Coronavirus: The Insanity is Ending

My heresy is beginning to spread. In the New York Times we have Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease? and in the WSJ we see The California and New York orders to stay at home are unsustainable.

More and more voices have realized the call for an indefinite shutdown is a call to self-destruction. Corona got out. It spreads asymptomatically. It is in the third world.

It is here to stay, even if the first world breaks itself trying to control it. 

But all is not lost. We are learning it isn't as dangerous as it first seemed. South Korean testing has shown vast numbers of people with more minor symptoms or none at all. We are learning how to treat it, the serious case rate in South Korea is now 1%. And we are learning how to muster resources for a surge. Conversion of hotels into facilities for the less sick comes to mind.

We are making our way towards a new reality - where people work and live and where corona is added to the list of ailments we battle. Of course, we don't battle it with fixed resources, we battle it with human innovation. For example:

researchers in France treated a small number of patients with both hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pak, and 100% of them were cured by day six of treatment. Compare that with 57.1% of patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone, and 12.5% of patients who received neither."

The virus is dangerous. It will strike certain groups like the religious community very very hard (e.g.the Hasidic communities in New York are experiencing high infection rates). But we are learning to moderate our response just as we learn to control it. My hope is that we will get back to life soon. 

Let's lay out a plan: three weeks to get everything we can ready, and then begin to open up.

With three weeks, business and people alike can plan instead of living in the fear of complete and overwhelming uncertainty.

As the mantle has now passed beyond crazy gadflies like me to mainstream voices like the NYT and WSJ, I wanted to take the next step. I wanted to do the first postmortem on the situation - and analyze what we can learn from the early history of corona. Is it too early? Probably, but there are still lessons.

With all that as introduction, here is my latest video. (Watch the rest of this video series here).

Video length: 00:23:34