The U.S. government has dramatically ramped up its response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak this past week. In a matter of a few days, we’ve shifted from the White House insinuating COVID-19 was on the brink of disappearing to President Trump declaring a national emergency and invoking the Defense Production Act.
If you’re wondering what was behind this stark reversal in tone, a plummeting stock market and official “pandemic” declaration from the World Health Organization had something to do with it...
But the primary influence behind the sudden change in U.S. policy is rumored to be an epidemic-modeling report from across the pond. This report, which comes from Imperial College London, tested the expected impact of COVID-19... and the findings were alarming.
If you’ve yet to read the report, you can view it here. I think every investor needs to read it because, as the New York Times reports, it is this very model that “influenced the White House to strengthen its measures to isolate members of the public.”
In short, this is now the prevailing impact model for the spread of COVID-19. Questions of accuracy aside, this is one of the primary sources of U.S. government guidelines for the time being.
Now, I’ll share some of the biggest takeaways from this report, but I will warn you; the findings will seem outright terrifying to some.
Imperial College London considers three non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies and their outcomes.
The first strategy is to do nothing: make no changes to our daily lives and behavior to let the virus spread through the population unchecked. In this scenario, 2.2 million Americans would die, with the daily death toll peaking in three months.
The second strategy is full-on suppression: stopping human-to-human transmission indefinitely, until vaccination is widely available. In this scenario, we would reduce deaths to the thousands, but it would require a draconian government shutdown of the economy and nationwide quarantine between 12 to 18 months, at a minimum. The researchers note that there is no guarantee we will find a reliable vaccine in this time frame.
The third strategy is mitigation: reducing the disease’s spread not entirely, but to where we try not to overwhelm the national healthcare system. In this scenario, 1.2 million Americans still die.
There is no winning scenario here. The researchers ultimately lean towards suppression, but recognize the following in their commentary [emphasis mine]:
We do not consider the ethical or economic implications of either strategy here, except to note that there is no easy policy decision to be made. Suppression, while successful to date in China and South Korea, carries with it enormous social and economic costs which may themselves have a significant impact on health and well-being in the short and longer-term. Mitigation will never be able to completely protect those at risk from severe disease or death and the resulting mortality may therefore still be high.
Unfortunately, policymakers and the mainstream media are largely hand-waving this critical section of analysis from Imperial College. The only thing they can see right now is the headline: “Millions Will Die If the Government Does Not Act”.
