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On Wed, 27 May 2020 22:20:49 -0400,
wrote:

On Wed, 27 May 2020 19:22:43 -0400, wrote:

On Wed, 27 May 2020 16:37:25 -0400,
wrote:

On Wed, 27 May 2020 19:16:15 -0000 (UTC), Bill
wrote:

From an email,from my stockbroker.

I somewhat agree,

Miscalculating Risk: Confusing Scary With Dangerous
The coronavirus kills, everyone knows it. But this isnâ€™t the first deadly
virus the world has seen, so what happened? Why did we react the way we
did? One answer is that this is the first social media pandemic. News and
narratives travel in real-time right into our hands.
This spreads fear in a way we have never experienced. Drastic and
historically unprecedented lockdowns of the economy happened and seemed to
be accepted with little question.
We think the world is confusing â€œscaryâ€ with â€œdangerous.â€ They are not the
same thing. It seems many have accepted as fact that coronavirus is one of
the scariest things the human race has ever dealt with. But is it the most
dangerous? Or even close?
There are four ways to categorize any given reality. It can be scary but
not dangerous, scary and dangerous, dangerous but not scary, or not
dangerous and not scary.
Clearly, COVID-19 ranks high on the scary scale. A Google news search on
the virus brings up over 1.5 billion news results. To date, the virus has
tragically killed nearly 100,000 people in the United States, and more
lives will be lost. But on a scale of harmless to extremely dangerous, it
would still fall into the category of slightly to mildly dangerous for most
people, excluding the elderly and those with preexisting medical
conditions.
In comparison, many have no idea that heart disease is the
leading cause of death in the United States, killing around 650,000 people
every year, 54,000 per month, or approximately 200,000 people between
February and mid-May of this year. This qualifies as extremely dangerous.
But most people are not very frightened of it. A Google news search for
heart disease brings up around 100 million results, under one-fifteenth the
results of the COVID-19 search.
Itâ€™s critical to be able to distinguish between fear and danger. Fear is an
emotion, itâ€™s the risk that we perceive. As an emotion, it is often blind
to the facts. For example, the chances of dying from a shark attack are
minuscule, but the thought still crosses most peopleâ€™s minds when they play
in the ocean. Danger is measurable, and in the case of sharks, the danger
is low, even if fear is sometimes high.
Imagine if an insurance actuary was so scared of something that she graded
it 1,000 times riskier than the data showed. This might be a career-ending
mistake. This is exactly what people have done regarding COVID-19: making
decisions on fear and not data.
According to CDC data, 81% of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States are
people over 65 years old, most with preexisting conditions. If you add in
55-64-year-olds that number jumps to 93%. For those below age 55,
preexisting conditions play a significant role, but the death rate is
currently around 0.0022%, or one death per 45,000 people in this age range.
Below 25 years old the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.00008%, or roughly
one in 1.25 million, and yet we have shut down all schools and day-care
centers, some never to open again! This makes it harder for mothers and
fathers to remain employed.
All life is precious. No death should be ignored, but we have allowed our
fear to move resources away from areas that are more dangerous, but less
scary, to areas that are scary, but less dangerous. And herein lies the
biggest problem.
Hospitals and doctorsâ€™ offices have had to be much more selective in the
people they are seeing, leaving beds open for COVID-19 patients and cutting
out elective surgeries. According to Komodo, in the weeks following the
first shelter-in-place orders, cervical cancer screenings were down 68%,
cholesterol panels were down 67%, and the blood sugar tests to detect
diabetes were off 65% nationally.
It doesnâ€™t stop there. The U.N. estimates that infant mortality rates could
rise by hundreds of thousands in 2020 because of the global recession and
diverted health care resources. Add in opioid addiction, alcoholism,
domestic violence and other detrimental reactions from job loss and
despair. Itâ€™s tragic.
The benefits gained through this fear-based shutdown (if there really are
any) have massively increased dangers in both the short term and the long
term. Every day that businesses are shuttered, and people remain unemployed
or underemployed, the economic wounds grow more deadly. The loss of wealth
is immense, and this will undermine the ability of nations around the world
to deal with true dangers for decades to come, maybe forever. We have
altered the course of economic growth.
Shutting down the private sector (which is where all wealth is created) is
truly dangerous even though many of our leaders suggest we shouldnâ€™t be
scared of it. Another round of stimulus is not what we need. Like a
Band-Aid on a massive laceration, it may stop a tiny bit of the bleeding,
but the wound continues to worsen, feeding greater and more elaborate
intervention. Moreover, we are putting huge financial burdens on future
generations because we are scared about something that the data reveal as
far less dangerous than many other things in life.
A shutdown may slow the spread of a virus, but it canâ€™t stop it. A vaccine
may cure us. But in the meantime, we have entered a new era, one in which
fear trumps danger and near-term risk creates long-term problems. It
appears many people have come to this realization as the data builds.
Hopefully, this will go down in history as a mistake that we will never
repeat.
Brian S. Wesbury, Chief Economist
Strider Elass, Senior Economist
RealClear Politics, May 22, 2020

===

It's all well and good to point out that the death rate for people
under 60 years old is fairly low, but they are just as capable of
catching and spreading the virus as anyone else, perhaps more so if
they are more active.

I am far more afraid of a financial collapse and runaway inflation
than I am of this virus, not only for my "fixed income" future but for
my kids. It is only a very good contract that is keeping my SIL
employed. A non-lawyer person might have signed the first one they
offered but he is still worried that the land trust he works for will
go belly up and make the contract moot. Their revenues are flat and my
daughters job is gone (JC Penney)

===

Inflation is a serious risk that I've been expecting for 20 years,
only to be confounded repeatedly. It will probably hit when I'm not
looking. The classic defense is to borrow like crazy and buy
appreciating assets like gold and real estate but that doesn't feel
right at this point of my life.

The government always denies that there is any inflation but I guess
they never go to the grocery store.

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