Posts Tagged ‘pandemic’
“When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.”*…
Noting that, technically, all pandemic flus start as bird flus, the estimable “Scott Alexander” addresses three all-too-timely questions: What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be?
The entire post is eminently worth reading; here, the summary:
Conclusions / Predictions
All discussed earlier in the piece, but putting them here for easy reference – see above for justifications and qualifications.
- H5N1 is already pandemic in birds and cows and will likely continue to increase the price of meat and milk.
- 5% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next year.
- 50% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next twenty years, assuming no dramatic changes to the world (eg human extinction) during that time.
- If H5N1 does start a sustained pandemic in the next few years, 30% chance it’s about as bad as a normal seasonal flu, 63% chance it’s between 2 – 10x as bad (eg Asian Flu), 6% chance it’s between 10 – 100x as bad (eg Spanish flu), and <1% chance it’s >100x as bad (unprecedented). The 1% chance is Outside View based on other people’s claims, and I don’t really understand how this could happen.
Don’t give your true love a partridge, a turtledove, or (especially) a French hen: “H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” from @astralcodexten.com.web.brid.gy
See also: “How America Lost Control of the Bird Flu, Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic” from Kaiser Health News.
As Larry Brilliant once said, “outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional.”
* Barack Obama
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As we prioritize preparation, we might spare a thought for Pierre-Joseph van Beneden; he died on this date in 1894. A zoologist and paleontologist, he specialized in parasitic worms and discovered the life cycle of tapeworms (Cestoda).
He is credited with introducing the term mutualism in biology– naming a phenomenon akin to the invader-host relationship central to the development of flus– in 1875.
“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency”*…
… the capitalist system or for that matter, just about any economic system. So the keepers of those systems, the 169 authorities that issue money around the world, take that threat very seriously. About half of them depend on one company, De La Rue. As Samanth Subramanian explains, the pandemic has been a roller coaster ride for cash– and thus for De La Rue…
… De La Rue… is in the high-stakes business of authentication. It designs and prints national passports, as well as the silver foil labels that mark cigarette packs and alcohol bottles as genuine. Most crucially, it works with roughly half of the world’s central banks on their currency notes: designing them, developing security features to protect them from counterfeiting, and printing them. From its presses in Asia and Europe, De La Rue turns out up to 6 billion banknotes a year, making it the world’s largest commercial printer of currency.
That number is only a fraction of all the notes printed worldwide annually. The biggest central banks—such as those of the US, China, India, and Brazil—tend to have their own presses. Still, many smaller countries outsource their production of money. De La Rue prints British pounds, Fijian and Barbadian dollars, Qatari riyals, Sri Lankan rupees, and dozens more currencies…
[There follows a fascinating history of the company…]
… A major issuer like the Bank of England will place a currency order annually; smaller banks can order once every few years. But the past is not always a reliable guide. During times of inflation, for instance, the demand for notes grows. De La Rue is one of the few companies for which inflation—or, for that matter, regime change—is a good thing. The fall of Saddam Hussein warranted new notes; so did the creation of South Sudan.
Most countries are better prepared for more predictable cycles of cash use. Around the Middle East, central banks arrange to have more currency on hand before Eid al-Fitr, when it’s customary not only to spend money on festivities but also to hand out gifts of crisp new notes. The same goes for the Chinese New Year and Christmas.
The pandemic proved to be unexpectedly disruptive. A casual observer may have expected cash use to plunge in 2020, as people stayed home during lockdowns and worried about catching the virus from banknotes. In fact, disasters tend to drive people toward cash, as a physical store of safety and wealth. As a result, in most countries, the average value of notes drawn from ATMs went up by about 25-30%. Central banks also wanted new, cleaner notes, and larger stocks of notes in general, so they ordered more.
Across the US and Eurozone, total currency in circulation in September 2020 was more than 10% higher than the previous year. In the US, the number of notes circulating usually tends to rise by an annual 1-2 billion. In 2020, that figure surged to 6 billion.
De La Rue welcomed the bonanza. It had suffered a setback in 2019, when it failed to win a £490 million contract to print the new, post-Brexit British passport. (Ironically, the job went to an EU company). But after the pandemic glut of orders for new notes, demand sank to lower-than-normal levels between 2021 and 2022. The currency division’s revenues fell 2.1%, to £280.9 million. The chair of De La Rue’s board resigned in April 2023 after the company put out a profit warning—its third in a year (a new chair was appointed in May). For De La Rue, the hangover from the pandemic has been more challenging than the pandemic itself…
The world’s largest money printer made bank during the pandemic: “De La Rue: Currency printer to the world,” from @samanth_s in @qz.
* Vladimir Lenin
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As we muse on money, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939 that The Wizard of Oz was first shown to the public in Dennis, MA, one of three test screenings ahead of the official release. Fearing the film would be unpopular, MGM executives opted to gauge audience reaction. The film was of course well received, and the studio proceeded with the star-studded Hollywood premier at Grauman’s Chinese Theater (on August 15).
And on the subject of currency, it’s worth noting that many view Dorothy’s trek to the Emerald City to be a lightly-veiled critique of the Gold Standard…
“The future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous”*…
Emily J. Orlando on the enduring relevance and the foresight of Edith Wharton…
If ever there were a good time to read the American writer Edith Wharton, who published over forty books across four decades, it’s now. Those who think they don’t know Wharton might be surprised to learn they do. A reverence for Wharton’s fiction informs HBO’s Sex and the City, whose pilot features Carrie Bradshaw’s “welcome to the age of un-innocence.” The CW’s Gossip Girl opens, like Wharton’s The House of Mirth, with a bachelor spying an out-of-reach love interest at Grand Central Station while Season 2 reminds us that “Before Gossip Girl, there was Edith Wharton.”
But why Wharton? Why now? Perhaps it’s because for all its new technologies, conveniences, and modes of travel and communication, our own “Gilded Age” is a lot like hers [see here]. For the post-war and post-flu-epidemic climate that engendered her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence is not far removed from our post-COVID-19 reality. In both historical moments, citizens of the world have witnessed a retreat into conservatism and a rise of white supremacy.
Fringe groups like the “Proud Boys” and “QAnon” and deniers of everything from the coronavirus to climate change are invited to the table in the name of free speech and here Wharton’s distrust of false narratives resonates particularly well. Post-9/11 calls for patriotism and the alignment of the American flag with one political party harken back to Wharton’s poignant questioning, in a 1919 letter, of the compulsion to profess national allegiance:
how much longer are we going to think it necessary to be “American” before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, & having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?
Her cosmopolitan critique of nationalist fervor remains instructive to us today…
Eminently worth reading in full (then picking up one of Wharton’s wonderful novels): “How Edith Wharton Foresaw the 21st Century,” in @lithub.
See also: “These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.”
* Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
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As we prize perspicacity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1884, in the midst of the Gilded Age, that Harper’s Bazaar proclaimed, “…it is not convenable, according to European ideas, to wear a loose flowing robe of the tea-gown pattern out of one’s bedroom or boudoir. It has been done by ignorant people at a watering-place, but it never looks well. It is really an undress, although lace and satin may be used in its composition. A plain, high, and tight-fitting garment is much the more elegant dress for the afternoon teas as we give them.”
Embraced by artists and reformers, the Aesthetic Dress Movement of the 1870s and 1880s was a non-mainstream movement within fashion that looked to the Renaissance and Rococo periods for inspiration. The movement began in response to reformers seeking to call attention to the unhealthy side effects of wearing a corset, thus, the main feature of this movement in women’s dress was the loose-fitting dress, which was worn without a corset. Artists and progressive social reformers embraced the Aesthetic Dress movement by appearing uncorseted and in loose-fitting dresses in public. For many that fell into these categories, Aesthetic Dress was an artistic statement. Appearing in public uncorseted was considered controversial for women, as it suggested intimacy. In fact, many women across the country were arrested for appearing in public wearing Aesthetic costumes, as authorities and more conservative citizens associated this type of dress with prostitution.
But for most wealthy women, the influence of the Aesthetic Dress movement on their wardrobes took the form of the Tea Gowns. Like most dresses that could be considered “Aesthetic,” Tea Gowns were loose and meant to be worn without a corset. However, they were less controversial than the Aesthetic ensembles of more artistic and progressive women. This is because they were not typically worn in public or in the company of the opposite sex. Tea Gowns were a common ensemble for hosts of all-female teas that were held in the wearer’s home. Thus, because no men were in attendance, Tea Gowns were socially acceptable in these scenarios. Mainstream magazines like Harper’s Bazar were not especially keen on the Tea Gown and cautioned their readers not to appear wearing one in public.
“Gilded Age Fashion”
For a sense of what was at stake, see “The Corset X-Rays of Dr Ludovic O’Followell (1908)“
“It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it”*…
Still, some species “do it” differently than others…
It is well known that somatic mutations — mutations in our body’s genetic code that accumulate over time — can cause cancer, but their broader role in ageing is less clear.
Now a team of researchers have measured the somatic mutation rates of a range of mammals and discovered a striking correlation between mutation rate and lifespan. Lending evidence to the theory that somatic mutations are a cause of ageing rather than a result of it…
Ageing is linked to accumulated mutations: “The lifespan secret: why giraffes live longer than ferrets,” from @Nature.
* Mark Twain, on aging
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As we grow old gracefully, we might send carefully-deduced birthday greetings to William Ian Beardmore (WIB) Beveridge; he was born on this date in 1908. A veterinarian who served as director of the Institute of Animal Pathology at Cambridge, he identified the origin of the Great Influenza (the Spanish Flu pandemic, 1918-19)– a strain of swine flu.
“The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two percent of the world’s population”*…
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification; but as a new McKinsey Global Institute study suggests, perhaps not by much…
We have borrowed a page from the corporate world—namely, the balance sheet—to take stock of the underlying health and resilience of the global economy as it begins to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic. This view from the balance sheet complements more typical approaches based on GDP, capital investment levels, and other measures of economic flows that reflect changes in economic value… [and] provides an in-depth look at the global economy after two decades of financial turbulence and more than ten years of heavy central bank intervention, punctuated by the pandemic.
Across ten countries that account for about 60 percent of global GDP—Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the historic link between the growth of net worth and the growth of GDP no longer holds. While economic growth has been tepid over the past two decades in advanced economies, balance sheets and net worth that have long tracked it have tripled in size. This divergence emerged as asset prices rose—but not as a result of 21st-century trends like the growing digitization of the economy.
Rather, in an economy increasingly propelled by intangible assets like software and other intellectual property, a glut of savings has struggled to find investments offering sufficient economic returns and lasting value to investors. These savings have found their way instead into real estate, which in 2020 accounted for two-thirds of net worth. Other fixed assets that can drive economic growth made up only about 20 percent the total. Moreover, asset values are now nearly 50 percent higher than the long-run average relative to income. And for every $1 in net new investment over the past 20 years, overall liabilities have grown by almost $4, of which about $2 is debt…
“The rise and rise of the global balance sheet: How productively are we using our wealth?,” from @McKinsey_MGI
(Image above: source)
* Bill Bryson
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As we recalculate: we might spare a thought for composer, musician, director, and producer Frank “anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement” Zappa; he died (of pancreatic cancer) on this date in 1993 at age 52.
“Politics is the entertainment branch of industry”
“The bottom line is always money”
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