"The Plauge" was one of the few books I've read during high school for a book report because I... fried my CPU and couldn't use my PC during spring break so, having nothing better to do, I sat down and read the whole thing.
I could very much feel the loss of agency the characters had to endure, because computers were my whole world back then.
I read this in college 20 years ago, and understood it as an allegory of existentialism (which it is). I’ve been thinking A LOT about it the last few weeks. Worth a read, but not for the faint of heart.
Camus actively rejected labeling his work as “existentialism”. It only frequently gets lumped into that category because of his relationship/friendship with Sartre and de Beauvoir and because some of his work contains existentialist-like themes. He was more accepting of the term “absurdism” for his work. But his work never fully aligned with existentialist thought.
“The Plague” is typically read as an allegory of the French resistance to the Nazi invasion and occupation of France, and an analysis of the relationship that humans have with authoritarianism, fascism, and how we can either help or hurt each other in times of crisis. Camus was also a humanist and believed that people were more good than evil (which he comments on in “The Plague”).
Source: I got my university degree in Philosophy and Camus was my main subject of interest/study for a number of years (and continues to be even now).
this is just fascinating for me since I picked up The Stranger last week and am mesmerized by his writing style. The Plague is now next on my list. I don't want to compare him with others since he very much has a distinct & brilliant style (short crisp and far from pretentious - sentences are clear and appeal to uneducated riffraff like myself - think I have seen this also in Orwell and Hemingway). The feelings and emotions he raises in me are nevertheless similar to those I get when reading Kafka and Dostoevsky. Truly amazing being in this man's head. I only regret not having picked up his work sooner.
Well, fine, but. He gets lumped into existentialism whether he liked the term or not. And, yes, Nazis and the resistance. But there’s also Rieux’s struggle as an individual to confront the plague, ie the meaningless of existence and death, and define his existence.
In part, yes. Good books aren’t limited to a single interpretation though. How I read it, the plague is unexplained, an uncaring force without direction or animus, and can be interpreted as a symbol both for death itself as well as the consequent meaninglessness of life. The book not only treats how society and individuals react to this existential crisis, but also how an individual (Rieux, the protagonist) _should_ react. Faced with overwhelming despair, Rieux continues to treat his patients.
Fair, although I think we need to remember in difficult times like this that:
- The plague killed 50-100% of people who got it depending on which kind of plague you got (bubonic, pneumonic or septicemic) whereas while nCoV rates are still TBD we're probably looking at an upper bound closer to half a percent, or 3-4 order of magnitude lower.
- The average age of folks who've died of nCoV so far in Italy is 80 and in China the mid-high 70s.
- The plague took everyone whereas the young and healthy are effectively going to get a (sometimes very, very) bad cold out of nCoV. The younger they are, the less affected. I think out of the hundreds of thousands of cases we know about so far only a single child has died -- and they had serious medical conditions going in. Currently the CFR in Korea and in the USA for people under 30 is less than 0.1%.
Perspective matters. It's easy to get swept up in the panic going on right now. Don't panic. Do listen to authorities and generally keep away from other folks. This will all be over in a few months. We'll mostly all get it, we'll overwhelmingly recover, and become immune. Chances are this is going to become one of the endemic viruses that shows up every year from now on.
As panic sets in, if you've got some cash to invest in the markets and a long time horizon to draw on it, this may be the money making opportunity of a generation.
I'm 28, fit, physically active (bouldering / running / gym), no pre-conditions whatsoever, take vitamin D supplementation, I don't take any medication.
I'm going through a nasty pneumonia that hurts my lungs just breathing and I've never had something like this before. I get tired just walking around, whereas 2 weeks ago I did a 40 minute 10k. Take that anecdata as you will, but if you can protect yourself, do.
So when you say it's just a "bad cold", I chuckle a bit. What's going to happen to the millions of overweight, high blood pressure / diabetic Americans? Sure don't panic, but be safe.
An anecdote of my own: I am in my mid 30s and can run a 46 minute 10k and I have had what you describe twice in my life, both times probably caused by the flu. One of the times I had to get penicillin for the pneumonia the other time it resolved itself. You should not underestimate the influenza it can be pretty nasty for your lungs too.
More personal anecdata:
I got pneumonia three years back. A couple of weeks beforehand I'd run a 12km that I'd trained for over the three months prior. Once cleared of pneumonia (after another couple of weeks) I was puffing just walking 100 metres.
And apparently, once you've had pneumonia, you're more susceptible to get it again.
Something that didn't particularly help in my case was that I was prescribed an antibiotic that helps against "most" pneumonia causing bugs, but my pneumonia was actually caused by one of the less common bugs. Once put on the right antibiotic I felt much better within a day - after making no progress for two to three days on the original one.
Yes. But you'll live. You getting past it - as much as it sucks for you - lowers the overall threat. Now you're immune. The more we have lime you, the better off we are. We can't stop it. But the more immune there are the better.
This is interesting... I wonder if we're eventually going to see that this virus is worse for Italian/Spanish/Portuguese genetics. Italy has been hit super hard, New York (the most Italian ancestry in the US) is being hit hard. Just a hypothesis, don't everyone try to kill me at once, please.
I'll jump into this anecdata thread too: used to by in the military, regular gym rat, but totally got my butt kicked by the swine flu a few years back (like ~2010-ish).
Never got sick, rarely a head cold, but this laid me out for a week.
Oh yeah, it'll be a bad cold. You may well have it now. By no means am I suggesting people run out there and hug the nearest stranger they see, but what I am suggesting, is they not panic. The numbers are in their favor. This could have been much, much worse.
To be clear, the evidence seems to be that your outcome is still in the minority of cases. Some unknown but double digit percentage experience no symptoms at all despite testing positive, another large proportion only experience upper respiratory symptoms and never get a lower respiratory infection or pneumonia, finally there are so called "mild" cases which I believe are "a bad flu." What these proportions are exactly is unclear, but it is clear that the vast vast majority people are not at risk of death. The data is unreliable and all over the place, but it's trending in this direction: in otherwise healthy people, this isn't particularly lethal.
I am not a doctor but you should probably get tested.
Many countries are still weeks away from the virus reaching the "oh-shit" numbers, effective lockdowns take weeks more, and then the whole thing is likely to reoccur at least once or twice in most places.
This is going to make the entire year 2020 spicier than we would all like...
Which countries are closest to lifting the first lockdown? Italy is generating record death tolls every day but that could mean the pandemic will die down soon (pardon the phrasing.) I feel like that and Germany might see some improvement by the end of April, they've been taking things quite seriously.
I'm still hoping for a slight acceleration of medical research and production when they get potential symptoms easing and actual vaccine. Enough to dampen the secondary waves.
For some young people, it might ressemble to a "bad cold", and some people might even be completely asymptomatic, HOWEVER:
- in France 50% of ICU patients are under 60
- this is really the wrong message to pass
- for some people around 30 this more closely resemble to a very bad flu, with extra bonus symptoms
- you are not getting very accurate numbers from Italy right now: only people dying in an hospital are counted, but some are dying at home (the symptoms are very fast evolving at the end, and the medical system is surcharged)
Now I don't discuss that for probably at least 98% of contaminated, (and maybe even more), they will live. But this is certainly not a bad cold, by any fucking standard. For anybody.
We don't halt the world for "bad colds".
> As panic sets in, if you've got some cash to invest in the markets and a long time horizon to draw on it, this may be the money making opportunity of a generation.
Most people have other preoccupations; but if you want to be seen as are seen the people who made a fortune during 9/11, by all means focus on that.
This number is meaningless without knowing the age distribution of infections. If many more young people are infected than old people, we'd expect the absolute number of young people hospitalized to be higher, even if old people are way more likely to require hospitalization.
Likely because there are more people under 60 than over 60 who are alive in general -- that's the shape of the population curve, and 50-59 are pretty heavily affected too. The CDC data is probably a good place to start looking [1] as it aligns with other world health data. Even if 60+ are affected 2X as much as 50-59, if there are 10X as many 50-59s in the population then that number doesn't mean much. We need to see the curves.
> - for some people around 30 this more closely resemble to a very bad flu, with extra bonus symptoms
For the vast majority, yes.
> Most people have other preoccupations; but if you want to be seen as are seen the people who made a fortune during 9/11, by all means focus on that.
No, I want to be seen as someone who made a fortune during 2008. In order for someone sell their equity positions, there must by definition be a buyer. People who are panic selling would be far worse off if there were no buyers on the other side of those transactions. The price would then be $0. Perhaps they need the liquidity more than I do? To pay for necessities?
No we typically don't. But in this case we may have. The science is beginning to point to the fact that this virus is not particularly lethal, but it is extremely contagious with an R0 of at least 2. That's where the danger lies -- if this was the plague and more than half of people who got it died our response should be what China did or perhaps significantly stronger than that. But there may be better options that don't doom an entire generation to an economic depression and its manifold consequences (which in and of themselves, in the long run, could kill more people than this disease ever will.)
in the case where the disease itself is not particularly lethal.
The lockdown stuff that has economic consequences is speculated to need to last as long as 18 months! Even two months will cause untold damage that will have knock on effects for years, perhaps decades. We didn't even recover from 2007 before this latest downturn and the effects have rippled through our society touching everything, including suicides.
> if you've got some cash to invest in the markets and a long time horizon to draw on it, this may be the money making opportunity of a generation.
If you think prices are dropping strictly because of covid-19 you're wildly misunderstanding the situation. If you buy now thinking it's low I am quite certain you will lose quite a lot of money.
~20% of the work force is unemployed or at reduced time right now. Goldman Sachs estimates we might see ~2 million people file for unemployment Monday. These are the most vulnerable parts of the population. They're going to lose health insurance, struggle to pay rent, struggle to eat... and we haven't even seen the pandemic warm up in the US yet.
Next will be people at companies whose stock just completely crashed losing their jobs. It will take a month, but when shares drop companies must act by increasing share holder value, which will mean letting people go.
All of this will have severe consequences for the national and global economy, consequences that will just start to be felt once people stop being sick. If this thing magically disappeared tonight you would probably still see a few of your favorite local restaurants disappear forever. And again, this is literally just the beginning.
This isn't happening just because of an unfortunate natural disaster but because the US (and many other countries) have systematic vulnerabilities that make them unable to deal with a situation like this. The world after covid-19 dies down will be wildly different than today. This could very well be the end of US hegemony as we see countries like China, that can deal with these problems, start to rise to become the new global super power.
The best case is looking bad and the worst case is unimaginable. The idea that you can simply "buy at the bottom" and make it rich very wrong.
Depends, as always, on how much your worst case is priced in. Over the last month or two, Lyft is down 70%. The company is not intrinsically worth 70% less than it was the Friday before last. Does that mean it's a good company? Who knows, maybe not. Can it fall more? Sure. Does it have a big cash position to weather this storm? Yeah I mean it's got $3.3B-ish on hand and doesn't have to pay drivers when nobody's taking rides because they're contractors. Just like Uber [1] and their $6B bank account [2]. And Square with their $2B bank account [3]. At this point Square is trading at 7X cash on hand. UBER at 6X cash on hand. That makes them better capitalized than your Wells Fargo savings account with a fractional reserve rate of 10:1.
Plenty of very solid companies are now trading at 30% of what they were a month ago with massive warchests. To say that hasn't priced in a few quarters of negative growth is a bit of a stretch isn't it?
As for indices, well, not all companies stand to get burnt by this downturn. Have you seen the lines at Target and Walmart? As some S&P components go down others go up. That's the raison d'etre of ETFs. Plenty of companies do well as others do poorly.
> The idea that you can simply "buy at the bottom" and make it rich very wrong.
Of course picking the bottom is the hard part but even if you're off by a bit on either side, with a sufficient time horizon, these prices are mouth-watering.
Or should I just wait and buy at the next top? ;) I'd argue the idea that you can wait for it to recover before investing in hopes you become rich to be very wrong.
To not downplay the severity of the virus, even if a young person were to recover from Covid-19, s/he may experience reduced lung capacity for several years. There are many sources online based on SARS and here's one:
based on SARS is not useful. Until we get COVID-19 specific data that means nothing. 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronoaviridae and that very much doesn't cause these problems. Just because you see something in SARS-COV-1 doesn't mean you'll see it in SARS-COV-2. SARS-COV-1 has a fatality rate of 15% overall and 50% in over-65s [1] and MERS have death rates approaching 35% [2].
Until we see actual reports of this in the wild directly attributable to SARS-COV-2 we shouldn't really extrapolate. Otherwise it's as useful as saying "based on the fact 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronaviridae, get out there and have fun" or "based on the fact MERS and SARS-COV-2 are both coronaviridae 35% of people are going to die."
"while nCoV rates are still TBD we're probably looking at an upper bound closer to half a percent, or 3-4 order of magnitude lower"
This is incredible. Not only do you start with an "upper bound" less than one-half the accepted value, you then toss in a "3-4 order of magnitude" reduction, which is so fantastically impossible that there has clearly been zero actual thought. Just rhetoric. Elon Musk, is that you?
Actual medial professionals are seeing that even tiny spread in a community the healthcare system becomes absolutely overwhelmed. Hence all of the emergency declarations. The Internet intelligentsia would like us all to believe that millions are walking around with it, and the fact that you can trace individual branches and the horrifying results is just a remarkable coincidence happening throughout the globe.
No, this isn't the plague. At the same time anyone who seriously compares this virus to the cold has started in a completely broken, intellectually dishonest and dangerous place. Add that to the silly claims about death rates...
As to investment opportunities, this is an incredibly lazy, zero-value observation -- yes, in the future the market will grow. Nobody thinks otherwise. But right now the market has lost some 35% off a frothy, already-in-danger high, and ahead of us are heroic government responses and a lot of economic disruption. But yeah, at some point it's going to hit bottom, and if someone is willing to churn on limited returns for a while it'll eventually pay off. You could say that in every downturn throughout history.
> This is incredible. Not only do you start with an "upper bound" less than one-half the accepted value, you then toss in a "3-4 order of magnitude" reduction, which is so fantastically impossible that there has clearly been zero actual thought. Just rhetoric. Elon Musk, is that you?
3-4 orders of magnitude lower than the plague which has an upper bound fatality of 100%. That's not controversial. 3-4 order of magnitude lower than 100% is 0.01 to 0.9%, a range very much in line with your suggestion and that of health officials.
How much of the extremely old mean death age do you think is caused by burdened hospitals turning away certain age groups. If it gets bad enough hospitals here in the US will create rules to turn away people over a certain age.
Figure 2 in the CDC write-up indicates they account for a much larger fraction of the hospital admissions, though a much lower fraction of them require ICU admission, and a much lower fraction of them die [1]. This aligns with Korea [2]. The funnel is much, much less forgiving to the aged.
Do we know for sure that people are immune after getting it once? A lot of the downplaying rests on that assumption but I haven't seen anything that says we know that's the case.
Do we know of any viruses that we don't develop immunity to? (I don't know either way). I'm guessing that if we've never encountered a virus like that, then the occasional person we've heard that "got it again" might be just a false positive, one of the two testing times.
Sure, the book is most commonly attributed to being an allegory about Nazi occupied France. As there isn't a Nazi invasion going on I assumed people were taking it more literally than they were allegorically. And if you're going to take it literally, contextual information matters.
Good, refreshing perspective! How do you think we will get out of the lock downs? That’s my biggest concern right now. The restrictions are getting worse and worse and we are suffocating many businesses. I fear the repercussions are greater than the effect on the curve flattness.
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I could very much feel the loss of agency the characters had to endure, because computers were my whole world back then.
“The Plague” is typically read as an allegory of the French resistance to the Nazi invasion and occupation of France, and an analysis of the relationship that humans have with authoritarianism, fascism, and how we can either help or hurt each other in times of crisis. Camus was also a humanist and believed that people were more good than evil (which he comments on in “The Plague”).
Source: I got my university degree in Philosophy and Camus was my main subject of interest/study for a number of years (and continues to be even now).
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- The plague killed 50-100% of people who got it depending on which kind of plague you got (bubonic, pneumonic or septicemic) whereas while nCoV rates are still TBD we're probably looking at an upper bound closer to half a percent, or 3-4 order of magnitude lower.
- The average age of folks who've died of nCoV so far in Italy is 80 and in China the mid-high 70s.
- The plague took everyone whereas the young and healthy are effectively going to get a (sometimes very, very) bad cold out of nCoV. The younger they are, the less affected. I think out of the hundreds of thousands of cases we know about so far only a single child has died -- and they had serious medical conditions going in. Currently the CFR in Korea and in the USA for people under 30 is less than 0.1%.
Perspective matters. It's easy to get swept up in the panic going on right now. Don't panic. Do listen to authorities and generally keep away from other folks. This will all be over in a few months. We'll mostly all get it, we'll overwhelmingly recover, and become immune. Chances are this is going to become one of the endemic viruses that shows up every year from now on.
As panic sets in, if you've got some cash to invest in the markets and a long time horizon to draw on it, this may be the money making opportunity of a generation.
I'm going through a nasty pneumonia that hurts my lungs just breathing and I've never had something like this before. I get tired just walking around, whereas 2 weeks ago I did a 40 minute 10k. Take that anecdata as you will, but if you can protect yourself, do.
So when you say it's just a "bad cold", I chuckle a bit. What's going to happen to the millions of overweight, high blood pressure / diabetic Americans? Sure don't panic, but be safe.
And apparently, once you've had pneumonia, you're more susceptible to get it again.
Something that didn't particularly help in my case was that I was prescribed an antibiotic that helps against "most" pneumonia causing bugs, but my pneumonia was actually caused by one of the less common bugs. Once put on the right antibiotic I felt much better within a day - after making no progress for two to three days on the original one.
Pneumonia is no joke.
We were hoping it was covid so we’d have immunity. My wife was just tested - no such luck.
Never got sick, rarely a head cold, but this laid me out for a week.
I am not a doctor but you should probably get tested.
Not likely.
Many countries are still weeks away from the virus reaching the "oh-shit" numbers, effective lockdowns take weeks more, and then the whole thing is likely to reoccur at least once or twice in most places.
This is going to make the entire year 2020 spicier than we would all like...
- in France 50% of ICU patients are under 60
- this is really the wrong message to pass
- for some people around 30 this more closely resemble to a very bad flu, with extra bonus symptoms
- you are not getting very accurate numbers from Italy right now: only people dying in an hospital are counted, but some are dying at home (the symptoms are very fast evolving at the end, and the medical system is surcharged)
Now I don't discuss that for probably at least 98% of contaminated, (and maybe even more), they will live. But this is certainly not a bad cold, by any fucking standard. For anybody.
We don't halt the world for "bad colds".
> As panic sets in, if you've got some cash to invest in the markets and a long time horizon to draw on it, this may be the money making opportunity of a generation.
Most people have other preoccupations; but if you want to be seen as are seen the people who made a fortune during 9/11, by all means focus on that.
Hopefully nobody looks poorly on the people who bought stock after 9/11, if it wasn't for them the market would never have gone back up.
This number is meaningless without knowing the age distribution of infections. If many more young people are infected than old people, we'd expect the absolute number of young people hospitalized to be higher, even if old people are way more likely to require hospitalization.
Likely because there are more people under 60 than over 60 who are alive in general -- that's the shape of the population curve, and 50-59 are pretty heavily affected too. The CDC data is probably a good place to start looking [1] as it aligns with other world health data. Even if 60+ are affected 2X as much as 50-59, if there are 10X as many 50-59s in the population then that number doesn't mean much. We need to see the curves.
> - for some people around 30 this more closely resemble to a very bad flu, with extra bonus symptoms
For the vast majority, yes.
> Most people have other preoccupations; but if you want to be seen as are seen the people who made a fortune during 9/11, by all means focus on that.
No, I want to be seen as someone who made a fortune during 2008. In order for someone sell their equity positions, there must by definition be a buyer. People who are panic selling would be far worse off if there were no buyers on the other side of those transactions. The price would then be $0. Perhaps they need the liquidity more than I do? To pay for necessities?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm
But you have no idea how many are infected and will never see a hospital or even a doctor.
No we typically don't. But in this case we may have. The science is beginning to point to the fact that this virus is not particularly lethal, but it is extremely contagious with an R0 of at least 2. That's where the danger lies -- if this was the plague and more than half of people who got it died our response should be what China did or perhaps significantly stronger than that. But there may be better options that don't doom an entire generation to an economic depression and its manifold consequences (which in and of themselves, in the long run, could kill more people than this disease ever will.) in the case where the disease itself is not particularly lethal.
The lockdown stuff that has economic consequences is speculated to need to last as long as 18 months! Even two months will cause untold damage that will have knock on effects for years, perhaps decades. We didn't even recover from 2007 before this latest downturn and the effects have rippled through our society touching everything, including suicides.
If you think prices are dropping strictly because of covid-19 you're wildly misunderstanding the situation. If you buy now thinking it's low I am quite certain you will lose quite a lot of money.
~20% of the work force is unemployed or at reduced time right now. Goldman Sachs estimates we might see ~2 million people file for unemployment Monday. These are the most vulnerable parts of the population. They're going to lose health insurance, struggle to pay rent, struggle to eat... and we haven't even seen the pandemic warm up in the US yet.
Next will be people at companies whose stock just completely crashed losing their jobs. It will take a month, but when shares drop companies must act by increasing share holder value, which will mean letting people go.
All of this will have severe consequences for the national and global economy, consequences that will just start to be felt once people stop being sick. If this thing magically disappeared tonight you would probably still see a few of your favorite local restaurants disappear forever. And again, this is literally just the beginning.
This isn't happening just because of an unfortunate natural disaster but because the US (and many other countries) have systematic vulnerabilities that make them unable to deal with a situation like this. The world after covid-19 dies down will be wildly different than today. This could very well be the end of US hegemony as we see countries like China, that can deal with these problems, start to rise to become the new global super power.
The best case is looking bad and the worst case is unimaginable. The idea that you can simply "buy at the bottom" and make it rich very wrong.
Plenty of very solid companies are now trading at 30% of what they were a month ago with massive warchests. To say that hasn't priced in a few quarters of negative growth is a bit of a stretch isn't it?
As for indices, well, not all companies stand to get burnt by this downturn. Have you seen the lines at Target and Walmart? As some S&P components go down others go up. That's the raison d'etre of ETFs. Plenty of companies do well as others do poorly.
> The idea that you can simply "buy at the bottom" and make it rich very wrong.
Of course picking the bottom is the hard part but even if you're off by a bit on either side, with a sufficient time horizon, these prices are mouth-watering.
Or should I just wait and buy at the next top? ;) I'd argue the idea that you can wait for it to recover before investing in hopes you become rich to be very wrong.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-gets-an-upgrade-at-we...
[2] https://www.pymnts.com/news/ridesharing/2020/uber-sees-cash-...
https://thorax.bmj.com/content/60/5/401
Until we see actual reports of this in the wild directly attributable to SARS-COV-2 we shouldn't really extrapolate. Otherwise it's as useful as saying "based on the fact 15% of the common cold is attributable to coronaviridae, get out there and have fun" or "based on the fact MERS and SARS-COV-2 are both coronaviridae 35% of people are going to die."
[1] http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/05/estimates...
[2] https://www.who.int/emergencies/mers-cov/en/
This is incredible. Not only do you start with an "upper bound" less than one-half the accepted value, you then toss in a "3-4 order of magnitude" reduction, which is so fantastically impossible that there has clearly been zero actual thought. Just rhetoric. Elon Musk, is that you?
Actual medial professionals are seeing that even tiny spread in a community the healthcare system becomes absolutely overwhelmed. Hence all of the emergency declarations. The Internet intelligentsia would like us all to believe that millions are walking around with it, and the fact that you can trace individual branches and the horrifying results is just a remarkable coincidence happening throughout the globe.
No, this isn't the plague. At the same time anyone who seriously compares this virus to the cold has started in a completely broken, intellectually dishonest and dangerous place. Add that to the silly claims about death rates...
As to investment opportunities, this is an incredibly lazy, zero-value observation -- yes, in the future the market will grow. Nobody thinks otherwise. But right now the market has lost some 35% off a frothy, already-in-danger high, and ahead of us are heroic government responses and a lot of economic disruption. But yeah, at some point it's going to hit bottom, and if someone is willing to churn on limited returns for a while it'll eventually pay off. You could say that in every downturn throughout history.
3-4 orders of magnitude lower than the plague which has an upper bound fatality of 100%. That's not controversial. 3-4 order of magnitude lower than 100% is 0.01 to 0.9%, a range very much in line with your suggestion and that of health officials.
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[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105088/south-korea-coro...