Capitalism is Sick

#BREAKING
WATCH: Rick Santelli suggests infecting everyone with coronavirus — to lessen the economic impact
https://t.co/NskH4LuIS9

— Raw Story (@RawStory) March 5, 2020

It's hard to think of a more apt encapsulation of what is wrong with the short-term gain, small-picture view of modern capitalism: in the clip above, CNBC's Rick Santelli, famous for his inane "moral hazard" rant that launched the Tea Party movement, thinks it would be a great idea if everyone just got COVID-19 at once so we could all get it out of our system.

Except that is not how anything works. I mean, we aren't actually talking about a 2% lethality rate (which is bad enough compared to ordinary flu) but possibly 3.4% even assuming adequate healthcare infrastructure. The figure I'd be concerned about is the 15-20% who require hospitalization. Under a scenario in which everyone was infected at once, the healthcare system would be too overwhelmed to accommodate care for all those seriously afflicted, and the lethality rate would soar because people who need ventilators, etc., would not get that care. The afflicted would include health care workers. Ordinary diseases and injuries would still occur, in some cases as secondary opportunistic infections for people already afflicted with COVID-19.

Beyond the nightmare this poses for health care, work productivity and consumerism would be at a standstill. Shelves would go empty. The likelihood of price gouging (like we're seeing with masks and hand sanitizer, but for things like tinned beans and bottled water), looting or riots would increase. Weather events like flooding, severe thunderstorms, straight line winds, blizzards, etc., major fires, accidental explosions through things like gas leaks, would all have more devastating impacts on local communities because the emergency support would be down. People would lose their habitations and not have the means or support structure for easily finding temporary shelter. Suicide rates would climb. Substance use/abuse would climb. Service industries could just go under. People who live paycheck to paycheck would go under. People who can't afford an unplanned $2000 emergency would go under. There would be misery for everyone.

And no, the stock market would probably not rebound in a short time after all that.



The idea that 2% means 2% lethality, that we could easily absorb the deaths of about 11 million people in this country, and that the markets would just be fine after the funerals were done, is weird, but not unfamiliar. I mean, it's the kind of thinking we see with climate change. The simplistic idea that: Well, sure, some things will be bad, but we'll adapt. In the meanwhile, let's not hurt profits.

Or, if you happen to be Donald Trump, sure, some things will be bad, but maybe they'll be good, because his gut says so and it's an election year:

The WHO rate compares the number of deaths to the number of people tested. But many people who have the virus do not show serious symptoms and do not get tested, said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

But, as Trump tried to explain this in his interview, he added confusion by discussing how people with a mild case of the disease caused by coronavirus may not be tested for it.

"So, if we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better," Trump said.

Trump's upbeat tone made it seem as though he was suggesting it was a good thing that people with coronavirus could go to work.

He might not be directly saying that people should just go to work anyway, but seems to be, to use a morbid saying, "whistling past the graveyard". He seems to want to prematurely congratulate himself for doing a great job of containment, but the numbers of the infected may be artificially kept low by inadequate testing, and that is certainly no way to properly do a good job of containment. If you take a look at this up-to-date reporting page, the US numbers show a high mortality incidence compared to reported cases--but here's a screenshot of today in case this changes:

This is close to 6%. That means we're catching the sickest people, and we aren't down to testing community infections adequately. And we will need to meet up with the early promises regarding availability of testing kits to get on top of the spread and stay on top of it. The Trump Administration seems to want to hold press conferences without answering questions, and praise Trump when it isn't clear what positive steps are being taken, besides indicating that the "numbers are low". (Is that "number of infections are low" or "numbers that we are aware of are low"?)

Health care professionals have real concerns about their safety and that of their patients in terms of their preparedness.  Instead of the Administration seeing criticism as politicized, that criticism needs to be taken to heart and materialize into solutions. Instead of viewing worst-case scenarios as fear-mongering, they need to recognize that the consequences of an epidemic overwhelming our resources are quite valid fears that could become a reality without timely interference.

There just isn't a rosy, stock market preserving happy talk strategy that exists that would do more than engaging in real, proactive and responsive government.  Also, Trump needs to own his government's own failures on this and not dwell on what his predecessor did in different circumstances.