COVID-19 Pandemic: Understanding Its History And Its Future With Shawn Cupp
27th March 2020 • Business Leaders Podcast • Bob Roark
00:00:00
01:00:43
Shownotes
We are in the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic that has since affected so many lives around the world. It has been testing the economy, public health infrastructures, and even our personal relationships. In this episode, Bob Roark tackles this pressing matter with someone who has a great deal of expertise about it, Shawn Cupp, Ph.D., the professor of Force Sustainment and Management at the Army Command and General Staff College. Shawn helps us understand COVID-19, comparing and contrasting it to what we've had before and helping us know how it will continue to affect us. Gathering up some news as well as scientific data, he informs us of the latest findings and development in terms of the creation of a vaccine. Shawn then taps into the many industries that are suffering because of the Pandemic, showing us the far-reaching implications that this will inevitably teach us for the following years to come.
COVID-19 Pandemic: People don't understand that the economics of agriculture is inelastic, not an elastic economic supply and demand.[/caption]
A 44-year-old in those days was old.
The 18 to 44-year-olds were the ones that did all the work. We were a 50% agrarian-based economy, 50% agrarian-based society and that's what slowed down productivity, slowed down a lot of business because we didn't have anybody to do the work. There was a bunch of young people left and a whole bunch of older people left. The people that were the two generations that did all the work, were almost severely affected.
As you think about the Spanish Flu experience and again, societal differences, age and how long you lived in a lifespan were different. We're way past being an agrarian society. I would say that we're more of a service-based high tech somewhat manufacturing society. From that perspective, what do you think the compare-contrast between potential supply chain interruption is from then to now?
The biggest thing then was food. A farmer fed between 18 to 20 people. Production agriculture is only about 1.5% of the population. However, it's about 17% of the GDP. A farmer feeds between 120 to 140 people. It's vastly different because of technology, research, land grant universities that were set up in post-reconstruction, that were set up to do research after the reconstruction. Those all began to bloom after the ‘20s and ‘30s as far as being able to produce more food with fewer people with more mechanization. We have even more people that grow even more food than we did back in 1918. What does that mean to business in the future? That means that tariffs are going to probably double or triple with some nations like China, but they're going to pay it because they need soybeans. They also had a devastating swine Coronavirus that impacted large portions of their swine population that they've started importing more and more from us and other countries.
What I see us going towards is more self-sufficiency, more industry that is going to be for Americans so we don't have supply chain issues with pharmaceuticals, ventilators, N95 masks, with all the equipment that we're going to find out, we don't have enough of or we can't distribute fast enough. The days of defense civil servant when we had post World War II where we had large food stocks, water and things set up for whatever would happen with nuclear war. I can see us going back towards that because once this goes through the population, whether it's one wave or two waves, people are going to be more dependent to be self-sufficient to themselves. What does that mean to a business owner? That means some things are going to fundamentally change in the production and manufacturing sectors. Some things are going to fundamentally change in the agriculture sector.
The productions, I remembered the entire theory that was talked about just in time inventory. You have somebody to make this widget and somebody makes the red widget and they're all theoretically supposed to trickle in here right at the right time and then we can do that. Do you think that's going to be dissipated?
I'm a Desert Storm veteran, so I believe in the just in case. The just in case is the iron mountains had a purpose. If we look at the military or we look at the military support to civil authorities, which is a niche area that I'm quite familiar with, which we are working in. The hospitals, the ships, the equipment, the doctors, all that we're expanding not only from the military side but also the fourth pillar of VA is to help support the nation in this time of need. You're talking about logistics and it's not in time, it's just in case. Where do we find more ventilators? Where do we find more hospital beds? Where do we find more oxygen? Where do we find more healthcare workers? Where do we find more capacity to treat these patients? When you start talking about mortality rates, there's a number of those people that get sick that if they have a ventilator, oxygen or if they have medical care, they will survive. As we see in Italy and probably also in Iran, they have less capacity. They have less capability and it's going to be reflected in our mortality rate. How many of those people there if they got sick here, would survive?
[bctt tweet="For every virus there is, we've got a way to shut it down." username=""]
That'll be interesting on the data skew. There’s the Belt and Road Initiative where there’s supposed to be the railroad from China and to Europe. You look at the incidences of outbreaks and concentrations of outbreaks along the belt and road of it. If we come up, there's some discussion that you and I talked about before we started, the hydroxychloroquine. They're talking about that has some level of efficacy in treating the symptoms at least.
That's what you're doing. You’re treating the symptoms. You're trying to make the body as comfortable as possible so that you can intake oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. You can still do metabolic. You can still breathe. You can survive the viruses’ attack on your body. That's why people with various health conditions are more susceptible to the disease because simple things like breathing are incredibly hard, especially with this virus. Based on what I’ve seen in symptoms, it's like breathing underwater because it gets so labored. As opposed to the regular flu, which would be headaches, body aches, other things that may happen to you as far as symptoms go.
I saw Bayer is going to donate 2 or 3 million of hydroxychloroquine derivatives that they were going to make available. The stuff is well-known. It's been around for 70 years as I understand it. Is it an anti-malarial?
It is an anti-malarial. There's a group of antimalarials and it's one of the ones. If you look at some of the nations that have COVID-19 that have had malaria, they have fewer incidents of COVID and that's where they're coming up with this might have some efficacy for everybody that gets COVID-19.
I think about the business owner out there that's dealing. For the business owners and so on, when we're past all this and we have some idea whether there's a vaccine or not, we'll be posting this and we're not all going to die as many are running around being emotional about it. What do you think you're going to see societally or business world or changes that's going to happen?
You're going to have even more social media contact rather than a concert. You're going to have more social media streaming services rather than going to a theater. You're going to have communications like we're doing that is going to become happenstance. It's going to be like getting up in the morning and shave. It's going to be what you do every day. Telework will not be some strange ubiquitous concept that only people that do hedge funds or whatever work that way. More businesses are going to be that way. It may cause some fundamental shifts in the way we operate.
We've gone from a manufacturing industrial age to service, to an information age. They may go back to a service age and the service is going to be different. For example, small business owners like restaurants, a lot of them are going to go out of business. Some of them will fundamentally change the way they do business and it will be like the Airbnb model where you order food and it shows up instead of you going out. We already eat about 30% to 40% of our meals out. One of the other things that have come out in the past several years is that we waste about 40% of our food because we want perfect apples and pears. We want to go to the store and get strawberries every month of the year. Less of that will happen. When I was in Europe, you had a refrigerator that would carry 2 to 3 days’ worth of food, not the giant refrigerators and freezers we have in the US that we carry weeks of food in.
It may fundamentally change the way houses are built because of how cabinets and kitchens are made. Do we cook or do we eat out? Do we bring in? Are we going to be more self-sufficient? You would have to go through a whole a tool and die generation. I don't know if this generation will be impacted enough where this fundamentally shifts their values and their desires back to an earlier age where you grow your food or you grow a portion of your food like what my great grandparents grew up with after the Spanish Flu and into the Depression. I don't know if it's going to fundamentally shift that, but it will shift some of the service industry. It's going to shift some of the streaming industry. I’ve stated for decades that agriculture is a strategic national security asset. It is something we take for granted because too few people are employed in the production part of it. Everybody talks about paying farmers not to grow food. People don't understand the economics of agriculture that it's inelastic, not an elastic economic supply and demand. People don't understand what that means because you can only have one time to grow an item versus you can start and stop and assembly line a number of times.
[caption id="attachment_5089" align="aligncenter" width="600"]
COVID-19 Pandemic: We may become more isolated as a nation because we want to keep ourselves from being attacked or influenced by another pandemic.[/caption]
The only thing that's helped us agriculturally is we've got the Chiles of the world that are able to take and produce in their summer, which is our winter. We have freight that brings it in time effectively.
I can see us doing more indoor, more hydroponics, more self-sufficient where we're not importing. We're going to grow more of our own food. Does that mean we shut down the borders? I don't know. I can tell you back in ‘97, there was an FMD, Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in Taiwan and Taiwan was a giant pig farm if you didn't know that. It had eight million pigs. They were the local source of pork for the Pacific Rim. They've never come back from that because they had to destroy all the animals.
It's hard to breed that many animals if you don't have a breeding stock to start with. It’s large numbers.
We're one of the fresh beef producers that's not Foot and Mouth Disease vaccinated in the world. We're going to take some of those things and apply them and leverage them. I also think we're going to condense and become more self-sufficient in a lot of areas, agriculture being one of them. It's the service industry and streaming services will be where you put your money. I’ve already...
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Watch the episode here:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA7MawLP7Tw[/embed]COVID-19 Pandemic: Understanding Its History And Its Future With Shawn Cupp
We have Dr. Shawn Cupp. He's a PhD. He's the professor of Force Sustainment and Management at the Army Command and General Staff College. Shawn, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you for having me. We're going to do a little bit of something different. We're going to talk about COVID-19. We're in the midst of it and Shawn has a great deal of expertise and thoughts on it. I thought I would turn it over to Shawn. When we talked about it was compare and contrast what we've had before and some of the history and some of your thoughts about that. There have been about thirteen different pandemics since the 1700s. The last major one that was worldwide was the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu that happened during the middle of World War I. It came from Kansas where I'm at. It went into Camp Funston and spread around the world. Historically, it was called the Spanish Flu because Spain was neutral during that fight and was the only one that would report on it. That has some significance now because China and some other news agencies are trying to blame people for what happened. We're in the midst of somewhat weaponizing information about blame. Who did what? Who started this? That is something significant that's going to happen in the outcome 3 to 5 years from now. We've also had a pandemic in Hong Kong and another flu in the late ‘50s and late ‘60s. Another pandemic was another H1N1 designated with swine, which was in 2009. Each of these viruses, at least Coronaviruses, you have to remember a few things about them. They don't need oxygen to live. They don't produce any products. They don't have to have any gender to reproduce. They are RNA-based, not DNA-based. When a water droplet that has COVID or SARS version two in it gets into your hands or you rub what we would call fomites like a computer screen or a door handle or a bag, you touch your mouth. That's why we talk about washing your hands all the time. You wash your hands, you get rid of the virus. Its only way to reproduce is to get into your lungs and change the RNA, DNA the next cell beside it. That's how it reproduces. When you cough or sneeze, then you expel that out. That's why we have the ten-foot social distance requirements that have been put out by the CDC. That's how you keep the virus moving from person to person. The other part of the science piece is the R0. How infectious is it? For example, if somebody had measles walks into a school, the R0 is about 12 to 18. That means it's very infectious but has a low mortality rate. As opposed to the various flus that we get vaccinated for, that have an R0 value of 1 to 2. If you walked into a room, maybe 1 or 2 people out of 10 would get the infection versus the COVID-19 infection rate is R0 3 to 5. If you walk into a room, 30% or 40% of the people in the room that are exposed to it will get it. Some unique things about COVID-19 are you can be asymptomatic and spread the disease. You can have no symptoms and spread the disease, which is different than 2002, 2003 when we have the SARS, which is the closest Coronavirus that this is to. It's about 80% match, RNA-based. The way we controlled it was Toronto, China, the US put temperature sensors in the airports. You had to have a temperature to be symptomatic and spread it, so they could control it a lot easier that way. Suffice to say the rates are different in different countries as far as mortality. We have rates of around 4%. If you look at the entire globe, John Hopkins has on their GIS database dashboard. They're also keeping it by country. In Italy, it's around 8%. In Iran, it's around 6.5%. Whereas a normal flu season is anywhere from 0.1% to 0.05%, so it's a lot more deadly than what we would call a normal flu season. When you think about that, a normal flu season here, if I had the flu and it's bad enough, I go to a local emergent care or whatever. Do you think that's influenced because they know what to do with the existing flu that we've had available? Do we know how to treat and manage the symptoms? That's one, but the other thing that is dramatically different about this is since the ‘40s, we've had a vaccine for flu. You get a vaccine that's a cocktail of the last 2 or 3 flu seasons and you have some immunity to it. Also, if you're like yourself or myself and you lived through several of these pandemics, you have a herd immunity to the flu. For the people that don't know what herd immunity is, let's dig into that a little. If you're alive during a pandemic and you survived it, like the people that survived 1918 Spanish Flu, their body built up immunity, antibodies to that virus. In the ‘50s when the next pandemic happened, they were much better able to fight off that virus versus being exposed to that virus for the first time in a pandemic form. If you live through several of these, and that's the part that the science has not come back and yet said, once you have COVID-19, are you immune to it? We don't know. That's why the document that came out that was published by the Imperial College in the UK about non-pharmaceutical interventions, they're talking about eighteen months with waves of illness. The reason they're talking that is because they don't know if you're immune to the virus once you've had it. There's a lot of science it has to go into that. We're worried about trying to come up with treatments because you don't prevent the virus unless you come up with a vaccine. We have treatments which can be various drugs, RNA-based drugs. That's why things like if you have underlying illnesses, what we call comorbidity, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, a compromised immune system, you have a higher risk of actually dying from the disease. That's the people that are affected the most with this virus. That being said, this eighteen-month planning window is because we don't know if you're immune once you get it. China said they stopped having community spread person-to-person of the virus. Their curve is supposedly going to stop going up and flatten. That means everybody and in the Hubei province eventually is going to start going back to school, back to work. If they didn't catch the virus, they can catch it again. If they caught the virus, we don't know if they can catch it again. This might spike again. It took us about six months to get the SARS genome up on the web in 2002, 2003. It took us one day to get the genome for COVID-19 up on the web. It took us two years to get a vaccine. I heard we are already giving vaccination and some trials to people in Washington State because they're so far along in the progression of the disease, we’ve given them the opportunity to take this trial vaccine to see if it will help. The curve that we are looking at is the curve of how fast can we get not necessarily preventatives, but treatments, various drugs that we're doing, but also how do we get a vaccine that we can start giving people? The demographics across the globe, over 60, you're at risk. If you're over 80, you're three times at risk. If you have comorbidity or underlying health conditions, you have a much greater risk no matter how old you are. The 2009 pandemic, there are certain demographics that are more risks than everybody else. For example, if we go back to 1918, the people that died were from 18 to 44-year-olds. They had the highest death rate. [caption id="attachment_5088" align="aligncenter" width="600"] COVID-19 Pandemic: People don't understand that the economics of agriculture is inelastic, not an elastic economic supply and demand.[/caption]
A 44-year-old in those days was old.
The 18 to 44-year-olds were the ones that did all the work. We were a 50% agrarian-based economy, 50% agrarian-based society and that's what slowed down productivity, slowed down a lot of business because we didn't have anybody to do the work. There was a bunch of young people left and a whole bunch of older people left. The people that were the two generations that did all the work, were almost severely affected.
As you think about the Spanish Flu experience and again, societal differences, age and how long you lived in a lifespan were different. We're way past being an agrarian society. I would say that we're more of a service-based high tech somewhat manufacturing society. From that perspective, what do you think the compare-contrast between potential supply chain interruption is from then to now?
The biggest thing then was food. A farmer fed between 18 to 20 people. Production agriculture is only about 1.5% of the population. However, it's about 17% of the GDP. A farmer feeds between 120 to 140 people. It's vastly different because of technology, research, land grant universities that were set up in post-reconstruction, that were set up to do research after the reconstruction. Those all began to bloom after the ‘20s and ‘30s as far as being able to produce more food with fewer people with more mechanization. We have even more people that grow even more food than we did back in 1918. What does that mean to business in the future? That means that tariffs are going to probably double or triple with some nations like China, but they're going to pay it because they need soybeans. They also had a devastating swine Coronavirus that impacted large portions of their swine population that they've started importing more and more from us and other countries.
What I see us going towards is more self-sufficiency, more industry that is going to be for Americans so we don't have supply chain issues with pharmaceuticals, ventilators, N95 masks, with all the equipment that we're going to find out, we don't have enough of or we can't distribute fast enough. The days of defense civil servant when we had post World War II where we had large food stocks, water and things set up for whatever would happen with nuclear war. I can see us going back towards that because once this goes through the population, whether it's one wave or two waves, people are going to be more dependent to be self-sufficient to themselves. What does that mean to a business owner? That means some things are going to fundamentally change in the production and manufacturing sectors. Some things are going to fundamentally change in the agriculture sector.
The productions, I remembered the entire theory that was talked about just in time inventory. You have somebody to make this widget and somebody makes the red widget and they're all theoretically supposed to trickle in here right at the right time and then we can do that. Do you think that's going to be dissipated?
I'm a Desert Storm veteran, so I believe in the just in case. The just in case is the iron mountains had a purpose. If we look at the military or we look at the military support to civil authorities, which is a niche area that I'm quite familiar with, which we are working in. The hospitals, the ships, the equipment, the doctors, all that we're expanding not only from the military side but also the fourth pillar of VA is to help support the nation in this time of need. You're talking about logistics and it's not in time, it's just in case. Where do we find more ventilators? Where do we find more hospital beds? Where do we find more oxygen? Where do we find more healthcare workers? Where do we find more capacity to treat these patients? When you start talking about mortality rates, there's a number of those people that get sick that if they have a ventilator, oxygen or if they have medical care, they will survive. As we see in Italy and probably also in Iran, they have less capacity. They have less capability and it's going to be reflected in our mortality rate. How many of those people there if they got sick here, would survive?
[bctt tweet="For every virus there is, we've got a way to shut it down." username=""]
That'll be interesting on the data skew. There’s the Belt and Road Initiative where there’s supposed to be the railroad from China and to Europe. You look at the incidences of outbreaks and concentrations of outbreaks along the belt and road of it. If we come up, there's some discussion that you and I talked about before we started, the hydroxychloroquine. They're talking about that has some level of efficacy in treating the symptoms at least.
That's what you're doing. You’re treating the symptoms. You're trying to make the body as comfortable as possible so that you can intake oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. You can still do metabolic. You can still breathe. You can survive the viruses’ attack on your body. That's why people with various health conditions are more susceptible to the disease because simple things like breathing are incredibly hard, especially with this virus. Based on what I’ve seen in symptoms, it's like breathing underwater because it gets so labored. As opposed to the regular flu, which would be headaches, body aches, other things that may happen to you as far as symptoms go.
I saw Bayer is going to donate 2 or 3 million of hydroxychloroquine derivatives that they were going to make available. The stuff is well-known. It's been around for 70 years as I understand it. Is it an anti-malarial?
It is an anti-malarial. There's a group of antimalarials and it's one of the ones. If you look at some of the nations that have COVID-19 that have had malaria, they have fewer incidents of COVID and that's where they're coming up with this might have some efficacy for everybody that gets COVID-19.
I think about the business owner out there that's dealing. For the business owners and so on, when we're past all this and we have some idea whether there's a vaccine or not, we'll be posting this and we're not all going to die as many are running around being emotional about it. What do you think you're going to see societally or business world or changes that's going to happen?
You're going to have even more social media contact rather than a concert. You're going to have more social media streaming services rather than going to a theater. You're going to have communications like we're doing that is going to become happenstance. It's going to be like getting up in the morning and shave. It's going to be what you do every day. Telework will not be some strange ubiquitous concept that only people that do hedge funds or whatever work that way. More businesses are going to be that way. It may cause some fundamental shifts in the way we operate.
We've gone from a manufacturing industrial age to service, to an information age. They may go back to a service age and the service is going to be different. For example, small business owners like restaurants, a lot of them are going to go out of business. Some of them will fundamentally change the way they do business and it will be like the Airbnb model where you order food and it shows up instead of you going out. We already eat about 30% to 40% of our meals out. One of the other things that have come out in the past several years is that we waste about 40% of our food because we want perfect apples and pears. We want to go to the store and get strawberries every month of the year. Less of that will happen. When I was in Europe, you had a refrigerator that would carry 2 to 3 days’ worth of food, not the giant refrigerators and freezers we have in the US that we carry weeks of food in.
It may fundamentally change the way houses are built because of how cabinets and kitchens are made. Do we cook or do we eat out? Do we bring in? Are we going to be more self-sufficient? You would have to go through a whole a tool and die generation. I don't know if this generation will be impacted enough where this fundamentally shifts their values and their desires back to an earlier age where you grow your food or you grow a portion of your food like what my great grandparents grew up with after the Spanish Flu and into the Depression. I don't know if it's going to fundamentally shift that, but it will shift some of the service industry. It's going to shift some of the streaming industry. I’ve stated for decades that agriculture is a strategic national security asset. It is something we take for granted because too few people are employed in the production part of it. Everybody talks about paying farmers not to grow food. People don't understand the economics of agriculture that it's inelastic, not an elastic economic supply and demand. People don't understand what that means because you can only have one time to grow an item versus you can start and stop and assembly line a number of times.
[caption id="attachment_5089" align="aligncenter" width="600"] COVID-19 Pandemic: We may become more isolated as a nation because we want to keep ourselves from being attacked or influenced by another pandemic.[/caption]
The only thing that's helped us agriculturally is we've got the Chiles of the world that are able to take and produce in their summer, which is our winter. We have freight that brings it in time effectively.
I can see us doing more indoor, more hydroponics, more self-sufficient where we're not importing. We're going to grow more of our own food. Does that mean we shut down the borders? I don't know. I can tell you back in ‘97, there was an FMD, Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in Taiwan and Taiwan was a giant pig farm if you didn't know that. It had eight million pigs. They were the local source of pork for the Pacific Rim. They've never come back from that because they had to destroy all the animals.
It's hard to breed that many animals if you don't have a breeding stock to start with. It’s large numbers.
We're one of the fresh beef producers that's not Foot and Mouth Disease vaccinated in the world. We're going to take some of those things and apply them and leverage them. I also think we're going to condense and become more self-sufficient in a lot of areas, agriculture being one of them. It's the service industry and streaming services will be where you put your money. I’ve already...