'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
You basically just want to prepare as though you know you’re going to get a nasty respiratory bug, like bronchitis or pneumonia. You just have the foresight to know it might come your way!
*Things you should actually buy ahead of time* (not sure what the obsession with toilet paper is?):
• *Kleenex,*
• *Paracetamol*,
• Whatever your generic, mucus thinning *cough medicine* of choice is (check the label and make sure you're not doubling up on Paracetamol)
• *Honey and lemon* can work just as well!
• *Vicks* vaporub for your chest is also a great suggestion.
• A humidifier* would be a good thing to buy and use in your room when you go to bed overnight. (You can also just turn the shower on hot and sit in the bathroom breathing in the steam).
• *If you have a history of asthma* and you have a prescription inhaler, make sure the one you have isn’t expired and refill it/get a new one if necessary.
• *Meals* This is also a good time to meal prep: make a big batch of your favorite soup to freeze and have on hand.
• *Hydrate (drink!) hydrate, hydrate!* Stock up on whatever your favorite clear fluids are to drink - though tap water is fine you may appreciate some variety!
• *For symptom management* and a fever over 38°c, take Paracetamol rather than Ibuprofen.
• *Rest lots*. You should not be leaving your house! Even if you are feeling better you may will still be infectious for fourteen days and older people and those with existing health conditions should be avoided!
• *Wear gloves and a mask* to avoid contaminating others in your house
• *Isolate* in your bedroom if not living alone, ask friends and family to leave supplies outside to avoid contact.
• *Sanitize* your bed linen and clothes frequently by washing and clean your bathroom with recommended sanitizers.
You DO NOT NEED TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL unless* you are having trouble breathing or your fever is very high (over 39°C) and unmanaged with meds. 90% of healthy adult cases thus far have been managed at home with basic rest/hydration/over-the-counter meds.
*If you are worried or in distress or feel your symptoms are getting worse*
*Preexisting risks* If you have a pre-existing lung condition (COPD, emphysema, lung cancer) or are on immunosuppressants, now is a great time to talk to your Doctor or specialist about what they would like you to do if you get sick.
*Children-* One major relief to you parents is that kids do VERY well with coronavirus— they usually bounce back in a few days (but they will still be infectious), Just use pediatric dosing .
How do you know you have coronavirus?
1. *Itching in the throat,*
2. *Dry throat,*
3. *Dry cough.*
4. High temperature
5. Shortness of breath
So where you notice these things quickly take warm water with lemon and drink.
The Financial Times Editorial Board Short of a communist revolution, it is hard to imagine how governments could have intervened in private markets — for labour, for credit, for the exchange of goods and services — as quickly and deeply as in the past two months of lockdowns. Overnight, millions of private sector employees have been getting their pay cheques from public budgets and central banks have flooded financial markets with electronic money. One may be forgiven for worrying that the pandemic has brought socialism on its coat-tails. Yet the paradox is that today’s emergency measures are necessary to protect the long-term health of free markets and a capitalist economy. Those who, like this news organisation, value those institutions must welcome this unprecedented intervention. Liberal democratic capitalism, with free and open markets and secure private property rights, remains the best institutional framework to meet the aspiration of freedom and prosperity for all. But liberal democratic capitalism is not self-sufficient, and needs to be protected and maintained to be resilient.
Catastrophic emergencies — wars, pandemics and natural disasters — bring risks that only governments can protect against. A purist libertarianism that denies people this protection cannot survive its first crisis. Capitalism can also undermine itself over time, if it is not tended by smart regulatory frameworks. The global financial crisis — caused in part by opacity, self-dealing and perverse incentives — showed that markets need good rules of the road to remain free, open and efficient. The accelerating disruptions from climate change prove a similar point. Like all social systems, free markets depend on political legitimacy. One of the greatest long-term threats to capitalism functioning well is the perception, let alone the reality, that markets which are supposed to be free are actually rigged in favour of the powerful. A creeping suspicion this might be the case had started to erode its popular support, especially after the financial crisis. The rising wave of young self-confessed socialists in the US and UK, homelands of economic liberalism, was clear proof of that. Mismanaged economies that leave many people behind give fuel to left-wing populists, who see state intervention as a replacement for capitalism, not just a corrective. But they also empower right-wing populists, who offer business a Faustian bargain of collaboration. Today’s situation resembles that of the 1930s. Back then, centrist liberals from US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt to British economist John Maynard Keynes saw that liberal democratic capitalism, in order to survive, had to be shown to work for everyone. The victory of their ideas set the stage for the success of western capitalism in the decades after the second world war. Now, like then, capitalism does not need replacement even if it may need repair. Free markets work best when all have access to them, which requires the state to provide smart, transparent and proportionate ground rules and offer social insurance in the last resort. The latter is exactly what governments have done in the necessary battle against Covid-19. Their many support measures, costly as they are, constitute an investment into a safe return of freer markets and a self-sustaining capitalism when the crisis abates.
The task for friends of liberal capitalism is to determine how free-market values can be buttressed in the future. That is a task made easier, not harder, if the state does its job well today.
A STUDY has been doing the rounds since early April which argues that in poor countries the price of a lockdown is larger than the benefits to be gained from it. The lead author of the paper is an economist of Bangladeshi extraction at Yale, who has plenty of experience working in developing countries and is no stranger to the lay of the land here. Khurram Husain in The Dawn
I first came across the study when it was being circulated in mid-April by people from industry, particularly those who were busy lobbying the government for easing the lockdown restrictions. It was subsequently cited in a few opinion pieces published in newspapers, and most recently was invoked by Planning Minister Asad Umar in his televised talk with the press in which he presented a bevy of arguments in support of easing the lockdown.
It is useful to examine this study carefully, because doing so gives us an idea of how (some) economists approach questions of pressing and urgent public importance, and the limitations of the tools that they use.
The study in question is called The Benefits and Costs of Social Distancing in Rich and Poor Countries, and it is authored by Zachary Barnett-Howell and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, both highly credentialled and published economists at Yale. It begins by asking whether “shuttering the economy for weeks or months and mass unemployment are reasonable costs to pay?” in return for “flattening the curve” of Covid-19 cases. In order to answer their own question, the authors have to first render both the costs and benefits of a lockdown into a comparable unit. The economic costs are measured in dollars, whereas the health benefits of a lockdown are measured in lives saved. So the question arises: how to compare these two quantities — lives and money — with each other?
To do so, the authors deploy a widely used model in the economics literature called the Value of Statistical Life model. What VSL does, quite literally, is tell us the dollar value of human life in different contexts. It was used originally in more limited contexts to help policymakers with complex judgements in cases where a particular policy imposed an economic cost in return for a vague health benefit. One example might be setting air quality standards.
But with the passage of time, the VSL model began to be used in contexts far more complicated and more pressing than any in the past. One example is climate change, where a number of economists from prestigious universities have used the model to argue that the benefits from the mitigation efforts to curb carbon emissions that scientists are calling for are not worth the economic costs that they will impose. Simply put, they argued that the likelihood of climate change turning out to be a catastrophic event was small, and making massive investments in foregone output today to avert an event that was probabilistically miniscule was not worth the cost.
The VSL at stake did not justify the massive investments required to curb greenhouse gas emissions to a two per cent increase by century end. This debate was sparked in 2006 when the Stern Review, put out by the eminent UK economist and public servant Nicholas Stern, argued that such an investment was now a matter of existential importance for mankind to make. Those who opposed him either took issue with his projections of the economic losses that climate change would impose, or invoked the VSL model to argue that the foregone economic output was larger than what was purportedly being saved.
It took 16-year-old Greta Thunberg to cut through the Gordian technicalities into which the ensuing conversation fell. “People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing,” she exclaimed in her famous address to the UN in September 2019. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Today, the economists are back, armed with their VSL model, telling us that the dollar value of the lives saved as a result of the lockdown are worth less than the foregone output in developing countries, and they specifically mention Pakistan as one example.
For the US, for example, they say 1.76 million lives will be saved through aggressive interventions, and put the total value of these lives at $7.9 trillion. This easily justifies a $2tr stimulus along with whatever economic losses result from a closure of the economy.
It is worth asking, they argue, “whether similar mitigation and suppression strategies are equally valuable in low- and middle-income countries”. When they compute the VSL for countries like Pakistan and Nigeria, they find that the amount is so low that it makes little difference to have a suppression strategy. “In comparison to US losses, the dollar costs of uncontrolled Covid-19 in large countries such as Pakistan or Nigeria look miniscule.”
So they’re basically telling us that we are investing precious foregone economic output to save lives that are not worth saving. Among the reasons why the Covid-19 loss is lower for a country like Pakistan is the “higher base VSL” in the US. They don’t give the dollar figure, but in a graphic they show that the “total VSL lost” for the US ranges from $25tr to just under $1tr depending on the severity of the suppression measures. For Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria, their model shows the total VSL lost to be near zero across the range.
Economists have a hard time speaking plain English, especially when they are attaching dollar values to human lives. It is worth asking this pair to explain in plain English how the base VSL is higher in the US. And the irony is that this argument is being used to justify an easing of the lockdown in the name of the daily wagers themselves, the very people whose lives are found to be not worth saving!
Two experts debate the long-term impact on inflation of the Covid-19 rescue packages Stephanie Kelton and Edward Chancellor in The FT YES - It poses no inherent danger to states that issue their own currency The Covid-19 pandemic has forced governments around the world to spend large sums in an effort to stabilise their economies, writes Stephanie Kelton. Gone, for now, are concerns about how to “pay for” it all. Instead we are seeing wartime levels of spending, driving deficits — and public debt — to new highs. France, Spain, the US, and the UK are all projected to end the year with public debt levels of more than 100 per cent of gross domestic product, while Goldman Sachs predicts that Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio will soar above 160 per cent. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has committed to nearly $1tn in new deficit spending to protect a $5tn economy, a move that will push Japan’s debt ratio well above its record of 237 per cent. With GDP collapsing on a global scale, few countries will escape. In advanced economies, the IMF expects average debt-to-GDP ratios to be above 120 per cent in 2021.
---Also watch
--- While most see big deficits as a price worth paying to combat the crisis, many worry about a debt overhang in a post-pandemic world. Some fear that investors will grow weary of lending to cash-strapped governments, forcing countries to borrow at higher interest rates. Others worry governments will need to impose painful austerity in the years ahead, requiring the private sector to tighten its belt to pay down public debt.
They should not. While public debt can create problems in certain circumstances, it poses no inherent danger to currency-issuing governments, such as the US, Japan, or the UK. This is not, as some argue, because these countries can currently borrow at very low cost, or because a strong recovery will allow them to grow their way out of debt. There are three real reasons. First, a currency-issuing government never needs to borrow its own currency. Second, it can always determine the interest rate on bonds it chooses to sell. Third, government bonds help to shore up the private sector’s finances. The first point should be obvious, but it is often obscured by the way governments manage their fiscal operations. Take Japan, a country with its own sovereign currency. To spend more, Tokyo simply authorises payments and the Bank of Japan uses the computer to increase the quantity of Yen in the bank account. Being the issuer of a sovereign currency means never having to worry about how you are going to pay your bills. The Japanese government can afford to buy whatever is available for sale in its own currency. True, it can spend too much, fuelling inflationary pressure, but it never needs to borrow Yen. If that is true, why do governments sell bonds whenever they run deficits? Why not just spend without adding to the national debt? It is an important question. Part of the reason is habit. Under a gold standard, governments sold bonds so deficits would not leave too much currency in people’s hands. Borrowing replaced currency (which was convertible into gold) with government bonds which were not. In other words, countries sold bonds to reduce pressure on their gold reserves. But that’s not why they borrow in the modern era. Today, borrowing is voluntary, at least for countries with sovereign currencies. Sovereign bonds are just an interest-bearing form of government money. The UK, for example, is under no obligation to offer an interest-bearing alternative to its zero-interest currency, nor must it pay market rates when it borrows. As Japan has demonstrated with yield curve control, the interest rate on government bonds is a policy choice. So today, governments sell bonds to protect something more valuable than gold: a well-guarded secret about the true nature of their fiscal capacities, which, if widely understood, might lead to calls for “overt monetary financing” to pay for public goods. By selling bonds, they maintain the illusion of being financially constrained. In truth, currency-issuing governments can safely spend without borrowing. The debt overhang that many are worried about can be avoided. That is not to say that there is anything wrong with offering people an interest-bearing alternative to government currency. Bonds are a gift to investors, not a sign of dependency on them. The question we should be debating, then, is how much “interest income” should governments be paying out, and to whom? The writer is a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University and author of the forthcoming book “The Deficit Myth” No — This dangerous monetary practice ensures inflation is around the corner How to pay for the fathomless costs of fighting a pandemic? All the state’s expenses, whether a Green New Deal, jobs-for-all or the economic lockdowns, can be met simply by printing money. That is what modern monetary theory claims, writes Edward Chancellor. Adherents of this unorthodox school of economics would have us believe, like Alice in Wonderland, six impossible things before breakfast. Governments can never go bust. They don’t need to raise taxes or issue bonds to finance themselves. Borrowing creates savings. Fiscal deficits are not the problem, they are the cure. We could even pay off the national debt tomorrow. As theory, MMT has been rejected by mainstream economists. But as a matter of practical policy, it is already being deployed. Ever since Ben Bernanke, as governor of the US Federal Reserve, delivered his “helicopter money” speech in November 2002, the world has been moving in this direction. As president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi proved that even the most indebted countries need not default. Last year, the US federal deficit exceeded $1tn at a time when the Fed was acquiring Treasuries with newly printed dollars — that’s pure MMT. This crisis has accelerated the process. Fiscal and monetary policy are now being openly co-ordinated, just as MMT recommends. The US budget deficit is set to reach nearly $4tn this year. But tax rises are not on the agenda. Instead, the Fed will write the cheques. Across the Atlantic, the Bank of England is directly financing the largest peacetime deficit in its history. MMT claims that money is a creature of the state. The Fed’s share of an expanding US money supply is close to 40 per cent and rising. Again, we are seeing MMT in practice. The lockdown is a propitious moment to implement MMT. During crises, the public has an abnormally high demand to hold cash; debt monetisation appears less of a problem. But governments can print money to cover their costs for only as long as the public retains confidence in a currency. When the crisis passes, the excess money must be mopped up. Proponents of MMT claim this shouldn’t be a problem. But then they admit that nobody has a good inflation model. We cannot accurately measure the economy’s spare capacity, either. This means that politicians are unlikely to raise taxes in time to nip inflation in the bud. Bonds can always be issued to withdraw money from circulation. But once inflation is under way, bondholders demand higher coupons. From a fiscal perspective, it makes more sense to issue government debt when rates are low — as they are today — than to print money now and pay higher rates later. Great historic inflations have been caused not by monetary excesses but by supply shocks, say MMT exponents. It’s likely that coronavirus will turn out to be one of those shocks. Besides, history casts doubt on attempts to explain inflation by non-monetary factors. The closest example of MMT in implementation comes from France’s experiment with paper money. In 1720, the Scottish adventurer John Law served as French finance minister and head of the central bank. The bank printed lots of paper money, the national debt was repaid and France enjoyed brief prosperity. But inflation soon took off and crisis ensued. The truth is that governments have an inherent bias towards inflation, especially under adverse conditions such as wars and revolutions. The Covid-19 lockdown is another such condition. Tomorrow’s inflation will alleviate some of today’s financial problems: debt levels will come down and inequalities of wealth will be mitigated. Once excessive debt has been inflated away, interest rates can return to normal. When that happens, homes should be more affordable and returns on savings will rise. But the evils of inflation should not be overlooked. Economies do not function well when everyone is scrambling to keep pace with soaring prices. Inflations produce their own distributional pain. Workers whose incomes rise with inflation do better than retirees. Debtors will thrive at the expense of creditors. Profiteers arise, along with populists who feed on social discontents. Modern monetary practices ensure another inflation is around the corner. MMT provides the intellectual gloss. It promises a free lunch. Even Alice shouldn’t believe that. The writer, a financial historian, is author of a forthcoming history of interest