Head Tale

Yesterday, I tried to do a post of all the worst-case scenarios for COVID-19 but I realised that I probably did too much commentary and I probably didn’t think through quite how bad this could get.  (I mean, at one point, I went on a tangent about how this might end up resulting in *improvements* in the economy – *not* the point of the post!)

So not sure if I’ve ever done this before but let’s have a “do-over” with some ideas about how bad it could get.  As I said yesterday, some are more likely than others but at the same time, there’s no way to predict if the absolute worst might happen (just like the dinosaurs didn’t predict the comet that ended them!)

1. COVID gets really bad through human backsliding on safety measures and/or no effective vaccine being developed and/or mutation and/or it being more widespread than we realise and/or confirmation that having it does *not* provide immunity (lots of conflicting info about that right now) so it ends up killing millions worldwide over a couple years like the Spanish Flu of 1918. Or there’s *never* a vaccine and we end up living with this for *years* until we reach some type of herd immunity.

2. Due to economic failures and lack of a social safety net or good government, the US has riots, unrest and uprisings.  Maybe mass shootings.  Maybe assassinations of prominent figures.  Complete civic breakdown that police and government aren’t able to contain.

3. The United States has some sort of civil war/civil divorce and splits into regional blocs that are more aligned politically, culturally and economically, sort of like when the USSR separated.

4. The economy is permanently altered in a negative way – restaurants fail, destination travel is changed forever, people stop shopping as meaninglessly as they did before the virus, numerous major companies go bankrupt from casinos to clothes to car manufacturers.

5.  Daily life is permanently altered in a negative way.

All this argues strongly that the current borrowing binge should turn out well – so long as things get back to normal in relatively short order.

The nightmare scenario is one where the virus continues to suffocate the global economy for a year or more.

6. The economy is destroyed.  Government borrowing reaches a tipping point where the majority of people are on government programs so as to be unsustainable.

7. Conspiracy theories take hold and people refuse a vaccine even if one is ready.  Or some other conspiracy theory takes hold that counters the ability of society to recover from Covid in some other way.

8. There is some sort of a war, conventional or cyber, between China and the United States.

9. Diplomatic relations between nations are permanently altered by the actions of various nations in response to Covid – claiming PPE, imposing sanctions, etc.

10. The developing world is decimated by the virus without some of the same health and government structures that help first-world countries to deal with the virus relatively well (so far.)

11. There is never a vaccine, the virus never mutates to be less deadly and humans must learn to live with Covid as a constant presence like the common cold for an undetermined amount of time.

12. In the midst of battling Corona, something else major happens – a major earthquake in California, a hurricane in the southern United States, hell, another virus – and society gets completely overwhelmed.

13. I don’t want to even mention this because it’s personal for me.  But it’s already happened in Italy, the US and other hardhit countries and that’s the fact that the virus is particularly hard on healthcare workers which makes a death spiral – you lose trained doctors and nurses who get sick or even die after working on the front lines which means less people on the front lines which leads to more illness and down we go.

Have a great day! 🙁