Food falls under the economy, the economy isn't just the stock market or things rich people do rich people things in. The economy is the vast network stretching across the globe that works to supply goods and services in the places they are needed, when the economy starts shutting down so do a lot of things we need for daily life. All the government stimulus in the world isn't going to help anyone if there aren't goods to purchase.
The meat plants have largely stayed open as essential businesses, only closing or even putting in controls when there's a number of employee cases that can no longer be ignored. So in this case, we're not looking at the trade-off between closing companies preemptively to save lives and economic output, but instead the trade-off between closing companies in response to severe sickness throughout the workforce vs. whatever economic could remain in these conditions.
I -do- think in a lot of jurisdictions, e.g. the SF Bay Area-- we are going too far. We've had slowly declining ICU occupancy for the past 3 weeks (a trailing indicator behind disease) and now even case counts are falling noticeably even though testing has improved. We should be -slightly- easing controls and seeing if we can keep the disease load constant or falling. Instead we won't even talk about it until May 4th, and I worry we'll either take too much of a step at once or make a tiny movement much later than we should have tried it.
The problem is we STILL don't have enough equipment for healthcare workers if that ICU starts filling up.
Part of the reason for the lockdown was to give time for all the equipment industries to spin up. Unfortunately, the US federal government squandered that.
Until the hospitals can deal with a New York scenario and not have the healthcare workers contracting it due to lack of equipment, we shouldn't relax.
Then, just within food itself, what of people with allergies and special needs, and separating the "real" from the "I think gluten free means healthier" types.
It's the kind of dependency complexity that economists would drool over, but during good times it's probably a far less profitable area of research than those that cause economics to be looked down upon as part of the problem.
There aren't any. If you grow food, you're essential. If you ship food, you're essential. If you fix the trucks that ship food, you're essential. If you fix the air conditioner in the auto shop that fixes the trucks that ship food, you're essential. If you make screws for the air conditioner that gets installed in that auto shop, you're essential.
Read the shutdown orders. They enumerate essential industries, and the list of them is incredibly broad. In Washington state (Which has one of first, and furthest reaching shutdown orders), if you make literally anything that the military uses... You're essential. The list is incredibly broad.
These disruptions are caused directly by the virus getting people sick, and taking them out of work (And their workplaces, until people can get tested, and their workspace can be sanitized) - not the shutdown.
The shutdown actually serves to keep these facilities open, because it has reduced the virus's spread through the population.
1. Meatpacking, and its supporting supply chains is an essential business. No state in the US has lifted a finger to shut it down.
2. These plant shutdowns are caused by people working in meatpacking plants getting sick, and being unable to work.
I don't understand how you can blame this on an economic shutdown. If anything, without the shutdown, the meatpackers would have gotten sick sooner, and in greater numbers.
There has been slowed production due to inadequate workforce, but I don't think many plants have -closed- for this reason.
The markets have cascading effect, even if individuals don't own equity. Unemployment is a huge factor in what people generally refer to as "the economy."
It's all intertwined and I think most people realize that.
2. Recessions cause the destruction of money (Due to defaults, and lack of new loans). This causes deflation. If the new money created by the printing press does not exceed these deflationary pressures, you won't even get inflation, let alone hyperinflation.
3. Deflation is horrible, and is much more dangerous than mild inflation.
4. The printed money is currently chasing investment assets (Mostly stocks), not flour and ground beef. Our previous experience with QE did not result in the prices of commodities inflating - only the prices of investments.
Inflation is not the problem.
i'm not a vegetarian but if the choice is between people living and me having access to pork i choose the former.
But seriously, it's never going to be a binary thing. 100 years ago, people ate far less meat, because it was relatively more expensive and scarcer. While avoiding shopping, I've not been eating meat on a daily basis. Once a week or so is fine.
This isn't a problem specific to meat at all; the same kind of interruption to supply chains can occur anywhere through the economy. So you don't necessarily have the option of falling back on veggies.
I'd love to see some rich people forced to work in meat packing plants alongside men and women infected with this coronavirus.
It's inherently immoral to force people to work at great risk to themselves and their families just because "the economy", as would be the case in states where the abhorrent practice of at-will employment is law.
We obviously don't shut everything down because of 1 in 1,000,000 risks. We don't shut everything down for 250 in 1M risks (the flu).
Here we have what's likely to be a 1,800 in 1M risk, based on the latest infection fatality rate numbers and the estimate of how many people would be infected before herd immunity. It's 7x worse than the flu. It's also not a risk that it's clear we'll be able to avoid. So here it gets hard to reason about what's right to do.
And, of course, we obviously can't act to protect people at a level that will result in worse outcomes, like starvation or famine or collapse of public order.
If you think about it, meat plants are the wet markets of the US. Albeit with sanitary standards, refrigeration, etc, but if there was going to be another zoonotic crossbreeding event, where the human coronavirus from a sick plant worker merges and mutates with a bovine coronavirus within dying slaughterhouse animals - you could be looking at a worse event.
These plants are not shutting down because of precautions, they are shutting down because the plant workers are sick and test positive.
Farmers being forced to pour milk down the drain:
https://twitter.com/freshairfarmer/status/124787620556452659...
Retail toilet paper manufacturers not setup to handle load from people pooping at home instead of work (and corporate TP factories don't know how to sell to grocery stores):
https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about...
Covid testing blocked because of equipment regulations:
In the US, we have a free market that has resulted in the cost of milk production falling below the break even price for a lot of small dairy farms: https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/special-reports/dairy...
No, because half the business world thinks that we're going to all re-open in two weeks, and isn't willing to spend money on any kind of retooling/restructuring for such a short period of time.
After all, we could use robustness as our optimization criterion.
Anyway the meat industry isn't special. The whole economy needs to run on stocked up supplies and skeleton crews for a while. That's why its so important to get this right the first time. If the lock down only consists of half-measures and the crisis is prolonged there aren't enough supplies to take another shot at it. Scarily, I'm seeing a whole lot of half-measures right now.
We need to move (ASAP) in jurisdictions where the virus is largely under control, to half-measures that are hopefully sufficient to prevent another large incident wave and that provide economic output/lets us "stock up again". This will allow a slow reduction in population susceptibility. And we need to be ready to tighten again if it looks like we're going to run out of ICU capacity.
As bad as New York's response has been, treading right next to disaster/health care overload, they may have attained a magical proportion of the population where Rt is greatly reduced. I'm betting that when we have the serology study, we'll find 15-30%, or even more-- of the population of NYC has antibodies-- a good chunk of the way to herd immunity and enough to greatly reduce the amount of control measures needed to control the virus.
Herd immunity isn't a solution if your immunity only lasts 6 months. This is NOT a flu virus--this is a Coronavirus--immunity is generally limited for Coronaviruses(virii?).
If it's under 12 months, every flu season will likely also be Covid-19 season.
Cornavirus immunity seems to top out at about 24-36 months--if you're lucky. SARS seems to be 24, IIRC.
But it's not like the spigot is turning off / we're stopping all production. What's it falling to? If it's 85% of typical demand, that storage will stretch for awhile, especially because many people may be choosing cheaper staples to consume.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/amp/Impossible-Burger-comes...
The question is why is the price so high, is it scale, inherent costs or just a virtue tax?
I've been reading HN for six years, and near as I can tell the vast majority don't support any health care rights, let alone universal health care. It's generally acceptable on HN that companies can fire people for being sick for too many days. There's no federally mandated sick leave at all. HNer's don't care about that.
I have more sympathy for HN interns who have lost their internships, except about 10 seconds later I remember just how young they are. They'll be fine.
And there are all the delivery persons, sacrificing more than most anyone that has the luxury of reading or writing here.
Very little is made on HN about how disproportionately health care workers are sacrificing family, sanity, health, and their lives. For no extra pay. They don't tend to get things like bonus pay at the end of the year, common among the HN crowd. Essential workers, most especially the ones stocking grocery stores full of jerks who refuse to wear masks or socially distance, likewise have no health care rights. They don't get bonus pay. If they get sick and are out of work for two months, they aren't assured they will be paid for time they didn't work. HN doesn't care about that. Routinely arguing against "socialist" laws that should try and make life actually fair, as contrary to the free market. Whatever that is.
And very little is recognized on HN about the consequences about "reopening" or "resuming" the economy on health care workers. It is a defacto demand: we own you; you are our slaves; you must work to protect us; work harder; sacrifice your lives; and above all, when the inevitably higher case load explodes you will choose who lives and dies. That is your job. To decide. And live with the scar of having chosen who lives and who dies. Deal with it. That is the demand behind every single "reopen" argument.
Maybe let's try to avoid freaking out about maybe not having dead pig on our sandwiches? It's degrading.
Those workers at shut down plants? They should have unemployment benefits pay them in the vicinity of 80%, at the least. That is not the system we have. HNer's don't care about that. It would be a competitive disincentive to free markets if the government were to compete with shit jobs no one really wants.
You know, and then there's the minority who consider universal basic income and universal health care from time to time. And I'm not talking about them. They're they minority on HN, near as I can tell.
South Korea has twice the population of NY state, and yet NY state has 62x the deaths. ROK and the U.S. had their first confirmed cases a day apart. It should humiliate every American what has transpired. Federal, state, parties, free market - across the board the result of deaths proves a culture wide incompetency. It's embarrassing.
And, if people reduce their meat consumption form these shortages, it could have excellent results on people's health. The last time a country went completely without meat or dairy was in durring the world war, when the Nazis took all the dairy and meat from Sweden. Their rate of heart disease went down dramatically for many years. As soon as the war ended and meat returned, the rate of heart disease sky rocketed back to the original numbers. (source: Forks over knives, a netflix documentary).
The case studies presented in the documentary are accurate and credible, with numerous historical facts.
As for bioavailability, the difference isn't very huge and you'll get more then enough amino acids from plant based sources without all the carcinogens that come from animal based sources.
Animals do Not make their own protein. They all get it from plants. Plants make the protein. Then the animals eat it. When you eat an animal, your just eating recycled protein. So, why not just cut out the middle man.
Meat has many problems. Dr. Milton Mills a stanford doctor, explains it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nti7JrBOQAk
Also, the people who live in the blue zones (the 100yr+ zones) typically eat very little or no meat/dairy.
