This whole coronavirus thing is scary, and unlike anything that anyone well under 105 or 110 years old could possibly remember.
The closest thing like this that has happened in relatively modern history was the outbreak of what was called “Spanish Flu” back in 1918. The numbers for that were rather staggering, with estimates of people who died numbering in the tens of millions. There are even estimates that it might have killed up to 100 million, although most estimates are less than that.
This is an airborne virus, which makes this obviously very dangerous. You may very well get it just by proximity to someone who is infected, and what makes this particularly dangerous is that some who are contagious might not show any symptoms yet. Indeed, some who look and feel healthy might be infected and spread the coronavirus. That makes this very scary.
But indeed, it is not only the health risks that make this whole situation scary. Already, it has had an economic impact, and it has been quite detrimental. The stock market crashed, and many people have been sent home from work for an indeterminate amount of time. No one knows when – or even if – things will return to normal. And many people may not even have jobs to return to. A lot of smaller businesses are not going to be able to survive this, and there are estimates that just from the past two weeks, there may be anywhere from one to two million Americans who will find themselves suddenly unemployed. The number of people filing for unemployment is growing daily. It feels like we are on the brink of an economic downturn that might last a long, long time.
Hopefully, it will not turn into an economic disaster, although that possibility cannot be completely eliminated.
How bad could it get, though?
There are projections that suggest unemployment may rise to 30 percent, which, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently mentioned, is higher than even the peak unemployment rate seen during the Great Depression.
Here is what she recently said:
"We may see up to 30% unemployment rate. At the peak of the Great Depression, we saw 24% unemployment. So this is something unlike anything we have ever seen."
Scary thought.
That is not to say that those kinds of numbers will actually happen. But there is so much uncertainty surrounding this thing, that nothing seems impossible. None of us have seen anything like what is happening right now, so there is no clear model for us to compare with or follow. We just do not know what is going to happen.
Here is the link to the source from which I got the quote used above:
Quote by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez taken from Twitter page of Justice Democrats @justicedems:
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