With apologies to everyone in outdoor retail, my first “real” job was with International Data Corporation, IDC, first as a secretary but soon as a Junior Analyst, tasked with dealing with reams of raw data. I went on to spend about seven years with IDC, studying high performance computing market trends and writing forecasting reports. As such, I’ve always kept an eye on the “what’s next” beat in computing and other tech-focused markets.
“What’s next” when it comes to Coronavirus is pretty hard to forecast. We’re in new territory here; but that said, we can always rely on basic trends to forecast unknowns.
For instance, we have basic data on the R0 of COV-2: it’s somewhere between 3 and 5, which means that for every person with COVID-19, that person will infect somewhere between 3 and 5 other people. We need that number to be below 1 for the outbreak to finally die down. So, we’re nowhere near that, currently. And I’m not sure that most people understand how dire that is.
Anyone pushing for “opening the country” simply has no concept of how epidemiology works. We are nowhere near being able to resume normal life, life before COVID. We are anywhere from a year to multiple years away from that transition. I mean, depending on how many people you know you’d be ok with them dying, that is. Personally, for me, that number is zero.
I feel like, for the people that seem to dominate the news-cycle, your average middle class American, there is so little understanding of how awfully wrong the situation that we’re in is. It’s so elitist to say that, like I somehow understand more. But the reality is that the life we lead is basically unsustainable without the construct provided by “essential services” which will pretty quickly become highly visible.
I’m just worried that we’re about to step off a cliff – and without any sort of safety infrastructure that could soften the landing.