(I didn’t realize that Douglas Adams died 10 years ago! Discovered that while refreshing my memory of the title of his book.)
I have this vague recurring mental image of the Earth/Mother Nature acting like a dog with fleas on a hot summer day: Lots of frantic, angry scratching and twitching, and then a massive body shake to try and rid themselves of the irritation. The cartoon Earth in my mind’s eye sends a shower of humans spraying off into the nothingness.
Mother Nature is seriously pissed off.
I do actually have a question here:
Current worldwide death toll is estimated to be well over 2 million, with nearly 500,000 of those being in the US. Those numbers are also thought to be inaccurate and that the totals are a good deal higher. We won’t see the end of the pandemic for another year, (my guess) and the total deaths will continue to rise.
Once this beast is under control and life returns to “normal”, what do you think the effect of several million fewer people will be for the the US, other countries, and the planet? I’m thinking in terms of pollution production, jobs to be filled, economic factors that I can’t begin to wrap my brain around.
I do realize that while horrific, the actual number of people lost represents a drop in the bucket as far as total world population goes. But sometimes seemingly small changes can have big impacts.
What do you think will change or happen, be better or worse once we have a bit of control over the virus?
The lion’s share of deaths (at least in the US) appears to be among the elderly:
Out of 421,378 dead (as of February 3), I tallied 342,324 who were 65 and older. The vast majority of these folks would have been retired already, so their deaths won’t be freeing up jobs or resulting in much less commuting-related traffic/pollution.
From page 3 of this PDF, I’d estimate the over-65 population of the US to be about 35 million, so 342,324 is nearly a 1% decline in that demographic. I wonder if that will have economic impacts on the elder care industry.
It’s currently 2021; he actually died 20 years ago.
And you’re right about the deaths among the senior population. But though they don’t commute, they do still require food, medicine, lights, water etc. All of that uses energy of one kind or another.
I wonder too if it will have any effect on Medicare.
I suppose the deaths will make a dent of some size in the world’s demographics. There’ll be a blip in life insurance claims, and maybe a bigger impact on health insurance claims. A half-million extra deaths in a country of 300 million might look small in the actuary’s-eye view, though.
I’m guessing the pandemic’s impact on Medicare will be smaller than that of cutting off the payroll taxes that feed that system. All those people who died will no longer be getting pension checks.
I’m not speaking from a position of expertise, though. I haven’t worked in those fields.
The impact on Medicare and Social Security will depend on what the change is to life expectancy at age 65 or so. I haven’t seen those numbers. The number of deaths are not large enough to make much of a dent in pollution. That came from factories shutting down and traffic decreasing.
The big change will be the result of the hundreds of millions of people forced online. There had been talk about work at home for years, and certainly some people were doing it. At Sun I worked with a bunch of people who for one reason or another were far away from any offices and did fine. But managers are conservative (not in the political sense, here) and were scared to make a test of working from home. Now they had to. We’ll be studying the results of this experiment for years.
I am in a club who has monthly meetings with speakers. That got forced online. We found that we could get better speakers once they did not have to drive, and we’re even getting speakers from across the country. Most members are older than I am, and they adjusted to Zoom pretty well after the first month. We will probably have every other meeting on line even after we are all vaccinated.
That’s the kind of changes the pandemic will bring. It will be interesting.
Speaking for the US:
As I noted upthread, most of the COVID dead are 65 and older, resulting in a 1% decrease in the size of that demographic group. That’s 1% fewer people drawing Medicare, and 1% fewer people drawing social security checks. ISTM that’s a substantial reduction in expenses.
A minority of the COVID dead (about 79,000) are 18-65 years old, about 0.04% of that demographic. The deaths in this demographic skew toward lower income, so the social security and Medicare revenue lost by these deaths is probably considerably less than 0.04% of the total.
IOW, the silver lining on the COVID shitstorm is a move toward solvency for these programs.
When I wrote about “cutting off the payroll taxes,” I didn’t mean the taxes no longer coming from those who died. I meant the executive action by the former president to halt collection of payroll taxes. To be even more clear payroll taxes are separate from income taxes. Payroll taxes, at least in theory, go to pay for Social Security and Medicare. Income taxes go into the Treasury’s general fund, and they go toward everything else.
AIUI, those payroll taxes weren’t forgiven - they were merely deferred, i.e. the bill comes due later:
When are Applicable Taxes due?
The due date for withholding and payment of Applicable Taxes to the IRS is postponed until a period beginning 1 January 2021 and ending on 30 April 2021. The Memorandum and Notice only provide deferment of the Applicable Taxes, and do not provide a tax holiday or forgiveness of the amounts due.
That article was from last September. Did the policy change since then?
No the entire working age population does not skew lower income. That’s not what I said. What I said was the deaths within the 18-65 demographic skew toward the lower-income portion of that group. The pandemic is disproportionately affecting lower-income people.. These are the people who tend to work essential jobs that require them to be physically present, rely on public transit instead of personal vehicles, live in multi-unit apartment buildings, live in multi-generational households, and have substandard access to health care. The result is that even though 0.04% of the 18-65 demographic have died, the loss of tax revenue (due to dead workers) is probably much less than 0.04%.