking and restricted movement

It'll be a dark age of sorts, very hierarchical.

1) Oligarchy .001% in Beverly Hills/NY/Greenwitch
2) Local Elites 1% Big Houses Inner City/High Rise Luxary Condos
3) 15% Professional Class Finance/Tech working from home or in their "hip office"
4) 30% Working Class/Rural Installing Solar/Building Hyperloops/Wind Energy
5) Gov Dependents- Free Housing/UBI money is eaten by walmart/amazon.

Eternity.

 

[Regina]

They will be building day and night. Remember the goal is

1) Internet of things
2) High density living-Compact in the cities
3) No cars, lots of walking/scooters/
4) Tracking and restricted movement

It'll be a dark age of sorts, very hierarchical.

1) Oligarchy .001% in Beverly Hills/NY/Greenwitch
2) Local Elites 1% Big Houses Inner City/High Rise Luxary Condos
3) 15% Professional Class Finance/Tech working from home or in their "hip office"
4) 30% Working Class/Rural Installing Solar/Building Hyperloops/Wind Energy
5) Gov Dependents- Free Housing/UBI money is eaten by walmart/amazon.

Eternity.

Yep.
It pretty much has been that way in Chicago.
Except for all the college educated people working at Starbucks, Trader Joes and actors. They definitely go into the UBI class. And, of course, everybody else.

But these are very expensive "shoeboxes" downtown.

It's a weird coincidence.
When we had a small getaway cape on 5 acres outside of Manhattan, Paul Tudor Jones bought 300 acres some 200 feet from our land. Of course, he worked out a tax-free 501c out of his new vast sanctuary. When it snowed (and did so epically), his snow plower would stop just before our land and reversed. It would have been much easier for him to keep going and turn around at the dead end of our little street. But by dangerously reversing on the icy path, he created a massive wall of snow that was impenetrable for us to get out. We began to just keep our car up on the edge of the road just before the wall of snow. I literally had to trudge across deep snow drifts, ice storms and blizzards for like 600 ft to get into the house in the middle of the woods in the pitch black on Friday nights. (a sitting duck to hungry wild animals. lol). I sent Paul Tudor Jones a letter asking him if he wanted to charge us something per month to have the snow plow guy just turn around at the end of our street. I never heard anything back.

We put our cottage for sale and somehow got out just before any normal people could escape.

Now, I see he has hedge Fund that is also 501.c status. Nice going. Deepak Chopra . HAH!
About — JUST Capital

Our overloads.

 

[milkboi]

They will be building day and night. Remember the goal is

1) Internet of things
2) High density living-Compact in the cities
3) No cars, lots of walking/scooters/
4) Tracking and restricted movement

It'll be a dark age of sorts, very hierarchical.

1) Oligarchy .001% in Beverly Hills/NY/Greenwitch
2) Local Elites 1% Big Houses Inner City/High Rise Luxary Condos
3) 15% Professional Class Finance/Tech working from home or in their "hip office"
4) 30% Working Class/Rural Installing Solar/Building Hyperloops/Wind Energy
5) Gov Dependents- Free Housing/UBI money is eaten by walmart/amazon.

Eternity.

I’d like to believe that the people wouldn‘t tolerate something like this. But maybe they would.

 

[Regina]

I’d like to believe that the people wouldn‘t tolerate something like this. But maybe they would.

In Chicago, they want it.

 

[MatheusPN]

I go outside and shopping often. I wouldn't have changed a single thing in my life, had things not changed beyond my control. I would eat out at restaurants, travel, go to large events. I would have no problem "betting my life" on that. One, because I think the risk is vastly overstated, the risk of being injured or killed in a car wreck is far greater than dying from 1 particular virus out of 320,000, possibly trillions. Two, if I was wrong, well, I'd happily die, because I don't particularly want to live in a world that basically turns into a years/decades long version of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

I strongly agree and pursue to disinfect or minimize its effects. People overreacting on the streets, markets etc. Is so funny hahaha
Or worrisome and comprehendible...
Is impressive how some/ most, become so authoritarian, so easily, blindly in favor of facism
I will leave here my thanks for all your collaboration on this topic!
Thanks, @LeeLemonoil, Charlie, Hans etc!

 

[Deleted member 5487]

I’d like to believe that the people wouldn‘t tolerate something like this. But maybe they would.

We’re already in it. Trump had 9 CEOs on the stage 2 days ago..lol

I think the lock down/police presence is the norm going forward. I drove by 4 cop cars in less than one mile from work. Of course I had my papers since I am considered “essential”.

Kinda see the picture I am painting?

We’re enetering an aryan ran corporation paradise. “Only thing government should provide is protection from criminals”- RAND

Free for all 1905 style.

Be super careful what u eat and the products u use. Local sourcing is crucial now.

 

[michael94]

We’re already in it. Trump had 9 CEOs on the stage 2 days ago..lol

I think the lock down/police presence is the norm going forward. I drove by 4 cop cars in less than one mile from work. Of course I had my papers since I am considered “essential”.

Kinda see the picture I am painting?

We’re enetering an aryan ran corporation paradise. “Only thing government should provide is protection from criminals”- RAND

Free for all 1905 style.

Be super careful what u eat and the products u use. Local sourcing is crucial now.

aryan ran? Explain

 

[Regina]

We’re already in it. Trump had 9 CEOs on the stage 2 days ago..lol

I think the lock down/police presence is the norm going forward. I drove by 4 cop cars in less than one mile from work. Of course I had my papers since I am considered “essential”.

Kinda see the picture I am painting?

We’re enetering an aryan ran corporation paradise. “Only thing government should provide is protection from criminals”- RAND

Free for all 1905 style.

Be super careful what u eat and the products u use. Local sourcing is crucial now.

Guarded by police dept, mounted police and private security, they spent last Friday (during the day) installing tower (survellience I guess) and mega floodlights all along the lake and lakefront parks in Chicago.

It's too late to do anything about it. It is here.

What an April Fool's joke for all of us.

My musician friends (as in members of Chicago Symphony) are still thinking a relief fund for them is forthcoming.

Weird thing on Sunday night when I was driving along the lake back downtown, there were parked cars right along the LakeShore Drive highway. I did a double take when I noticed the inhabitants of the cars were uniformed. I almost swerved off the highway. Dotted all over are boring regular cars. But peer inside them and the uniform is the same on them all. So weird.

Note: no cars are Lake Shore Drive -- the major throughway through the city.
Life After People. The new towers and floodlights keep going along the lake.

 

[milkboi]

We’re already in it. Trump had 9 CEOs on the stage 2 days ago..lol

I think the lock down/police presence is the norm going forward. I drove by 4 cop cars in less than one mile from work. Of course I had my papers since I am considered “essential”.

Kinda see the picture I am painting?

We’re enetering an aryan ran corporation paradise. “Only thing government should provide is protection from criminals”- RAND

Free for all 1905 style.

Be super careful what u eat and the products u use. Local sourcing is crucial now.

I mean yeah, short term people obviously tolerate it. But we don‘t know if that‘s the case long-term.

 

[energyandstruct]

a good paper on systemic risk and "overreaction" by taleb:
Ethics of Precaution: Individual and Systemic Risk


A lot of the stuff people talk about as risks of overreaction is just pure BS, especially compared to risk from a pandemic. We have a totally BS , financialized economy which is unmoored from any tangible values. Who cares if the stock market crashes? maybe bankers, not me. It's just lines on a graph. Its not real life.

 

[energyandstruct]

the DOW jones can go to zero and unemployment to 50 percent for all I care. there are tons of , as david graeber calls them "b*llsh*t jobs" that will be lost. the important thing is not to keep people employed in non essential jobs, the important thing is to ensure they still have sustenance and the things humans need to live.

 

[energyandstruct]

"P RECAUTIONARY decisions do not scale. Collective safety may require excessive individual risk avoidance, even if it conflicts with an individual’s own interests and benefits. It may require an individual to worry about risks that are comparatively insignificant. Assume a risk of a multiplicative viral epidemic, still in its early stages. The risk for an individual to catch the virus is very low, lower than other ailments. It is therefore "irrational" to panic (react immediately and as a priority). But if she or he does not panic and act in an ultra-conservative manner, they will contribute to the spread of the virus and it will become a severe source of systemic harm. Precaution scales in a convex way for crossdependent small idiosyncratic risks that end up dynamically extremely large at the systemic level. Hence one must "panic" individually (i.e., produce what seems to an exaggerated response) in order to avoid systemic problems, even where the immediate You are harming individual payoff does not appear to warrant it. others by not "overreacting" This happens when the systemic risk is small to the individual but common to all, while an individual’s other idiosyncratic risks dominate her or his own life. The risk of car accident may be greater for an individual, but smaller for society. In short you will end up harming yourself by ignoring these "irrational" risks Under such conditions it becomes selfish, even psychopathic, to act according to what is called "rational" behavior – to make one’s own immediate rankings of risk conflict with those of society, even generate risks for society. This is similar to other tragedies of the common, except that there is life and death. In addition, there is a tradeoff short-term vs. long term for idiosyncratic risk. Over the long run, there is convergence between idiosyncratic and systemic: your risk rises if all others are infected and the risks of survival from other diseases drop. For instance, during a pandemic that mostly spares young, healthy individuals, an independent emergency that would typically be routine may become untreatable because of lack of resources. Further, in conditions of severe societal breakdown, many additional risks will emerge for all agents that can’t be reduced to the initial short term risk of infection to the individual. In the current COVID-19 outbreak, such effects can be observed by a complete inundation of hospitals and their ICUs as local outbreaks take hold. This and other less visible thresholds change the dynamic of the pandemic as they are exceeded. Initially small risks become amplified and produce novel and unanticipated risks as the contagion makes impacts system-wide. For these reasons, the prudent and ethical course of action for all individuals is to enact systemic precaution at the individual and local scale. The breakdown of scale-separation that a multiplicative contagion induces connects the individual to the collective, making everyone both a potential bearer and source of risk."

 

[energyandstruct]

"
I thought I would open up this sticky post to allow folks to drop whatever ideas occurred to them regarding the long-term implications of the coronavirus lockdown. I will let it stick here as long as people continue to contribute. You don't need to have any finished idea how a particular implication might relate to the whole, just identify it for further discussion.

I will start with three implications that I think bear investigation:

1. US-China: This event may well see an accelerated transition in the relation between the PRC and the US. I would not be surprised to see China eclipse the US as the largest economy in the world in the very near future. China's economy will be detached from the US to make this possible.
   
   
2. The economic impact of what has occurred as a result of the pandemic cannot be called a recession or depression. Those sorts of events are driven by absolute overaccumulation. We don't have a term for an event where capitalist accumulation is administratively interrupted by the existing state to control a pandemic. Still less do we have any idea how an administrative lockdown will affect a capitalist society characterized by chronic overaccumulation of capital and a surplus population of workers.
   
   
3. If fiscal and monetary policies were already moribund prior to this lockdown -- the United States is presently running a trillion dollar federal budget deficit, with near zero interest rates and getting only tepid growth -- it is likely that these Keynesian--era tools will be of no use in recovery from an administratively interrupted accumulation process. This does not mean they will find no means of exit. It just means whatever mean of exit they do find will be unique to this situation.
   "

 

[energyandstruct]

"
What is means is this: to save itself, the state has been forced to reduce the production of surplus value.

This, we can tell, is a real reduction, because yesterday, a barrel of oil was briefly selling for a negative price. Pollution related to climate change is falling. Deflation has set in. We (as a society) have never seen anything like this even during the Great Depression.

The collapse has been so dramatic and so rapid that most people don't even realize it has taken place. They have just been told to stay home. They don't realize that this means the entire mode of production has ground to a halt.

Over the next few weeks, the individuals states will begin to announce that their revenues have plunged. Pensions funds will begin to collapse. Banks will fold. Real Estate firms will follow. The Federal government will intervene to prop everything up, but it will be like holding back a tsunami.

At this point, we will need to borrow a page from Keynes play book and drastically reduce hours of labor to (probably) 24 or even 15 hours. No government can continue to pay income to people who aren't working. It will be forced to share what work there is.

At this point, Washington doesn't want to do this, because it want to go back to where we were at the earliest opportunity. This won't work. Which is bad news for Washington. If we aren't working long hours, Washington can't afford the huge military. So that will have to go as well.

These are some of the changes that will be necessary. There are others. We are discussing them now."

 

[energyandstruct]

"
QUESTION] Why Can't 30% Unemployment Be Converted Into A 30% Reduction of Hours of Labor? Here's Your Chance To Tell Us.

Discussion and Debate

Last week Trump's Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, offered the opinion that the country could see unemployment as high as 20% as a result of the lock down of businesses made necessary by coronavirus pandemic. The President of the Saint Louis Federal Reserve Bank, James Bullard, predicted the unemployment rate may even reach as high as 30%, with an unimaginable 50% drop in aggregate output (GDP).

These figures, previously unimaginable in Trump's workers' paradise, point to anywhere from 32 million up to 47 million proletarians without work out of a labor force of 160 million, whether or not they are officially counted as unemployed or hidden from government statistics by creative measures.

Obviously. politically, no state can afford such a massive explosion of unemployment. Washington will do everything it can to mitigate this event in a way that is consistent with the existing mode of production. It may fail, but not for want of trying.

The most likely measure is to simply subsidize the burden of maintaining workers on the payroll of many companies. The workers remain attached to their former employers and are not counted as unemployed. The second most likely course is to offer generous benefits for those who have already been let go. The state may impose a temporary moratorium on their noncollectable loans and mortgages as well.

This is the bourgeois approach to managing the economic consequences of the pandemic, but what solution do communists offer beyond being better managers of the bourgeois approach?

So far, nothing. The lockdown has exposed the most incredible secret of 21st century bourgeois society:

The labor of at least 20-30% of the working class is empty! It produces nothing!

It is obvious that this empty labor can immediately be converted into free, disposable time for the whole of society, but nowhere do communists raise this demand.

I just would like to know why.

Here is your chance.

Tell me.

Drop a comment and tell me why what I have written here is stupid."