Peak Pessimism as a Lagging Indicator

I was walking Pippa through our subdivision yesterday. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and people were out and about, keeping their distance. I had a couple conversations that I found interesting.

The first was with a family we’re friends with down a few streets. They’re about our age with three young kids. They said they hadn’t left the house in about three weeks. I was glad to hear that, because three weeks ago people still weren’t taking COVID-19 seriously here.

But it was what she said next that really surprised me… “I just don’t know if they’ll even be going back this Fall.”

The “they” here is in reference to the kids, and “back” is school. That shocked me because my read on sentiment has been that people are of the mindset that we’ll be back to “normal” in a couple months.

I told her that if I had to bet I’d say they would be back by Fall.

As I neared home, our across the street neighbor shouted out. He mentioned he’s been leaving the house for groceries and what not, but his wife has refused to leave the house for about two and a half weeks. He also mentioned that he’d stopped by his parents and grabbed a couple of his old hunting rifles… “I don’t think it will come to that, but just in case”.

I agreed, because well… who the hell knows. But I really don’t think it comes to that. We wrapped up the conversation talking about how privileged we are to have jobs that allow us to work from home.

Kaitlin and I talked later last night about what we think the countdown to normal looks like. She’s more receptive to my opinions now that she’s seen my rants become reality. And it’s not because I’m intelligent, I’m just smart enough to block out mainstream media and get my news from intelligent people via Twitter.

I mentioned these conversations and the overall theme. People seem extremely pessimistic. Their actions and thoughts (staying at home, securing firearms, questioning if school will open six months from now) are the ones I was having four to six weeks ago which tells me the average person’s mentality is a huge lagging indicator.

My mentality is simple: I believe we are all likely to contract COVID-19 at some point. The US has finally done a decent job of social distancing and we’ll start to see that in the data in the coming week. Within the next month we’re going to start having to make our own personal decisions on how much we want to start returning to normal. We may start seeing some businesses reopening in 1-2 months. We’ll continue dealing with the disease, there will be progress on treatment, but likely not a vaccine for awhile, and things will start to get closer to normal. But I don’t think we ever return to “normal” as we once knew it.

Here’s some encouraging stuff I’ve been seeing. First, the number of daily deaths in Italy seems to be tapering down:

Source: https://virusncov.com/covid-statistics/italy

In the last ~3 weeks, South Korea has seen their efforts really start to pay off:

Source: https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/south-korea

My business partner, Jim, had this anecdotal evidence to share via Slack today:

Some encouraging news: seems to be all good here in San Jose area. My cousin works as a nurse here and she said the hospital she works at is not even close to being at capacity–they partitioned an extra wing area for ICU, but they just closed it a few days ago because lack of patients. Some of her fellow staff and doctors are considering on going to NYC to volunteer.

Yes, the Bay Area has been far ahead of the response curve, but this is a great early indicator that hopefully we’ll start to see the same happening across the country in the next couple months.

Lastly, I’m still a firm believer that COVID-19 has been circulating far longer than politicians or mainstream media would have you believe. The more I think about it, the more I believe our household already had it back in early February.

Once we have the capability, and start, to test people to see if they’ve already had COVID-19 I believe we’ll see the number of uncounted or asymptomatic people is far higher than expected. That’s great news. That means we’re far closer to hear immunity than most people believe and we’re closer to getting things back to a new normal.

Stay positive, and stay sane.