The whole chloroquine thing is just a means to quell the markets and give some false hope. Chloroquine helps but it's not a cure, not a panacea.
How is it
false hope if you can give it to infected people for several days, and the result is 70% test negative for the virus when you're done?
For the person who's currently testing positive, a 70% likely cure doesn't sound like
false hope, to me. It sounds like hope.
Or are you confining the term "hope" to the economic realm?
We're screwed. We're headed for a severe depression.
Recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. Depression is something significantly worse than that: Typically four quarters plus dropping real purchase value of wages that takes over a year to recover.
I doubt we see a Depression, let alone a severe one.
Since I'm unwisely making a
prediction here, let me put some specifics on it: Since there's no fixed definition for a Depression, nor for a "severe depression," I'm going to say that we will not have:
- more than 4 quarters negative economic growth before it starts heading upward again;
- more than 20% drop in the real (inflation-adjusted) buying power of the mean U.S. household income from March 2020 to March 2021
That'll stand as my definition for "severe depression," which I don't think we're going to see.
If I'm wrong, or the news shifts and I change my mind 15 days from now, I'll loudly admit I was wrong. (I don't wear hats, and thus have no hat to eat, with or without sauce.)
But right now, I'm saying: No severe depression. Recession? I'll buy that. A bad, sharp recession is likely. (In fact, it's basically started, but the numbers aren't released yet.)
Millions will lose their jobs. Banks will fail. Chaos.
Millions will lose their jobs. A fair number will get different jobs, or the same ones back, within 6 months. Not sure very many banks will fail. Some of them ought to, but I'm not sure they will.
But, how do you define "chaos?" Are we talking shutdown of water, of electricity? Will the police disband? Will the only areas with law enforcement be those under martial law? Will there be no food on the shelves?
I don't think any of
that's going to happen, unless some other Black Swan event occurs.
If we get a meteor strike or a hostile power launches an EMP, or the data about COVID-19 that we all currently have at hand turns out to be radically, earth-shatteringly wrong, then,
okay. But if all we're dealing with is (a.) COVID-19 and (b.) the voluntary and imposed social-distancing in reaction to COVID-19, and nothing radically new ("This just in! COVID-19 causes sterility!") emerges, then I'm pretty positive we won't see the "chaos" items described above, at least not in the U.S. (I make no predictions about
Iran. And it seems like Italy, sadly, is in pretty bad shape.)
I'm so pissed. I've been screaming about this for at least two months and no one would listen.
If you turn out to be correct in your predictions, then you should wave the
I TOLD YOU SO flag proudly, and I, at least, will listen far more attentively next time.
BTW, here's the latest on Case Fatality Rates: Trending downwards, probably approaching a lower limit of 0.1%:
https://www.cebm.net/global-covid-1...nykUSvpfoJL1S7rbCxRSrREOec0s6fnH5aOMWEl6itLQ8