How covid19 has affected Bralice household

I'm going to sound incredibly privileged when I say that being personally affected by an economy-wide shock is a novel experience for me. Last time one of these happened I was 17 and probably making jokes about Michael Phelps at school.

On Friday I caught a cold. I haven't been travelling, nor have I come into contact with a known case, so according to official advice I don't need to get tested. Whether or not I need to self-isolate is less clear, but I think any sensible person in my shoes would. Obviously there's a risk to others but also myself if I go out now with a compromised immune system.

So last night my fever broke, and today I called uni telling them I wouldn't be tutoring any of my classes this week. I'm planning to listen to all of my classes online as well. They say that they'll close uni down once a case breaks but I think the probability of someone having the virus on campus by now is quite close to 100%. Potentially the uni is just trying to make sure that its remote-learning infrastructure is robust enough to tackle the situation where everyone's logging in from home.

It's been a bit weird because over the course of a weekend I've basically done a 180 - from "isn't corona virus only a bit more serious than the seasonal flu?" to "let's smooth the effects of this virus as much as possible". Alert but not alarmed is my current motto.

Lol #lockusdown is trending in Australia.

This article provides some nifty analysis (read: pretty charts!) on the spread of the virus and argues that governments should act now. Early action will slow down the spread of the virus which will make sure that we don't push our healthcare system to capacity. Once our healthcare system is pushed to capacity that's when we really get effects that could've been avoided (e.g. healthcare workers being tired and getting sick and therefore choosing which patients to treat).

These threads (1 and 2) also show how to think about coronavirus from an economic framework. Basically, we want to reduce the chances that this one-off shock has lasting effects and that means making sure people and businesses have enough money to continue spending/operating today without affecting their ability spend/operate in the near future (read: intertemporal substitution!).

Anyway, back to me!! So I had to give up some income in order to self-isolate this week, which is why I jokingly started asking Brendan whether he was ok with being the sole income earner of this household, at which I think he scoffed and started saying something about how much we've saved. Sigh gone are the days when we used to have a $200K+ household income (not that we did anything with it, it just made me feel good when it came to filling out the census).

Of course I have mild concerns that the economy will take longer to recover if the Government can't manage this public health crises properly. This may affect me when I'm back in the labour market again, but oh wells.

Again, luckily I'm not (economically speaking) at capacity. There is a lot of slack. But just goes to show that if I was very much on the brink (e.g. casual job + rent to pay + no savings + no parent's home to go back to) this kind of shock would affect me very badly.

EDIT: I forgot to say that

• Brendan is now working from home indefinitely (he can't afford to get sick if we want to keep visiting his mum)
• we cancelled all our outings this weekend (and I've cancelled mine for next weekend too)
• we've started stockpiling (read: we bought more groceries than we usually do but no toilet paper)
• the woollies metro downstairs (although small and probably overpriced) does not have crazy scenes like the ones I'm seeing on twitter where the line seems to extend all around the store
• in a bid to save tissues, I've started using a handkerchief around the house. I still think handkerchiefs are a bit gross but oh well.