Chapter 61: Estimated 200,000 Deaths
Chapter 61: Estimated 200,000 Deaths
< Estimated 200,000 Deaths >
The fallout from the coronavirus spreading through New York, the heart of the American economy, struck the entire world.
- Trump Considers Lockdown for New York and Another State
- New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut Considering Mandatory Quarantine
- American Baseball Fans Watch Koreans Play Ball in Masks
- Global COVID-19 Deaths Surpass 30,000
- U.S. COVID Cases Exceed 100,000, Financial Markets Face 'Hour of Reckoning'
The U.S. administration was surprisingly powerless.
They couldn't even forcibly mobilize police for quarantine measures, and medical facilities quickly reached capacity.
It reached a point where news reports showed bodies being stored in refrigerated trucks because crematoriums were full.
It felt as if the coronavirus was completely sweeping across the globe.
- U.S. Government Predicts Over 200,000 Deaths Even with Perfect Response from Now On.
They seemed utterly unable to get a handle on the situation after community transmission had spread.
Perhaps it was because they couldn't implement aggressive testing or lockdown measures due to social and cultural factors.
*'Two hundred thousand... that's like an entire mid-sized Korean city just disappearing.'*
And America was a country so sensitive to loss of life.
Historically, it was a nation that had gone to war over the deaths of dozens or hundreds.
Even the Vietnam War had resulted in about 50,000 deaths. I could feel the sheer power of this spreading pandemic.
Now, television and newspapers were filled with nothing but stories about the coronavirus.
"Myeong-woo."
"Yeah."
"How much would work be disrupted if the programmers worked from home?"
"You're telling them not to come in?"
"Because the coronavirus could spread at the office."
"True. Better to be safe than sorry."
We decided to shift Earth Resource's management style to a system prepared for the coronavirus.
Anxiety was spreading among the employees, and many of their children were no longer going to school.
Rather than force them to commute, I decided to let them work from home.
"We can work online, so it shouldn't cause major delays. But what about their salaries?"
"The company isn't running at a loss, so we should pay them in full. Let's even send them a bonus for all their hard work."
"Oh! They'll love that."
I still didn't have a complete owner's mindset, so I thought about it from an employee's perspective.
How happy would they be to receive a bonus from a company that just started?
We encouraged all possible employees to work from home.
It would inevitably delay work schedules, including the hiring of new staff, but we decided to accept it.
- Jo Soo-ah: Oppa, are you okay over there?
Jo Soo-ah contacted me first for the first time in a while.
- Kim Shin: Yeah. San Francisco is still fine for now.
- Jo Soo-ah: If it gets dangerous, don't go to work. Just stay home.
- Kim Shin: The fatality rate wasn't that high in Korea, right? We've switched to remote work, so don't worry too much.
- Jo Soo-ah: You still need to be careful.
- Kim Shin: I will.
* * *
California is blessed with a magnificent natural environment.
Clean air, wonderful weather, and beautiful beaches.
I'd been working so hard until now that I hadn't been able to enjoy any of it properly.
Work-life balance.
The idea of finding a balance between work and life.
It had been hard to manage even when I was an office worker, but it became even harder after I started my own company.
Honestly, I didn't have much to do myself, but I couldn't just go to a baseball game and relax while my employees were working on a project.
The most I did was take a walk on the beach on weekends, but now I had a bit more free time.
"Jong-yeop. Let's find a new house."
"Yes, Hyung."
We decided to get a house in Palo Alto, where the company was located.
The three-bedroom apartment felt cramped with the three of us men living there.
I had lived in a semi-basement for thirty years, but I'd quickly grown accustomed to a more comfortable environment.
The musty smell of mold, cockroaches of various nationalities, and the fog that filled the room.
*'I used to dream of moving into a goshiwon that served free meals. It would have been so much more pleasant.'*
An affluent neighborhood with old, tree-lined streets.
I went with a real estate agent to look at a few houses.
A newly built mansion with eight bedrooms, not far from the office, caught my eye.
The landscaping included a swimming pool, a pond, and an artificial waterfall, giving it the intimidating air of a luxury home right from the garden.
The price was ten million dollars.
To me, with a pauper's mentality ingrained to my very bones, it was a staggering amount.
But my perspective had broadened considerably while traveling and doing business.
"I'll take this house."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. I like it."
Most of the existing furniture was high-end, so I decided to take it over.
It was a hassle to go around buying things to match the house.
After signing the contract and paying in cash, I called Oh Myeong-woo over to show him.
"What do you think?"
"It's close to the company, so that's good."
"It is."
The luxury of the house didn't feel as extraordinary as it once would have.
After my net worth surpassed ten billion dollars, my feelings about cars and houses had cooled considerably.
I'd look at the supercars driving on the streets of California with a sense of indifference.
*'I guess this means I've finally come to feel like I'm rich.'*
Maybe that's why some of the super-rich use ordinary houses and cars.
I had been in frequent contact with Professor Paul recently because of the coronavirus.
- Paul: I think I'll have to go to the U.S. in a few days. For the clinical trials.
- Kim Shin: You're working hard. Are the discussions about the preclinical trials moving forward?
- Paul: We won't be doing preclinical trials in the U.S. at all.
- Kim Shin: What?
- Paul: They said we're going straight to Phase 1 clinical trials with volunteers.
Skipping the preclinical trials.
The plan was to drastically shorten the timeline for Phases 1, 2, and 3—which usually takes thirty months—to just two or three months.
Considering the complex procedures usually required for developing new drugs or vaccines, this was astounding.
- Kim Shin: Considering the vaccine's safety, the testing period feels a bit short.
- Paul: It seems there was aggressive lobbying from other pharmaceutical companies. Plus, politicians and health authorities are desperate, so they're trying to release a vaccine within the year.
- Kim Shin: I see.
When your feet are on fire, things that seem impossible by common sense standards can happen in a crisis.
As the coronavirus landed in the U.S. and Europe, it ballooned into a global disaster.
*'Even with a perfect response, 200,000 dead in the U.S. alone...'*
Even that projection was incomparably higher than the one from just a week ago.
The media was predicting that the actual death toll in the U.S. alone could exceed 400,000 or 500,000.
*'Millions of people around the world could really die from this.'*
When the coronavirus first emerged, I never imagined the damage would be this severe.
A disease I thought would kill a few hundred people when it started in China had now spread across the globe.
Pharmaceutical companies were now competing to research a vaccine, and countries were pouring in support policies.
*'Will Biolife's vaccine be effective?'*
As an individual, I had done my best.
A single human life is precious.
If I had invested in an opportunity that could save hundreds of thousands, even millions, I felt I had done something worthwhile.
- Kim Shin: If you need any help in the U.S., please don't hesitate to ask.
- Paul: Yes. Thank you.
* * *
Dream Art Rainbow.
Producer Seong Ho-jin and Producer An Won-jae, who were in the U.S. filming Kim Shin's YouTube channel, were talking in their lodging.
"The Earth Resource company episodes... I think it would be good to release them as a separate series."
"I agree. It has a corporate documentary feel, but a lot of people seem to find it surprisingly interesting."
"That's because the employees are young, and the company is showing such record-breaking growth."
They had planned the YouTube series as 'The American Life of Super-Rich Kim Shin'.
Who starts a company and turns it into a unicorn right off the bat?
Moreover, excluding the programmers, a significant number of the employees were in their twenties or were recent college graduates.
And apparently, the programmers had gathered because of a post Oh Myeong-woo made online.
This wasn't some story from long ago; it was happening in real-time, so the viewer comments exploded.
- So that's how you make money!
- I'm so jealous of his talent for making money.
- "The companies I invested in in Silicon Valley were frustrating, so I started my own." LOL.
- This is a truly amazing video. I'm rewatching all the episodes every day to study.
- To get what you want in life, you have to work that hard. You can't stop learning and challenging yourself.
- Even with all that money, he seems truly passionate about his business.
Tens of thousands of comments were posted on the videos every day.
In Korean, English, and many other languages like Japanese and Chinese.
It would take over two hours a day just to read all the comments.
Of course, not all of them were positive.
- He's incredibly rich, right? But he doesn't date, doesn't seem to have any sports or hobbies. Just a simple life of playing games at home. lololol.
- Guess you can't escape the dirt-spoon origins.
- Work, home, work, home. The video content is going to run out soon. What's he gonna use for views after that?
- Wow. These people have lost their minds.
- You're dissing Kim Shin for his dirt-spoon origins? Who in all of South Korea can look down on him when it comes to money?
- So when is he going to donate? I've never seen a single article about Kim Shin making a donation.
The YouTube channel was a great help to Earth Resource's business, including Source Coin.
The effect was beyond imagination.
Whenever a new video was uploaded to YouTube, hundreds of articles would pour out in Korea.
About Earth Resource's working conditions, the size of their building, their cloud service fees, and so on.
It even reached the point where separate articles were being written about the key employees.
In Korea, Kim Shin and Earth Resource were incredibly popular.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call them the nation's company.
Thanks to this, Dream Art Rainbow had allocated a generous budget for the filming team.
"But you know."
Producer Seong Ho-jin began, his voice heavy.
"I'm not sure how we should broadcast the fact that the COVID vaccine has been developed."
While they weren't filming his every move, they were capturing a lot of what went on at the company.
A different team in Korea had looked into Biolife and discovered that Kim Shin had been consistently investing in them.
"It's a research-focused pharmaceutical company."
"With no real results..."
"He's been investing in it for over two years. This particular investment looks like a failure."
When they first started covering him, they just thought of him as a super-rich guy with an interest in various fields, including medicine.
But now that Biolife claimed to have developed a COVID vaccine, the filming team itself was thrown into confusion.
This fact was still being kept under strict security.
"If we release the news of the vaccine development on YouTube, all hell will break loose."
"The entire nation of South Korea would be in an uproar."
"The U.S. would go crazy, too, don't you think?"
It was an issue that could turn everything upside down, from the political world to the media.
Even one of the leading presidential candidates was originally a doctor.
He had gained high approval ratings by famously creating and distributing a computer antivirus.
What would happen if Kim Shin made a decisive contribution to overcoming the COVID crisis?
He could become a national hero.
"But that could also be a trap."
"That's right. I looked into it, and the failure rate for vaccines is extremely high."
If serious side effects emerged during clinical trials, there was a chance Kim Shin would face blame.
Many people don't care about the effort put in; they only see the result of failure.
"Let's talk to the CEO and release the video only after Phase 1 of the trials is successful."
"That sounds right. Even if the vaccine fails, if we upload the footage two or three years from now, the reaction probably won't be bad."