Bormio

Best of luck and congratulations!

Go process some unemployment claims, you ought to be busy.

Read the British press. It changed U.K. policy and impacted our task force’s recommendations a lot. Markets were resistant to Covid for quite a while, then went down a bit. When the U.K. changed policy and the US got more stringent (based on the study) - the markets got really spooked.

I have generally tried to be respectful of others and not question their motivations. But today you have insinuated that I might kill Democrats and that I care more about money than medicine. Frankly you can pound sand, asshole.

Eff off - I am not worried about the market for myself. I merely said that widely quoted and cited report had a major impact on the markets - which is true. Google it. Try Huff Post, Mother Jones, NYT and WP.

Epidemics are hard to predict. Smaller numbers of deaths can be a problem when they occur in such a time frame to overwhelm the system. For all of Italy’s tragedy, they have lost 8,000 people to date. They lost 410,000 in the 1918 flu. Uncertainty has reigned in this case - we do not know when it started. Wuhan may not have locked down for 2 months or more into the epidemic and had 3,000 dead in an area of 60 million people. That would suggest a very low mortality rate.

The Imperial College Report was also the one that said we would have to socially distance for 18 months - the market hated that too.

Yes I do - but they traveled recently

Agreed, but starting earlier means way more doublings have occurred and many more people infected - meaning a way lower mortality.

That study definitely caused the U-turn in U.K. policy and deeply impacted our task force. It was written about in numerous places. And when we started with more stringent measures, the markets rapidly declined.

The point is it may be the spreading that caused the flattening and not the lockdowns primarily. The length of time between China locking down and their peak was very short - makes the idea the lockdown was the cause of the flattening questionable.

It was the Imperial College study that got the UK government to change tack, and got the scientific community in the US to much more strongly push lockdowns etc. it also crashed world markets

I am not saying change what we are doing. But China flattened early, Italy is flattening at a relatively low number of deaths. They are not just guessing - they are modeling as experienced scientists and are reassessing their model based on data.

The feeling is this has been out there longer and already spread more - and we are closer to the peak than people realize

The author of the Imperial College study that scared everyone saying 500,000 could die in the U.K. and 2.2 million in the US, has revised his estimates, saying that U.K. deaths could be around 20,000 and not half a million. This might comport with what we are seeing - Italy’s numbers are flattening in growth with 8,000 dead. If they lose 20,000 or so - that would be the same as 100,000 here - except our death rate is considerably lower. A recent projection out of Oxford is along these lines. There is a good write-up on this at hotair.com