The Coronavirus

[Warren Dew]

(05-03-2020, 02:29 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: That change is profound and permanent.  One of the predictions made in the S&H books is that the change is always greater than what is anticipated going in.  If you look at the difference between the unravelling culture and the following high, the difference is extreme.

Aren't you one of the ones who thinks there can't be a nuclear war?  And here you are lecturing others about the crisis being "greater than what is anticipated".  I'd love for the crisis to be Covid-19 rather than a nuclear war, but that may just be wishful thinking.

At a minimum, Covid-19 would have to do a lot more damage than it has been for it to substitute for a crisis war.  The smallest percentage of the population that has died in a crisis war was just under 0.5%, and that was for WWII, which was barely a crisis war for the US.  Covid-19 is at under 0.02%, even assuming all of the deaths with Covid-19 are on top of the normal death toll.  To be the equivalent of a Crisis War, it would need to get about 25 times worse - to kill 25 times more people.  Not 2x.  25x.

Could it get there?  Sure.  If it turns out it mutates too fast ever to develop a vaccine for it, and if it somehow stays at least as deadly as it is, rather than following the more normal path where diseases tend to get milder, and if the fast mutation rate means immunity from contracting the disease only lasts a few months, then the only long term solution might be to accept that everyone's life expectancy gets cut by a decade, and we'll just have to watch as millions of old people in the US, and tens of millions worldwide, die off.  Then the Millenials will be rid of us Boomers forever, and they can create an authoritarian world full of dictatorships enforcing whatever local brand of politics they want, subject only to limited objections from Gen X.

Is that the most likely path?  I still think a real war is more likely.  With both Presidential candidates vying for who can be more xenophobic about China, we don't seem to be heading for a more peaceful world.