My fear is that economic impacts will end up so severe that we won't really see normal again as a result for a long, long time. I hope I'm being alarmist, but my gut tells me (and my brain) that my city is hemorrhaging cash and even with economic stimulus, jobs aren't going to come back as quickly as people think.
A lot of local business owners who were doing alright (making money and paying several employees) are not at all interested in getting back to it. The risk in the next few years due to future waves of infection is too great, and government assistance is incredible here in Canada but only enough to help you limp along. That's a scary condition to run a business.
I think this will be great for large companies. Jobs and economic opportunity might relatively shift towards them for quite a while.
I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see a significant change to isolation practices any time soon and the economic impacts seem likely to change our lives in a very noticeable way.
I have this same fear. Small businesses suffer immensely while large corporations thrive. I think also based on the hiring thread last week on HN, tech companies are disproportionately unaffected.
When will stores be open again, when will we do meetups again, when will we be able to travel again?
Around 10 weeks for stores and meetups, longer for travel depending on the destination.
However, Covid-19 will likely be a lesson in single point of failure, supply chain dependency, and failure planning. To that end things will take decades to go back to the way they were. Companies will not be willing to accept massive losses again, so they'll change the way they operate. That will continue until the cost reductions from going back to the way things were win out.
For some things, like remote working, I don't think we'll ever go back. It'll be a thing companies plan for, implement, and accept as normal after this.
(I'm in the UK though, which probably makes a difference.)
> For some things, like remote working, I don't think we'll ever go back.
This could go two ways:
(a) people realise that remote working is very doable, because they managed at short notice, during a crisis, and thus it will increase.
(b) people will believe that remote work is not doable, because they didn't manage at short notice, during a crisis, and thus it will not increase.
I would be very surprised if anyone who didn't handle the change well, would accept "well you realise that you changed to this overnight, with zero planning some of us have spent the last decade or so 'making it work'?" and try again in a better scenario (i.e. time to make a proper home office, time to adjust to a different way of working, etc).
Given the potential cost savings for both businesses and individuals there is already an incentive to do it; this situation will force companies to make the effort and try. I'd be surprised if there are many companies that get to the end of, say, 12 weeks of quarantine and haven't figured out how to make it work at least to some extent, or at least worked out some of the things that block it so they can start working on those problems.
The EU allows flights from the EU, EEA and the UK, but no others, so Germany-UK happens to be allowed but there are no flights from any non-European country to Germany.
It might also help to consider that the current circumstances are a shock to the world (including the economy) and whatever evolves as the new "normal" once everything settles down, is unlikely to be the same as before.
I think as soon as serology tests become widely available and cheap, lots of people will get a "certificate of immunity" and be allowed/encouraged to return to work. My thinking is that in 3 months (i.e. around end of June), lots of people will be back to work.
In the US in particular, public schools get money from the federal government conditional on administering state tests. It doesn't look like the stimulus bill is leaving them off the hook, so schools have a very big incentive to give the test by the end of the school year (around 25-June). There was no official statement that state exams are cancelled for this year, and what's more my son's teacher resumed the exam prep with the kids yesterday.
So, I'm not sure when stores will open, but I give a more than 50-50 chance that schools will open at some point before the Summer vacation, maybe second half of June or early July, in order to give the state exams.
Definitely depends on your region, though. I think you might be jumping the gun a bit w.r.t. serology tests -- consider that the entire United States can only complete something like 20,000 tests per day right now, we're likely going to have to wait for normal tests (like what we're doing now) to become less important before we can even begin to focus resources on serology tests. And when only a small portion of the population has caught COVID, it's still going to be very important to test flu-like illnesses and isolate contacts of infected individuals for months.
As for serology tests, I may be jumping the gun, but only a bit. My employer started paying for coronavirus home test kits in the UK, with the aim of having people come back to work if they show the antibodies. They don't have anything similar in the US simply because there's no FDA approved similar kit. But this will probably change soon.
Without mitigation, sure. But of course the deaths, overwhelmed hospitals, etc. would be horrific.
Instead, we're trying to "flatten the curve" in most countries. This means we're directly trying to lower the doubling time, which means that we won't develop herd immunity the same way. Lots of pockets of never-infecteds will exist where COVID can crop up again.
I'd also caution estimating based on current "confirmed case" counts. Almost every country has suffered from test shortages, and even those that haven't had shortages haven't been testing everyone -- in most cases, if you aren't having trouble breathing, you're advised to just stay at home and assume you're infected. So honestly nobody knows just how many people are infected.
Flattening surely is not going to work if everybody eventually get sick from this. We'd need 3M beds for a month each patient. Divide that by the number we have, it'd take 20 years of 'flattening' to make that work.
No, the reason to try and delay is only to give time for vaccines, better processes and treatments. That's the only path forward.
And it isn't happening fast enough. So there will be some suffering.
Evidence to date outside Asia is, zero flattening. Most places. Thus my estimate.
If you want to posit some slight flattening, then 70 day? No more.
The terrible power of geometric growth cannot be resisted for long. You need to change the growth rules entirely to beat it. No half-measures will do it.
https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data This shows an "unexpected" inflection point starting March 28 which slowed the USA death growth from 2.7 day doubling to 3.4 days doubling. Even at that slower rate 900 million Americans would be dead by the end of May, so obviously there will be a major slowdown in deaths over the next 8 weeks.
https://neherlab.org/covid19/ indicates maybe sometime between July and October things will normalize (ICU's will no longer be over capacity).
https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ The phase space plot from Johns Hopkins dataset still shows no recent improvement of trajectory, in contrast to the NYT dataset.
My tentative guess is around June. It seems like the ramp up is slowing down after a while in a lot of countries. Look at the 'New Daily Cases' graphs for separate countries[0].
So maybe another ~1 month or so of ramp-up and then after a while some ramp down. Maybe a bit worse in the US than elsewhere.
Of course, the impact will be felt for a long time.
I am in the process of asking a lot of people that exact question. Answer ranges are 3-18 months with various degrees of support. Average so far around 6-9 months.
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A lot of local business owners who were doing alright (making money and paying several employees) are not at all interested in getting back to it. The risk in the next few years due to future waves of infection is too great, and government assistance is incredible here in Canada but only enough to help you limp along. That's a scary condition to run a business.
I think this will be great for large companies. Jobs and economic opportunity might relatively shift towards them for quite a while.
I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see a significant change to isolation practices any time soon and the economic impacts seem likely to change our lives in a very noticeable way.
Around 10 weeks for stores and meetups, longer for travel depending on the destination.
However, Covid-19 will likely be a lesson in single point of failure, supply chain dependency, and failure planning. To that end things will take decades to go back to the way they were. Companies will not be willing to accept massive losses again, so they'll change the way they operate. That will continue until the cost reductions from going back to the way things were win out.
For some things, like remote working, I don't think we'll ever go back. It'll be a thing companies plan for, implement, and accept as normal after this.
(I'm in the UK though, which probably makes a difference.)
This could go two ways:
(a) people realise that remote working is very doable, because they managed at short notice, during a crisis, and thus it will increase.
(b) people will believe that remote work is not doable, because they didn't manage at short notice, during a crisis, and thus it will not increase.
I would be very surprised if anyone who didn't handle the change well, would accept "well you realise that you changed to this overnight, with zero planning some of us have spent the last decade or so 'making it work'?" and try again in a better scenario (i.e. time to make a proper home office, time to adjust to a different way of working, etc).
To what extend is travel restricted at the moment? What happens when someone from - say - Germany flies to the UK?
As far as I can see, flights can still be booked.
In that case I think it's still allowed, but there are a lot of entry bans and visa restrictions in place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_restrictions_related_to...) that probably won't be lifted for a long time.
In the US in particular, public schools get money from the federal government conditional on administering state tests. It doesn't look like the stimulus bill is leaving them off the hook, so schools have a very big incentive to give the test by the end of the school year (around 25-June). There was no official statement that state exams are cancelled for this year, and what's more my son's teacher resumed the exam prep with the kids yesterday.
So, I'm not sure when stores will open, but I give a more than 50-50 chance that schools will open at some point before the Summer vacation, maybe second half of June or early July, in order to give the state exams.
Meanwhile, NYC's mayor has suggested that it's unlikely for schools to resume this school year at all: https://www.silive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/mayor-nyc-schools...
Definitely depends on your region, though. I think you might be jumping the gun a bit w.r.t. serology tests -- consider that the entire United States can only complete something like 20,000 tests per day right now, we're likely going to have to wait for normal tests (like what we're doing now) to become less important before we can even begin to focus resources on serology tests. And when only a small portion of the population has caught COVID, it's still going to be very important to test flu-like illnesses and isolate contacts of infected individuals for months.
http://www.nysed.gov/news/2020/statement-board-regents-chanc...
As for serology tests, I may be jumping the gun, but only a bit. My employer started paying for coronavirus home test kits in the UK, with the aim of having people come back to work if they show the antibodies. They don't have anything similar in the US simply because there's no FDA approved similar kit. But this will probably change soon.
But consider: the doubling time is around 4-5 days. We'll hit 1M worldwide maybe Friday.
40 days after that, we'll hit 1B people. That's about the estimated total that typically get infected by a pandemic. Peak infection.
Two or three weeks after that, everybody will be through it. No problem; scars and health issues; death; whatever, it'll be over.
So 60 days to do anything and everything we hope to do with this. No more than that.
Instead, we're trying to "flatten the curve" in most countries. This means we're directly trying to lower the doubling time, which means that we won't develop herd immunity the same way. Lots of pockets of never-infecteds will exist where COVID can crop up again.
I'd also caution estimating based on current "confirmed case" counts. Almost every country has suffered from test shortages, and even those that haven't had shortages haven't been testing everyone -- in most cases, if you aren't having trouble breathing, you're advised to just stay at home and assume you're infected. So honestly nobody knows just how many people are infected.
No, the reason to try and delay is only to give time for vaccines, better processes and treatments. That's the only path forward.
And it isn't happening fast enough. So there will be some suffering.
Some societies will choose such that their medical infrastructure will be at 10x capacity for ten times as long rather than be at 100x capacity.
Others will manage to stamp it out, only to endure subsequent flare-ups.
Unconstrained doubling is only a popular policy among oligarchs in power. To be fair, they do have a lot of power...
If you want to posit some slight flattening, then 70 day? No more.
The terrible power of geometric growth cannot be resisted for long. You need to change the growth rules entirely to beat it. No half-measures will do it.
https://neherlab.org/covid19/ indicates maybe sometime between July and October things will normalize (ICU's will no longer be over capacity).
https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ The phase space plot from Johns Hopkins dataset still shows no recent improvement of trajectory, in contrast to the NYT dataset.
Of course, the impact will be felt for a long time.
0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries