Amen to that. Swiss unemployment peaked at 3.7%, and is now back to 2.8%. I guess there have to be certain upsides to balance the downside risk of NK-style dictatorship we face in Switzerland according to pundits.
This, in my view, is a complete surrender to human vanity and lack of discipline which caused Covid 19 to become the global threat it has become.
I don’t think so. The next epidemic will happen at some point and there will be a scramble to develop a vaccine.
There isn’t much else “we” can do.
I am pretty sure the testing and tracking bonanza, which distributed some tens of BN (just in the UK) among a load of shysters, crooks, wide boys and criminals, will not be repeated.
At least as mankind we might have learned something from the disaster of the last 1,5 years: I still remember far to many speeches and entire conferences in the 2000s that basically declared that mankind has overcome infections and the 21st century will be dominated by non communicable diseases.
Malibuflyer wrote:
From 19 to 20 the unemployment rate in the EU only slightly increased from 6.9 to 7.1% while in the US unemployment exploded from 3.8 to 8.6%.
Yeah…but most EU countries have fuddled everything by “Furlough” for the last year and a half… so the numbers dont reflect the reality, which will unfortunately come to pass eventually.
I don’t think so. The next epidemic will happen at some point and there will be a scramble to develop a vaccine.
There was a $30 billion proposal to prepare for future pandemics which overall seemed like a good idea to me, though it seems expensive. Part of the plan involved developing vaccines for organisms that are known to be threats (as Coronaviruses obviously were, following SARS-1). If a SARS-1 vaccine had been ready, we could have been a lot quicker off the mark when SARS-2 came, and a lot more confident in our strategic thinking, knowing that a tweaked vaccine was likely to work.
Any such move to develop vaccines proactively should in my view be an international effort rather than something that is just left to the USA.
skydriller wrote:
but most EU countries have fuddled everything by “Furlough” for the last year and a half… so the numbers dont reflect the reality, which will unfortunately come to pass eventually.
Might be – or not. I actually do not see the masses of functionally unemployed workers right now that are only kept outside the statistic by some kind of publicly funded program. To the opposite: Vast majority of companies are quite urgently looking for additional staff. Even restaurants and hotels – without any doubt amongst the industries hit hardest by the shutdowns – complain that they can not find enough staff because lots of those set free in the last 18 months have found well paid jobs in other sectors.
Yes, time will tell which economies will have come through the crisis how well – the only thing I’m saying right now is that the narrative that the US has done great for the economy while the European (shutdown) way has hit the economy so hard is at least questionable.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Vast majority of companies are quite urgently looking for additional staff. Even restaurants and hotels – without any doubt amongst the industries hit hardest by the shutdowns – complain that they can not find enough staff because lots of those set free in the last 18 months have found well paid jobs in other sectors.
I’ve seen this here in Switzerland and also in Bulgaria, where the tourism industry had huge problems finding staff for the summer, which was quite normal in terms of occupancy, but had mostly Bulgarians in the hotels rather than foreigners.
Here in Switzerland, some people I talked to said the problem was they could not get the seasonal staff they usually have due to travel restrictions or due to the fact that the staff rather stayed home. Which is not totally surprising, given the fact that exactly this kind of staff is very suspectible to exposure once they work.
It may well be that due to this, some staff who go abroad over the summer might have found that working at home is not so bad either and maybe even less exploitation, alas with lesser salaries. Might not be a bad thing altogether.
Malibuflyer wrote:
the only thing I’m saying right now is that the narrative that the US has done great for the economy while the European (shutdown) way has hit the economy so hard is at least questionable.
I fully agree. While there are considerable differences, Europe as a whole has done no worse than the US. The Jury is still out on the total figures, both workplace wise and casualties of Covid, but I don’t see that the US has done so much better.
There is one massive difference though: For the travel industry, the US as one country obviously has had much better pre-conditions as they had basically one set of travel rules and were capable of bringing back airline travel easier than here, where local and national rule differences have caused massive problems. If that particular branch needs to learn something, it would have to be that within Europe (all of it!) we would need standardized regulation for travelling so that everyone knows very clearly what is required and can plan accordingly. Flip-flop regulation, change by the day, threats of quarantine which come and go, are poison for any industry.
By now many countries have realized that people much prefer unified regulation regarding such as green pass e.t.c. to mish mash made up pencil written “rules” which may change at the drop of a penny. It also looks like that people finally bite the bullet and get the vaccine now that several countries threaten to make (or have made) Covid passports compulsory. This should also help slowing down any future waves.
Europe as a whole has done no worse than the US.
If you take serious illness and death as the only yardstick that may be true.
But since on average Europe had much more restrictions than the US had, overall it has do a lot worse.
Cobalt wrote:
If you take serious illness and death as the only yardstick that may be true.
If you take serious illness and death as yardstick, Europe has clearly done much better. If you take economic indicators (unemployment, GDP development, etc.) as yardstick, the jury is still out but there is no indication so far, that Europe did worse than US.
Therefore it is quite obvious, that the stricter measures implemented in Europe (on average) lead to the desired results and generated the better outcomes. The narrative that is sometimes told that “Europe killed its economy by the strict lockdown” is simply fake news.
One can obviously still argue that even the better outcomes in Europe are not worth the level of restrictions the governments had imposed – but I can’t see any fact base that would indicate that these strict measures did not lead to such better outcomes.
Malibuflyer wrote:
One can obviously still argue that even the better outcomes in Europe are not worth the level of restrictions the governments had imposed – but I can’t see any fact base that would indicate that these strict measures did not lead to such better outcomes.
I guess we will see now, where stricter restrictions are basically gone, what havoc Covid19 will cause amongst the unvaccinated under such conditions. The outcome does not look good at all at the moment, with hospitals again reaching capacity limits fast and like in 2020, summer tourism has helped trigger the current 4th wave.
Malibuflyer wrote:
The narrative that is sometimes told that “Europe killed its economy by the strict lockdown” is simply fake news.
It very much looks that way. Obviously there has been damage to certain areas of the economy, namely airlines and the travel industry, entertainment and hospitality, but that damage has also been seen in the US. In any event, it is mute to discuss who’s done better unless there is an agenda behind it. What should be discussed is how to do better next time and how to finally get this mess under control and people vaccinated. Otherwise we’ll see a continuation of wave after wave and will never get rid of restrictions to the extent we would need.
