Inan Dogan, PhD, Insider Monkey: We Are 100 Times Safer Now Than In Early March: Here is the Math
I started wearing disposable gloves and a mask in early March. Almost everyone was looking at me as if I was some kind of a freak. Today, I don’t wear a mask when I go out and people are looking at me as if I am an idiot.
Most of the time it makes perfect sense to do what the crowd is doing. In investing this is called trend following. It is one of the most profitable investment strategies. If you had bought the S&P 500 Index in 2009 AFTER the index increased 20% from its recent bottom and didn’t sell until the S&P 500 Index declined 20%, you would have returned around 230% in 11 years.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: This is definitely one of the best explanations (in laymen terms) that I have read so far on the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus and where this pandemic is going from here, and it confirms what people who I respect and who are very knowledgeable about this outbreak have been telling me in the past few days. Needless to say this is my must read post for today. Here is one key point that explains why COVID-19 was able to elude our virus fighters ....
.... read a lot of academic articles and used incomplete data reported by other countries to estimate the parameters of this new coronavirus. We encountered deadlier viruses like SARS, MERS, and Ebola over the last 20 years, but they fizzled out. So, I especially tried to figure how COVID-19 managed to elude our virus fighters. The answer was asymptomatic transmission.
This explains why many governments around the world did a 180 in March on their approach towards combating this pandemic. Once this asymptomatic transmission component of the Covid-19 virus was understood, the World Health Organization and other infectious disease organizations declared a pandemic (March 11), resulting in lock-downs and quarantine measures that are still in force today. It is hard to believe that this understanding of the disease is only a few weeks old. It feels like we have been going through this for a months. But it has become a game changer on how to confront Covid-19, and we should be grateful that most governments took the initiative to institute the necessary measures as quickly as they did. I shudder to think what would be facing if these measures were delayed for a week or two in places like Canada and the U.S..
Needless to say the current media narrative is saying a different story. That U.S., Canadian, and other Western governments knew months ago what the true nature of this pandemic was, and they failed to impose the necessary measures to stop this disease. These claims unfortunately ignore what the science and consensus was saying in January and February, and the fact that everyone was unaware of the asymptomatic transmission capability of this highly infectious disease until only recently. The exception is China, who was aware of the asymptomatic transmission component of the Covid-19 virus in February but choose not to share this information initially. This is one more reason why the Chinese government must be held accountable for what they have done to the world.
On a more positive note ....
.... There are more than 100 different companies working on a COVID-19 vaccine right now. It is very likely that at least one of those companies will succeed within a year.
These are probably the darkest days of this pandemic and I am certain you will be able to see what I am seeing right now in a couple of weeks.
We did well and saved millions of American lives. This is the most resilient virus we’ve come across over the last 100 years, but the American people proved to be more resilient than the coronavirus.
