Not getting risk

In an analysis published Tuesday, Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis suggests that the response to the coronavirus pandemic may be “a fiasco in the making” because we are making seismic decisions based on “utterly unreliable” data https://t.co/vbvrqJDB92

— Mike 'Thomas Paine' Moore (@Thomas1774Paine) March 19, 2020

The virus started in China. There is no question that the political elite there are not telling the truth. The data is simply incomplete. However, once fragmented global statistics are compiled, the mortality rate turns out to be roughly 4%. Of course, the rate for young people is super-low while incredibly high for the elderly. Also, it's likely that hundreds of thousands of the infected have not been test and are not counted. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the true mortality rate is 1% or lower.

Given all this uncertainty, the main point of N. N. Taleb is utterly sensible: we need to be extra-vigilant against this global threat. Short-term pain is preferable over the possibility of long-term disaster.

Trump closed America's borders to China in early February. Canada waited till mid-March to do the same. Now, entire provinces are locked down. Schools, colleges, universities, bars, restaurants, theaters, cinemas, botanical gardens, and museums are all closed. Those 45 days of smug virtue-signalling by Canada will now cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost jobs and productivity. The Canadian stock market wiped out eight years of gains in under a month. The Canadian dollar crashed 10% against the US dollar in the same time. The Great Housing Bubble of the last decade is now ready to burst. The only rising stats will be for prices, bankruptcies and suicides.