Few things have a single cause, but I think it's not outlandish to hypothesize that potential pending famines could be driven by a fertilizer shortage, driven by Russia's invasion and global economic issues, driven by the pandemic.
Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-century, aren't we?
For any past-3-years timespan currently, you'll get the right picture only by looking at the numbers in light of consideration from the pandemic.
It's not that rates are low now, it's that they were temporarily high for three years, during the pandemic shutdowns and backlogged demand from that.
(Same goes for the apparent recession in 2022. That was mostly an artifact of the pandemic numbers, comparing 2022 to a 2021 that was artificially high from time-shifted backlogged demand from 2020.)
>I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit.
Standing nuclear armies 600K+ soldiers strong enforcing blockades, embargoes, price caps, bans, sanctions etc are not the most shining indicator of a free market that will correct shortages to equilibrium...
How can you price gouge something like Sri-Lakha, that has no currency to trade with? This whole mental model just has no grasp for the moment when the rear of the car falls off..
Hire its citizens. No money means you'd benefit by sending them money.
But inequality is a different problem than getting through crises. It should be addressed while leaving the production incentives intact. For example, progressive and/or negative income taxes.
Its citizens pay top dollar (earned by others abroad) to leave en mass. The state is collapsing and taking bribes to allow this.
So the free market creates waves, that set other systems under pressure, creating a domino tsunami. Were are the models for that? The solutions for that? Runaway to mars or NZ?
I want to express how jaring this ideology-irresponsibility background noise is regardless of ideologic affiliation.
The {MAGIC_TOTEM} will fix it, and then dangling discussion, problems, you are on your own good luck. It is moments like these, that are a direct attack on democracy and a engligthened citizenry as concept, leaving the pessimistic grown ups to contemplate full scenarios, while stealing oneself out of the problem space.
MAGIC_TOTEM = FreeMarket| God | Society
Countriy need solutions:
Short-term:Food delivery. Stabilization.
Mid-term: Fertilizer on credit
Long-Term: Fertilizer, made in situ (solar), in uncorruptable form (direct material transfer to farmers).
Passivity: Amplifies the problem.
The market is voting for a explosion and to make it your problem in the long run, directly and indirectly.
I'm not sure i follow. How exactly will the people "awarded with outsized profit for addressing the shortages" help those starving due to lack of affordable food? "The market" doesn't work for goods whose demand is inelastic, such as food and medicine. Letting people starve "to allow the market to function" is cold blooded greed.
the market does work for goods whose demand is inelastic
at the cme wheat costs 8.38 dollars per bushel, 31¢ per kg, and 1 kg of wheat is roughly two person-days' worth of food, 57 dollars per person-year
(of course an actual diet needs to be more varied and therefore slightly more expensive, but even just cooked wheat will extend your survival time under famine conditions by quite a lot)
let's start by dividing the cases to consider into ① cases where people have substantially more than 57 dollars per year to spend on food, whether in the form of production, money savings, foreign aid, or salable goods, and ② cases where they don't
we can subdivide case ① into case ①ⓐ where there are price controls, so that people who sell wheat at substantially higher prices than, say, 50¢ per kg, are subject to criminal prosecution, and case ①ⓑ where they are not
in case ①ⓑ you do not have a famine, and people do not starve, because even if delivering the food is very difficult and dangerous (①ⓑⅰ), due to pirates and collapsing currencies and whatnot, it will be profitable (for somebody anyway); maybe you'll have one merchant selling wheat at 2 dollars per kilogram and making an outsized profit, while another made worse choices and would need 3 dollars per kilogram and therefore has to take a loss from competing with the first merchant. and if it is not difficult and dangerous (case ①ⓑⅱ) then someone will sell wheat at 60¢ a kilogram in the supermarkets and there will be no outsized profits but still nobody will starve
in case ①ⓐ you might get lucky, maybe getting wheat into the country and distributed will not be difficult and dangerous (①ⓑⅱ), and so there's no shortages even though there are price controls. but if shipping costs go up, or bandits steal half the wheat in transit, or supermarkets can't open because of rioting, (①ⓑⅰ) selling wheat will be unprofitable at the legal price, and so merchants will do it as little as possible, and people will starve due to lack of not only affordable food but any food. wheat will rot in silos or be fed to livestock in order to avoid prosecution
in case ②, where people have less than 100 dollars per year and so can't afford to pay for the food they need to stay alive through voluntary exchange, their only hope for survival is to seize it by force, price controls or no price controls. this is a frequent occurrence throughout human history, and of course there's a whole continuum from a hypothetical state of perfect liberty, through transparent flat tax rates, through mafia protection rackets, all the way to raiding bands of thuggees and the holodomor.
systems that are closer to the totalitarian end of this spectrum tend to have frequent famines because, again, people starve due to lack of not only affordable food but any food at all; the holodomor is one example, but other examples are the irish potato famine, the ethiopian famine caused by the derg, the frequent famines in india under the british raj, and the greatest famine in human history, the great leap forward
because the cold-blooded-greed-powered market is, generally speaking, how people get fed in the first place, if you want to reduce the number of people who starve, you will let it function
i mean, unless you have a better replacement for the cold-blooded market, already debugged and working, but the track record of the proposed alternatives so far includes many of the worst atrocities in human history
And while the demand for food in general might be somewhat inelastic, the demand for wheat is very elastic, because you can substitute.
(Also keep in mind that we have huge buffers because of animal husbandry. If plant matter becomes too expensive, people can switch to eating it directly instead of feeding it to livestock first.)
I absolutely agree, and admire your comprehensive explanation.
While the market may sound greedy, you can't legislate away human nature. People just won't work for free.
If you also want to address inequality, then by all means implement progressive/negative income taxes. But mess with production and distribution incentives (like implementing price controls) and you have a recipe for disaster.
yes, and even more intrusive ways of addressing inequality such as subsidizing food prices with tax money can be effective without creating a perverse incentive to restrict the food supply precisely when it's most needed
Just a heads up, your usages of unicode circled characters (eg. ①) makes the comment hard to read. At least on my computer, the circled characters are the same approximate size as regular characters, but due to the circle the actual number/letter ends up being so small that they're unreadable without additional zoom.
> I doubt it. In as much as they are allowed to function, markets will reward people addressing the shortages with outsized profit
This is dangerous, fantasy thinking detached fromt the real world.v
If there is shortage of food today, you plant wheat today, it will be ready to eat in 7 months.
If it's not the right time to plant, it could be a year. By that time, people will be dead already.
Now, we don't even have idle land ready to plant, and if you have to invest in greenhouses or similar to increate productivity, farmers don't have that kind of money and even if they did capacity would take years to come online.
How is my thinking dangerous? Not allowing profit is dangerous, because it won't attract suppliers.
High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce their consumption, in favor of ones more in need.
You can address some of the future price uncertainties with a futures market. That way, you can see what the price you'll get in 7 months' time, and decide what you should plant.
But if a place has no means of growing food and no money, why stay there?
> High prices might prompt some people elsewhere to reduce their consumption
By dying. There is a famine in madagascar right now.v
> in favor of ones more in need.
Do you need 1 kg of bacon more than a poor family in madagascar needs 10kg of wheat that was used to feed your bacon?
> How is my thinking dangerous?
Because men than need to feed their children might grab torches and pitchforks
Free market does not store food hust in case of a. once in a decade famine. Free market has never been effective at disaster responce in any country on earth.
Let's examine this claim - currently there are 20,000 people and there is projection that it will eventually reach 100,000. Am I correct in understanding that we are talking about 0.1% of the population today and 0.5% of the population in two years?
A greater percentage of population in Britain own and ride horses - so I could write about a great opportunity of having transportation independent of governments, fuels, etc.
Having trust in the market is not a magic solution. Yes, prices will rise as they already are if there is a shortage but that's not going to make local production materialises out of thin air if there are other obstacles.
At some point, you need a concerted strategic answer at the correct level if you are facing a strategic threat like disruption of food supply. That's why China restricted exports. It remains to be seen if the USA and Europe will react fast enough and appropriately enough. What happened with Covid doesn't give me much hope.
Edit: As I am downvoted strongly (I imagine that it’s because the Covid answer is stupidly seen as political in the US - at least I hope so because if it’s about the ability of the market to solve issues it doesn’t bode well for us all), the EU took ages to secure first masks then vaccine supply and the utter stupidity of the US answer which avoided imposing wearing masks and making vaccination mandatory costed you hundred thousands of unnecessary death compared to country of equivalent development. Look at Taiwan or South Korea to see how it supposed to be done.
> The fertilizer shortage is caused by the war in Ukraine.
The war certainly exacerbated the issue, but there were already fertilizer supply issues before. I remember well purchasing my 2022 crop year fertilizer in December 2021, which is earlier than I normally get around to it, but was prompted to because the prices had already risen substantially by that time and were predicted to go even higher (which they did). War in Ukraine didn't break out for at least another month after that. Not so much COVID directly, but natural gas prices were a large component, seeing fertilizer plants go offline in the mid-2021 timeframe[1].
Arguably the war in Ukraine was influenced by the unrest against Lukanhesko after his poor handling of covid-19...and by Russians thinking that was yet another example of NATO attacks against their security.
That's... not true in any sense. Reasons are quite simple and have been explained ad nausea.
Greed of Putin while being detached from reality due to covid fears and paranoia, overconfidence in his army destroyed by his own and his friends corruption, underestimating Ukraine's resolve. He and his men really thought they could conquer Kyiv in few days.
He was trying war land grab for 8 years already and thought he could get big part if not whole country permanently.
> Greed of Putin while being detached from reality
Putin rules the largest country in the world. One of the most rich countries also (in real resources, not just printed money and inflated GDP). What do you mean by his "greed"? That he wants to take the place of USA and rule the whole world?
> being detached from reality due to covid fears and paranoia
If he's been detached from reality, how he succeeds ruling the huge country in clearly hostile environment? Don't you ever find a contradiction in this?
> overconfidence in his army
I guess (we all can only guess) that he didn't expect that all the West would supply so much weapons and soldiers of fortune to Ukraine (AFAIK, there're tens of thousands of soldiers of regular army of Poland fighting there, also France, US, and other countries). Still, Russia is prevailing, there's already no young Ukraine men left, there're only 45+ years Ukrainian men left and Western combatants.
And it's almost evident by this point in time that there's no way Ukraine would win that war. There're some scenarios like CIA would be able to organize successful coup de etat and replace Putin with traitor like Gorbachev or Yeltsin or someone of that kind who will simply sell Russia to the west.
But there's no way to win this battle any other way. Not with 45+ years old soldiers riding 100 donated western tanks because Russia already burned down 7,000+ soviet tanks donated to Ukraine during the past year.
Putin's (I'd say Russian) motivations were stated open and clear in 2021: we want NATO to stop expanding to the East. We asked West to discuss this thing and put an end to NATO expansion.
All of our demands were declined in the most obnoxious manner possible: "You mean nothing, we don't want to listen to your concerns, go away and die silently in your Siberia"
> Just like I don’t get veto power over your friendships, Russia does not get to decide who other sovereign nations get to be friends with.
NATO is an aggressive military alliance. Ukraine could be friends with EU and US and not be a part of NATO.
> The NATO excuse doesn’t explain the invasion and partial annexation of Georgia in 2008, either.
Do you really know anything about what happened in 2008? Honestly, not from the media and not from Wikipedia. Because regurgitating the easy-peasy propaganda from media is not interesting in any way.
How can you be so sure that it was Russia that "invaded" Georgia in 2008? How comes that although Russia beat the Georgian military force so easily that we could capture the whole Georgia, we didn't do it? There was nothing to stop us in 2008. How comes that "greedy Putin" didn't take Tbilisi and everything with it?
I always find it interesting when people being up the 2014 Ukraine situation without referencing the call from Victoria Nuland discussing who the US was going to put in charge ("surprisingly", those ended up being the government the people elected)
Likely because people who know anything about the region know that that supposedly damning call happened after three months of violent protests against the most corrupt government in recent European history.. the reference to Klitchko being made deputy PM means it was recorded after Jan 26th which was when Yanukovych was trying everything to stay in power, including bringing opposition leaders into his government (and working with Russian intelligence to bug US diplomatic phones). He was doing so because many regional offices had already been taken over by protesters and his police forces had already shot several people. The leader who the US diplomats were talking about was already a popular opposition leader, so it's entirely unsurprising that Yatsenyuk was part of government post-Maidan.
I think I'm mostly annoyed with these dumb conspiracy theories because they deny agency to the millions of people who actually cast out a criminal and democratically elected their own leadership. "hurr durr, the CIA did it"
The aggression in Georgia long predates that call, and the US expressing a preference in an election is hardly unusual. Are we to believe Putin didn't have a preference in the Ukrainian elections?
I'm always perplexed when reading such opinions: do people writing this ever tried to consider anything, just to sit and think for 1 minute instead of retranslating propaganda by media.
If you think that Putin is sick, do you think it is possible to rule the huge country with quite big population, huge territory, and a bunch of problems exacerbated by Western sanctions, quite successfully? E.g. the effect of sanctions on everyday life in Russia is negligible opposed to predicted effect. E.g. if you read comments on HN from about 1 year ago, you'll read something like "Russia would collapse in 3 days" (or 3 weeks or 3 months).
Also, is it like some God-like force makes his subordinates to listen to him although "he's clearly mad"?
It's such a primitive train of thought fueled by propaganda, that it never ceases to amaze me, especially on site like Hacker News and not reddit.
You're right, people don't think about these things from a more open perspective.
A general rule of thumb I follow is if someone who is otherwise successful, particular for a prolonged period of time, is doing something that is purportedly crazy, stupid, reckless, etc, I ask myself if maybe I haven't fully considered the situation.
Even if one falls into the camp of Putin being evil incarnate, he's been evil incarnate in power for quite a while and has presided over a Russia that by almost any metric is vastly improved relative to when he came into power. Whatever you say, Putin is not crazy and he's not stupid.
Maybe, just maybe, Russia found herself in a situation where very severe sanctions and being decoupled from the west, an area they tried tirelessly to forge ties with vis a vis energy, etc, maybe they found themselves in a situation where as bad as that outcome was, not invading Ukraine would be worse. Why might that be? They may be wrong, but more likely than not, this was a choice arrived at reluctantly and from their perspective, all the other options were _worse_ than potential war with the entirety of the collective west, deaths of tens of thousands, etc, etc.
I find that when I think of the actions of powerful nations and people as driven by a coherent thought process, I'm better able to predict their actions. I often think these entities may be wrong, that they may misunderstand some other process themselves, that they may be motivated by internal political considerations, etc, but it's never the cartoon version we hear in the media.
It's strange that people so rarely exercise this kind of thought. Do they still do those exercises in school where one has to argue both sides of a contentious issue? It's an essential skill.
Paranoia is hard to suss out between public statements that sound paranoid - "NATO is coming to get us!" style stuff - and genuine private paranoia. This one might be the hardest to prove.
"Putin's fault" is fairly hard to argue against without quite a bit of logical contortion.
Why do you think NATO was ceaselessly expanding eastward, in violation of guarantees they had made that they would not do so? Why do you think they were putting missiles, etc, in the former Warsaw pact countries?
Is it so unreasonable for a country that lost over 20 million from western aggression in WWII to be a little worried about this military buildup? I seem to remember a pretty strident response to soviet missiles in Cuba. Why so paranoid?
I don't imagine the US would respond well (and shouldn't!) to a Russian led military alliance with Mexico and other periphery countries that led to a growing mass of military arms in a military alliance that was essentially founded to combat the United States.
The psychodrama stuff is just not a very sophisticated argument here. Countries don't go to war like this because a leader like Putin is scared of COVID. This is something that was and is popular within Russia, Putin is seemingly a more moderate voice on all of this. There has been pressure for a more muscular response to the situation in Ukraine for quite a while internally to Russia.
> Why do you think NATO was ceaselessly expanding eastward…
Because countries asked to join, as is their right as sovereign nations.
> in violation of guarantees they had made that they would not do so?
No such guarantee has ever existed. The only such agreement violated in all this is the Budapest Memorandum, by the Russians.
> Is it so unreasonable for a country that lost over 20 million from western aggression in WWII to be a little worried about this military buildup?
Yes. The Nazis were defeated. Largely by that same West. The makeup of NATO is heavily weighted to “former victims of fascist aggression”, including its most powerful core nation.
One might ask this question in the other direction, given past Russian occupation of many of these countries. (Much more recently than 1945!)
> There has been pressure for a more muscular response to the situation in Ukraine for quite a while internally to Russia.
“The other guy wouldn’t have used lube when he raped you. How lucky are you to get me?!”
I don't see how that's sustained by the article. This is just another face of the energy crunch. Oil and gas are somewhat rarer more expensive, and so everything made from them is more expensive and the economy needs to seek to a new price equilibrium. In this case, that mostly means "reduced travel and air freight" and "reduced gas heating usage".
But as a side effect farmers need to scramble to match their own market. So some of this will end up meaning "more expensive fertilizer-heavy crops". But at the economic level farming is less able to tolerate volatility (you can't JustInTime a soybean, literally farmers reap what was sown months ago), so there's need for some assistance at the regulatory level. Which is what this article is about.
Basically, no. No famines. Just pricing and regulatory changes.
United Nations says it's "first climate change famine".
Why are you blaming administration? I am not sure how corrupt they are, but how do you deal with drought in a country that has GDP per capital of $520? Like you can't afford to do much with that.
Well, and also a big drought. Economies (and weather) are indeed unstable in general. But per the upthread hypothesis there's no particular instability in the food supply caused by fertilizer/energy/covid disruption that seems notable. We've been here before and we'll be here again.
Goosebumps from this line. It's apt and thoughtful. I'm thinking about how these events can be fractal-like. The past few years of active pandemic have felt like the "flame" but could be seen as the "ignition" for countless other, possibly even worse global events. It's like a Great Tree Shaking: all non-resilient systems began showing cracks of one size or another, cascading stress to other systems, many of which buckle or break.
We spent the first 50 years of the information age building systems to be as hyper-efficient as possible, with ruthless competition eliminating resiliency first in existing commercial, social, and political structures, and then in the education and life experience of the people that built those structures later. Like a Californian wilderness, we've been accumulating surface fuel load for decades.
At least in the us the first thing ruthless competition does is eliminate all competition and establish a monopoly like position. Every industry wants to consolidate to 2-4 players that split the market and don’t compete
Arguably history is the study of an ever-breaking quasi-non-resilient combination of systems and arguing that your particular causal viewpoint is the One True one.
Three totally unrelated things? There's no proof of the ""lab leak"" allegations (and I doubt there can ever be short of an admission by the Chinese government), the war in Ukraine was a proxy for the current invasion, and the Las Vegas mass shooting .. was just a larger incident of something that routinely happens in America that does not move the needle politically?
Well, 20.8% of goal potash production comes from Russia and another 18% from Belarus. It's a key ingredients in making fertilizer. There is your single cause.
After the US (which I’m assuming imports from Canada, the largest exporter), the next 6 largest importers aren’t western countries (if you exclude Brazil in that):
It's not really the conflict directly so much as the sanctions campaigns that followed.
Russia and Belarus are the number one and two suppliers of a basic fertilizer component, but now Western aligned nation cannot import from them and the Brits have gone further by making it harder to insure the shipments which affects the ability for Russia (and by extension Belarus) to export to anyone by sea.
The Germans _could_ have helped make up the difference since they can make some amount of fertilizer using natural gas, but some terrorist state (we still don't know exactly who) blew up NS1 and NS2 which makes this basically impossible. Germany now needs to preserve all its gas just to keep some manufacturing going, heat people's homes, and run the lights.
The pandemic has had some effect, but a lot of the fertilizer being sold internationally goes to Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. It doesn't actually have to go all that far in the global scheme of things.
The conflict itself affects wheat prices, since Ukraine is a major wheat exporter (as is Russia), but the fertilizer issues are due primarily to Western sanctions and Kremlin counter-sanctions.
That's not what the study's abstract said. It said heart attack deaths increased during the pandemic. It could be due to covid itself, fear of covid while seeking treatment, worse quality treatment, lifestyle chances, social isolation, others, or some combination.
One of the study's authors did say there's a link, but I have to wonder why it wasn't in the abstract.
First, this content is locked in my region so I don't know exactly what you linked to.
Second, if you are linking to a news article about that one University guy who said young people shouldn't take the vaccine, it is my understanding that his study was flawed. But again, I can't read the article so take this with a grain of salt.
Sooner or later energy prices will increase and fertilizer will get more expensive. Step functions and impulses are useful ways to probe the inner working of a system and in this case helped to highlight the dominant role energy plays everywhere. We re-learned what we forgot or ignored since the last energy aka. oil price shock in the '70. In the long run the situation for food security is challenging unless we switch to a different paradigm of farming and population control.
This is such a weird comment. For much of the world, food security is an ever present problem that is heavily affected by energy prices (among other things). Fertilizer prices are already up significantly. This isn't something we have to wait for. It's already been happening for the past decade and it's going to keep getting worse.
You're fortunate that you live in a country where food security on a population level isn't a constantly relevant concern.
energy prices are decreasing, not increasing; solar power is half as expensive as coal power in most of the world already, and it's likely to get even cheaper over time as pv production scales up
(of course in northern europe this year that is not the case because they were relying on russian gas, but that's not 'sooner or later', that's just right now)
The big lesson from the 1918 flu pandemic was that lockdowns didn’t really work.
The scientific consensus after that was to isolate the highest risk populations, and let it run through the rest of the population. That way, it hits herd immunity / becomes endemic without infecting people that are likely to die from it. For COVID, the conventional approach would be to lock down nursing homes and provide shelter in place orders / resources for the top 1-5% risk groups for 3 months while otherwise ignoring the pandemic.
If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID. Economic disruption would be minimal, per case fatality would be cut significantly, and the tripledemic / avian flu / 2021 famine / rebound of malaria, etc. probably would not have happened.
With the vaccines, it is unclear if the lockdowns helped or hurt average life expectancies. We will know in a few more years.
In retrospect, herd immunity for COVID doesn't seem like it ever was possible. It's a ridiculously infectious disease, basically everyone has to get infected and even then herd immunity is not guaranteed.
The most likely outcome without lockdowns, even if you isolate the 1-5% most vulnerable, would be catastrophic failure of the healthcare system. Plenty of countries really did try not to use lockdowns, but invariably all countries that didn't have extremely young demographics and tried not using lockdowns were at the brink at least once.
The approach you suggest would have been disastrous without RNA vaccines and from what happened in most countries which lifted restrictions too early, would also have been disastrous with them. The government where I live is one of them and they had to flip-flop on the issue about 7 times as the system got close to the breaking point. Increasing capacity wasn't feasible either because trained personnel was the bottleneck, and even if you could train three times faster, no one would want to do the job anyways.
The problem with health system breakdown is that at some point it's not even COVID that kills people. If that happens, even just a broken bone can be genuinely life threatening. People will start dying of a plethora of things they'd normally be able to easily deal with.
I think you missed the part of the guidance where you lock down the 1-5% of the population that is most vulnerable, but only for 1-3 months.
For Covid, that would have greatly reduced peak health care loads, and had a much more modest economic impact, and fewer secondary effects (RSV wouldn’t have been a issue, for example.)
Locking down 1-5% is not nearly enough, though. Hospitalisation rate just for nauve people above 60, which are a quarter of the population, was above 5%. No healthcare system can handle the hospitalization of over 1% of the population in a few weeks.
> If it were not for RNA vaccines, that approach certainly would have been better than what we did with COVID.
I know that 'flatten the curve' largely left the public consciousness, but wouldn't letting the virus run largely unrestricted have overwhelmed the health care system?
The curve flattening was initially proposed for a short period of time. Maybe weeks or a few months, I forget.
I think some initial panic is forgivable, even if it led to actions that were counter to previous guidance. We were ventilating patients early on, for instance, and we later learned that this causes more harm than good for many patients and should be deferred if at all possible. I think it's arguable that a short term lockdown was the right call. It's arguable it wasn't, but in my opinion it wasn't crazy.
During that initial period we were supposed to be increasing capacity and learning treatment. Encouraging people to lose weight and improve their health during this time would probably help with outcomes as well.
Capacity was increased to some extent. Remember the tents and the medical ship in NYC? I think neither were used at all. We don't seem to be having conversations now about more long-term increases in health care capacity. It's just like nothing was learned. It all just became political and like all things political in the US, incredibly stupid and tribal.
For what it's worth, when DeSantis started relaxing Florida lockdowns I thought the death toll in Florida was going to be sobering and it was reckless. I now think it was the right thing to do. DeSantis seemed to be following the pre-COVID playbook. I was scared and clung on too much to the status quo procedure on COVID.
>Capacity was increased to some extent. Remember the tents and the medical ship in NYC? I think neither were used at all.
They were not. Even in NYC, which really did see overloaded hospitals briefly in March-April 2020, USNS Comfort treated a *total* (not at one time; from start to finish) of 182 patients <https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-01/navy-h...>. USNS Mercy, with 1000 beds, treated a total of 77 patients in LA.
Same elsewhere. In Wales, Millennium Stadium was converted into a temporary field hospital with 300 beds and capacity to expand to 2000 beds. It was such a big deal that a public contest was held to name it. However, the newly dubbed Dragon's Heart Hospital <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Heart_Hospital> never had more than 46 patients at one time, and was closed in six weeks for lack of use.
Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-century, aren't we?