First of all, downplaying the gravity of this using the "only old people" mantra is disgusting. Not only disgusting but wrong. Young people have already died. It is less likely, yes, but it has happened and it may happen many times, as the desease infects more people.
From an Economics point of view, it is the apocalypse. Many companies are going under and that will lead to unemployment at historical levels worldwide once the epidemic crisis is over.
Actually, what this crisis has shown us is that the world is not ready for this. If something deadlier ever comes up, we are all doomed. This event will amount zero "experience points" for the next time we face a crisis of this magnitude.
The media is not overblowing anyhing. On my side of the world what they have done is quite the opposite, with catastrophic results. I wish they had warned people over the true danger of this. Until last week all they were saying is that "it's just a flu, you just wash your hands and that's it"
It's not the end of the world, but expect major disruptions in common people's lives for the next few years.
You are correct with a lot of that, and that's part of my point. There is that actual sense of danger. It's currently not a Black Death or Spanish Fly kind of a thing, but it is dangerous. People die but the death will not be some extra torturous endeavor. The world around feels empty, but stores still get stuff and we are mostly free to go and buy stuff.
What I mean is that this is a catastrophy right on the threshold of being something where we still can live our lives relatively well compared to a possible situation of having a world where, say, if someone was ill in the bus, the disease would 100% surely spread into every one of the other passengers and would quarantee the eventual death of at least 90% of them in some painful and disgusting manner.
We are witnessing one sort of a collapse in economy and to some extent in society too, but it's not something like if, say, we couldn't use electricity anymore or couldn't go buy milk from a store.
That's not downplaying the current situation. That's just how it is. We are right there in the beginning of a catastrophy movie, but haven't (at least yet) passed the point of no return from having to go through the whole movie. I hope you didn't mean I was saying "only old people" type of claims. I surely know about young people and even infants getting the disease. I'm well aware of this being dangerous to even young people and that's part of my point. There is an actual sense of danger for all of us - but we still are relatively safe compared to how things could be if it was, say, a major ebola outbreak.
We can walk in the streets, feeling the sense of apocalyptic emptiness. We can feel that. And my point is that we
can do that. There are scenarios where that would be a complete impossibility. We can smell that sense of dread in the air - and then get back to our homes and tell people about it - and go back to smell it again. It doesn't mean the danger isn't there. It just means that we are in a situation where people who for whatever reason want to experience a sense of apocalypse, but not actually go through an actual apocalypse, this is right there in the sweet spot bringing actual danger and real consequences and the breaking of status quo in society to our lives, like something our generation and the generation before that hasn't yet experienced in the 1st world, but still not destroying us in major scale where we would have to build the society nearly from scratch.
Where I think you are wrong is that I think the world
will learn from this. The world wasn't completely not ready for this. This could be way worse right now and we can see the world having at least some ability to tackle something like this when we can control people moving around the globe even this much. Imagine if countries weren't ready for doing lockdowns and other drastic measures. It would be a lot worse right now. After this we can now actually see how much of an impact a global pandemic can have to the economy in a world with this many people relying on current style of way of basing a lot of everyday lives on how good global economy is. This situation brings a ton of more knowledge about pandemics and economy and how they are connected to each other. We can be glad our first major global pandemic in the era of urbanization and globalization was this instead of something worse.
Now that said, who knows if things will get even worse by, say, having this disease mutate into something worse, or just having some other disease turn up relatively quickly. But for the time being, we are able to get our feet into the side of an apocalyptic world, to have an actual taste of it, and get back in our homes to talk about it. And while we are back in that world, there have been real consequences. Real deaths, businesses collapsing, lots of unemployment, danger still right there lurking around, but it's not quite what it is there beyond that threshold.
thehill.com
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g1.globo.com
Smiles and Cries
this is the correct number... according to some sources there are other 28 cases unaccounted for also.
toronto.citynews.ca
