Yuk, news all the time. . .

Like everyone else, I’ve been a bit glued to my phone – looking at the continually “breaking news” on the Covid-19 crisis. Frankly, there is a lot to know and be concerned about.  As I told my students, the entire economy is on pause. Things will get much worse before they get better.  So, no judging – be as attentive to the news as is healthy for you.  For me – I am finding – I need more insights and less random facts.

It’s just natural to want more “data”.  How many of us knew how viruses spread? Did you know what R0 (R naught) was before 3 weeks ago? What about the acronym PPE? This is a lot to learn, so I get it.

Management consultants love data for many reasons on client projects: 1) helps to shape the edge of the problem 2) provides context on the problem 3) lends objectivity 4) gives credibility for change management 5) helps prioritize recommendations.

Yes, data is critical – but let’s also agree it’s only a raw ingredient to understand this health crisis, turned economic crisis. For me, constantly searching, reading, mulling over random data is – well – exhausting.

Read the Economist

Here comes the plug for the Economist. Yes, I’ve been a subscriber for 20+ years.  Blog about it all the time – 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019. Serious fan-boy.

So, why the Economist?  Founded in 1843, strong libertarian bent – believes in the market – and the idea that governments, families, people also have a critical role in making a livable society. Based in the UK – decidedly international. Definitely less prey to the sensationalized American red/blue state false-choices. Most importantly, they have strong opinions, loosely held. They are unafraid to say people are right, wrong, and they back up their arguments with logic and facts.  It’s more insights and trends, than data.

After reading 15+ Economist articles. . .

Building off the hundreds of news articles and podcasts I’ve consumed over the last 4 weeks, the Economist gives a terse overview, with a major emphasis on the government response in China, US, and Europe. Yes, governments learned from the 2008-2009 financial crisis that you need to move strong, and fast. A crisis doesn’t afford the time for too much dithering on the minutiae – who deserves, doesn’t deserve help. Yes, the massive increase in money supply (read: printing money) and industry-specific bailouts will likely create greater concentration of government and corporate power. Libertarians cringe; basically big government and big companies. Global trade is grinding to a halt. What about the US housing market?  There are some promising signs as China re-emerges from its lockdown. Sadly, the greatest devastation may be in developing countries where so many people live on $2 a day with few hospitals. Honestly, it could be 10x scarier for the poor South.  Yes, it’s all a bit grim – but we need to stay open-eyed about this situation.  Stay positive, learning, and generous.  Quotes from the Economist in blue font.

Yes, do the right thing. Stay at home.

A very rough guess is that, without a campaign of social distancing, between 25% and 80% of a typical population will be infected. Of these, perhaps 4.4% will be seriously sick and a third of those will need intensive care. 

By some estimates, nearly 1m Americans may need mechanical ventilation at the peak of the country’s covid-19 epidemic. And the number of potentially critically ill patients who need ventilating could be much higher.

Economically, this is bad.

Morgan Stanley predicts that gdp will fall by 8% year-on-year in the second quarter and unemployment will rise to 12.8%, compared with just 3.5% in February.

[In the US] Small businesses employ 52% of private-sector workers. Half have a cash buffer of less than one month, by one estimate.

Most analysts think that China’s economy shrank in the first three months of 2020, perhaps by as much as 10%. The last time it contracted was more than four decades ago, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, according to official data.

Trade is shutting down.

More than 50 governments have restricted exports of medical supplies, 33 of which acted after the beginning of March.

Tourism has been crushed—it accounts for 8% of global services trade.

Flight cancellations have seen the cost of air freight, much of which goes in the belly of passenger jets, soar. Vaughn Moore of ait Worldwide Logistics, a freight-forwarding company, reports that rates have risen from $2-3 per kilo to $9-11, which for some goods is prohibitively expensive.

The US package ($2 Trillion) is a lot. Enough?

In America Congress is poised to pass a package worth almost $2trn, 10% of gdp, twice what was promised in 2007-09. Credit guarantees by Britain, France and other countries are worth 15% of GDP.

So many unemployment claims are being filed in Ohio that the state website has crashed.

Yet $1,200 is not much help for a [American] laid-off worker. The jobless will rely on the bill’s temporary expansion of unemployment insurance benefits by $600 per week. Yet America cannot construct an adequate social safety-net overnight. For example, 8.5% of Americans lack health insurance.

What about India?

India has at most 40,000 or so working ventilators, equipment that has proved life-saving for the most severely affected covid-19 patients. In contrast America, with a quarter as many people, has four times as many functioning ones.

China, for instance, can muster 18 doctors and 42 hospital beds per 10,000 people, according to the World Health Organisation. India has just eight doctors and seven hospital beds for the same number of people.

What about Africa?

Six in ten Ugandan workers are either self-employed or help out in a family business. If people do not work they do not eat, says Steven Agaba, who lives in a poor part of Kampala, Uganda’s capital. 

The welfare of a billion people depends on how governments balance saving lives from the virus while minimising economic damage in a continent where more than 400m people live on the equivalent of less than $1.90 a day. It is not at all clear how this Gordian knot can be untied.

Data are patchy, but the average American hospital may have more intensive-care beds than most African countries. Kenya has 130; Uganda 55; and Malawi about 25. In Zimbabwe there are probably even fewer in the public system, and doctors and nurses are on strike. Ventilators are scarce: Mali and Mozambique may have one per 1m people

Focusing on trends, not data.

Any other tips to stay out of the weeds of hour-by-hour data, and think about the larger implications?