This thread is missing the real issue.
It is the absenteeism that will result IF IF IF this does go pandemic. A 30% sick rate with a 2% mortality rate will result in a least 50% absenteeism rate from people who are sick, caring for sick family, caring for kids because step #1 is close the schools, or just plain scared to go to work. This absenteeism will have a cascading effect on our just in time economy causing shortages, exacerbating the effect.
For the vets out there, think Iraq in OIF1 when no systems (SWEAT-MS) were working.
For the beer math bubbas, 30% / 2% = 100 million sick Americans and 2 million dead in 6-8 weeks. For comparison, there were 2,813,503 deaths last year.
Yes, this is an argument for rice, beans, and 5.56.
and finally, I did say IF IF IF....
Absenteeism will have a cascading effect in a just-in-time supply chain that is world wide in scope.
The just-in-time economic model gets shot in the head by absenteeism, causing shortages, exacerbating public fear, uncertainty and doubt.
There is a tipping point in J-I-T supply chains like any other. The more intermediate products involved in producing a final good. The more likely the final good will not be built and the people involved upstream will lose employment and income in the middle of a wide spread biological contagion.
Contagion + Absenteeism + FUD + J-I-T Supply Chain Collapse = Bad S**t Happening.
China is going to demonstrate this first.
Nothing medical that can in any way deal with the WCV is leaving China until this contagion has run it’s course.
Point in fact, anything that is disposable or cheap, in ether medical or other goods supply chains, (think Dollar Store or it’s retail clones) has a supply chain reaching into China.
This is why I’m thinking six months before we in the West get disposable medical gear supply chains again.
This is simply because it will take 3 months for the “powers that be” to get off their collective assets and accept the reality that they need to build disposable medical gear facilities in the West — to replace China’s — with government money.
And then it will take another three months to build and staff them to produce at the necessary levels to replace China
Part of the reason those “powers that be” cannot go there is that the Chinese are in their income stream.
Frankly — if I were a Fed that could — I’d be demanding the FBI Counter-intelligence types get off their flat Trump-spying butts and go scrub the hell out of all CDC/WHO/US Level IV bio-facility staff for Chinese-connections related to Corruption, Graft and Espionage with every NSA intercept they have stored in the NSA’s Nevada server farm.
This might take a couple of months off that 3-month “paid not to see” delay.
The necessary quarantine measures to slow WCV down implies a Massive Recession to Depression in China.
I’ve seen a number that the area quarantined around Wuhan this far is the size of West Virginia and that area represents 5% of the Chinese economy.
The Chinese claimed their economy grew 6% last year.
Right now they are looking at zero economic output in the quarantined zone for as much as 6-months.
Budget cuts to future Chinese naval ship building is the least of it.
Since China’s buying off the WHO means the world will shut the barn door on air travel from China long after the horse of contagion has left the barn.
A really bad world wide recession is in the offing because of “Contagion + Absenteeism + FUD + J-I-T Supply Chain Collapse = Bad S**t Happening.”