Quote from: theymos on March 12, 2020, 10:01:13 PM

People are panicking about this to an unbelievable extent. It's a bad disease, to be sure, and some precautions should be taken, but it's not worth putting the entire economy on hold. For example, maybe it'd be a good idea to 100% lock-down nursing homes, but cancelling all university classes and sporting events, or locking down entire countries, or stopping trade between the biggest economies in the world? I think we'll look back at this in a couple of years and see this as a huge hypochondriacal overreaction which kicked off quite a damaging recession. (Though the economy was already unstable in many ways: it's not just the virus.)

Genetic engineering tech is moving along very quickly, and in a decade or two we could very well start seeing "black hat gene hackers" producing genetically-engineered viruses. After seeing the utter chaos from this only-somewhat-worse-than-average virus, I have to wonder how the world will react to those. Can you imagine seeing a new "coronavirus" pandemic every year, or one with even worse spread or symptoms?

(I recently had all of the symptoms of the virus. I wonder if I had it, or if it was just the ordinary flu. It was very unpleasant, though I got over it in a few days.)

Edit: Bonus haiku. Cheesy

Fear! Virus! Unplug:
Still see sky above my head,
Dirt below my feet

The concepts of overreacting and panic and it still being a serious issue are not exclusive. If you understand how epidemiology works as much as anyone who has ever played a game of Plague Inc., you know that the diseases that pose real issues are not the ones with extremely high and fast fatality rates, because those kill off their hosts quickly and the spread stops.

This disease is a problem because it not only is fatal enough to be dangerous, but it has several characteristics which lend itself to nearly universal spread.

-Long incubation period (also makes small scale quarantines largely ineffective)
-Passive symptom free carriers
-Airborne for long periods
-Survives on surfaces
-Can reinfect hosts after recovery
-High rates of infection

Panic is usually never a solution to anything, but the steps being taken are absolutely necessary. It is easy to write this off now because the impact isn't evident yet. These steps are specifically being taken to slow the spread so that the medical infrastructure is not completely overwhelmed with what is coming. Reducing the rate of infection is absolutely crucial to this.

This means expect quarantines. Quarantines means people being stuck in their homes for long periods of time. People being stuck in their homes for long periods of time means panic buying. The panic is absolutely being used for ulterior motives, but as I said previously the concepts of this being serious and people also simultaneously panicking irrationally are not exclusive. Normalcy bias is potentially an even more dangerous threat, because people ignoring the threat by dismissing the panic as totally irrational will ironically create a self fulfilling prophesy just as the people panic buying are with shortages.

I realized today what the obsession over toilet paper is. This is the bargaining phase. This is a result of people who live in well off nations admitting to themselves that there is a problem, but not how serious it is. They are literally saying to themselves "Yeah this is a problem, but it is not THAT big of a deal, at worse the toilet paper runs out." Thus, like the proverbial binky, people rush out to sooth their cognitive dissonance by buying toilet paper to reassure themselves that they have control of the situation when they do not.