Well I am not trying to ‘other’ anybody, I am a union laborer myself. I can’t claim to have perfect knowledge or submit definitive lists of who will or won’t be unemployed. Let’s see, a bunch of lawyers, stock brokers, cosmetic surgeons and professional athletes may soon fail to make payments on their yachts, and suddenly their $50 million condos are only worth $25 million. Sound better? Not to me, to me the waitresses and Uber drivers are the far more sympathetic characters in this drama. They work hard, they’re much appreciated, but they don’t get as big a slice of the pie and they are hurt the most economically. If I may generalize a little.
While I have all of this free time during quarantine, maybe I should meditate on my biases. But also, without to committing to anything, can we at least ask what the cost of keeping unemployment below x% would cost? Can we just ask what it will cost to lock down the country for x months? Because as I understand it, flattening the curve does not mean getting rid of it and a large portion of the population will eventually get sick regardless.
We aren’t going to keep unemployment under Great Depression levels no matter what we do for the simple fact that our economy is connected to everyone else’s and they’ve all hit the brakes, too. And some areas are going to take even longer to recover than we will.
We’ve got basically two extremes to consider, and to strike a balance between:
we can swing far in one direction and tell all those unemployed “sucks to be you, should have saved 5 years of living expenses” and let the chips fall where they may. In my opinion, this could easily lead to blood in the streets and heads on pikes because homeless starving people have little to lose and a lot of anger.
we can swing in the other direction and attempt to support everyone to the prior standard of living, which I very much doubt is possible even short term, much less sustainable.
OK, now that we have the two strawmen out of the way, let’s discuss how to get through this.
It benefits no one to have massive numbers of homeless, hungry people. So in order to prevent that we’re going to have to figure out some way to keep roofs over peoples head and food on their tables. That said, some people may discover that no, their job is NOT coming back and they’ll have to downside their residence and they may become re-acquainted (or meet for the first time) tuna noodle casserole and other thrifty meals. Which is something that tens of millions endured during the Great Recession. Such people - which will number in the millions - will have to find new jobs that likely will not pay as well as their prior jobs. Which sucks but I find acceptable provided that such jobs will allow them to house, feed, and otherwise care for themselves and their families albeit at a much more modest level than before.
But during all these lockdowns and stay-at-home orders those people are, realistically, unlikely to get a new job. Yes, a very few places are hiring - grocery stores, for example - but those are low-level jobs of a temporary nature. They’re a great stop-gap for those that can get them, but there aren’t going to be enough of them for all the idle workers. We should absolutely encourage people to take those jobs if they are able to do so (keeping in mind there are a lot of people who, due to various risk factors, really shouldn’t be face to face with large numbers of other people).
We have sent people home from their jobs for the public good. We are preventing them from resuming their jobs or looking for highly lucrative jobs for the common good. Seems only fair to me that there should be SOME form of support form the “common good”, i.e. “the government” to support those people until such time as they can actually either go back to work or seek other employment, and that will also required on-going support for some years because not everyone will get a new job the day after the quarantines lift.
With the assumption that those who have higher income have more resources, the wealthier you are the less help you should get. I don’t know if the numbers being floated - $1,000 or $1200 or $2000 or whatever for checks to Americans or American families - are adequate or not, or how many such payments would be necessary. I’m not even sure how much total that would be - keeping in mind that payments might go to “only” 40 or 50 million people or households. But we’re not going to re-start this economy without time and an infusion of wealth. Which is going to have to come from the wealthy because that’s where the money is. You’ve got rich old men declaring we may have to sacrifice actual lives for this economy - well, then they can damn well give up some mere money in return.
The point I’m making is that the economy isn’t going to crash, it HAS crashed. Hard. Everywhere in the world. We are in the early days of the Great Depression II and there’s nothing to be done to stop or prevent it because it has already happened. We can do nothing for those whose lives have been up-ended and see a return of Hoovervilles and starvation, or we can get started early on a New Deal II that, with the benefit of experience, can embrace some of the good features of the last one while avoiding some of the mistakes that were made back then.
Yes, I split my reply to deal with the two types of questions you were asking.
It is true that flattening the curve may not reduce the total number of sick people when this is all over. What it may reduce is the death toll from this.
If we let cases of covid spike “naturally” (meaning what would happen if we changed no behavior whatsoever) our healthcare systems WOULD collapse. Even WITH efforts to slow transmission e saw China come close to that despite the monumental effort of building hospitals in less than two weeks time. We have seen it happen in Italy. We are now seeing it happen in Spain. New Jersey is probably just days from the same. This is not debatable. And when hospitals run out of ventilators, when doctors and nurses run out of protective equipment, and hospitals run out of something as basic as beds death rates soar. And we lose the very medical personnel we need to get through this crisis.
The more we flatten the curve the greater the chances of avoiding it. Even if we can’t avoid it, the more we flatten the curve the less carnage we have to deal with.
If you think the lockdowns and current medical shortages are terrible and disruptive, do you think having half the population of a city ill simultaneously while the hospitals are literally overflowing and the bodies are literally stacking up would be any LESS disruptive or costly?
No I don’t. I believe things are about to get extremely bad in some places, and just the example of it will temper this talk of “Let’s get back to work, like, yesterday!” But we’ve got two problems. The virus is deadly bad and I’m not suggesting anything reckless. I’m on quarantine myself right now. But if we go into a Depression, that will get bad as well, potentially creating a feedback loop into the pandemic.
That the NYT survives as an independent source of actual real factual news is kind of a miracle and I am not going to diss their methods of staying afloat when thousands of papers have drowned. (Also I have a subscription)
They have suspended the paywall for all Corona news. That may apply to this op-ed, dunno.
I think the typical argument is that the economic damage from maintaining a lockdown and the economic damage from the extra deaths and other consequences of ending a lockdown too early are equivalent enough that there’s no reason not to go all in on the former.
The problem, T2BC, isn’t that Trump is technically wrong. It’s that it’s an entirely useless obvious statement, showing he has no idea what to actually do.
Of course there is the possibility of a the cure being worse than the disease. Everyone who is working out what to do knows this. That’s why there are all the models working out the best outcome.
The question is whether Trump is letting them run the show, finally not thinking he knows better than everyone else.
Look, these are really good points. Obviously we cannot do what one poster in another thread we should and do literally ANYTHING to stop the virus, up to and including every single person hiding in a separate room until people starve to death. No sane person is seriously suggesting that we should literally stop all economic activity for a preposterously long amount of time past all the food running out, power and water shutting off, and other disasters and plagues killing everyone.
The point though is that it’s really, really apparent that Trump and many of his Trumpist minions want things to return to “Normal” long before it’s safe to do so, and if they have their way thousands will die for no good reason and the economy will probably suffer just as much anyway. They are doing this so their stock portfolios go back up and so Trump might have a better chance at re-election. Those are the only reasons.
I am a relative optimist when it comes to how long I think everyone should shut down for and I think a general return to normalcy by April 1 is fucking insane. Going back to normalcy three weeks too early will be much, much worse than three weeks too late; the USA will just end up back at square one in terms of pandemic, plus with vastly less economic confidence than would have otherwise been the case.
You’re right; there are no good options, only degree of least damage. We are headed into a bad recessions and many people will die. Donald Trump and his flying monkeys want a VERY bad option for normal Americans so they can profit.
The nutty thing is that they can’t really profit. If tens of millions of humans die, taking down entire national medical systems in the process, where’s the profit going to come from? Where are the consumers to buy the products? Where are the laborers to produce them? Where are the logistical workers to produce the final and intermediate products?
The coming depression will harm many people, no doubt, but if we avoid the maximum spike of infections, we’ll have enough people to start fresh.
You’re thinking long term, like you actually care about the country. These are Republicans; they want the Dow to go up so they can cash out and then they’re fine in walled communities or fleeing the country.
It is a desperate idea. That it’s all politically catastrophic for Trump & co is the silver lining. I think the topic of this thread falls under politics too. First it was “it will go away like a miracle.” Then it was “we have things almost airtight.” Now we’re basically back to “it will go away” (after two weeks). I think they are breaking it to the conservative audience slowly.
Yeah well wait until March 31 when every news outlet is flooded with images of corpses, coffins and coughing and everyone will agree it is insane. Sadly, Trump’s stupid antics have already made things worse and it is going to take the awareness of disaster before some people will clue in to reality. I honestly think some people will never clue in to reality, but it is possible to string 'em along for votes, and there’s one demographic of the Trump camp.
I love being right Except these days. I hope I am wrong that the intensification of the pandemic will make the idea behind Trump’s little optics show baldly out of the question.
It’s also shockingly ignorant coming from the POTUS. But we’re used to Trump, we know he’s pretty much always full of shit. He’s always selling some fantabulous vision, and this time he’s trying to sprinkle his gold dust on, “Everyone is going to lock themselves in their homes for two weeks, then we’ll all come out and go back to work. Winning!” That’s the best-case scenario from the POV of selfish bullshit. It’s just trying to spin something that can’t hardly be spun. Remember how people loved Reagan for his sunny optimism? It just makes Trump look like an asshole
Maybe, just maybe, if we were discussing this in January, and America had ramped up testing then, followed that up with rigorous tracing, shutting down of the borders, then maybe some of the ideas may have had some merit. Although I doubt it.
But it is much too late now to be doing anything else but a country-wide lockdown lead by the Federal government.
But you aren’t even going to get that. America doesn’t have a co-ordinated approach to Covid-19. Not from the top. Not even at the State level. Imagine three states, one on complete lockdown, one implementing the methods suggested by Dr Katz, and one doing absolutely nothing at all. How effective do you think that will likely to be?
But lets ignore the utter chaos of a decentralised response to Covid-19 for a minute. How long do you think it will take to get buy-in for Dr Katz’s suggestions and how long do you think it will take to implement them? I can’t imagine anyone with any expertise with epidemiology, with pandemics, with what has worked and what hasn’t worked in slowing the spread of Covid-19 would support this idea. Dr Katz’s suggestion does nothing to stop community transmission. Absolutely nothing. And in America right now community transmission is probably rampant. And by “going back to work” community transmission is guaranteed to increase.
So now you will have a public debate between (self-confessed) ignorant people like you who find this “argument attractive merely because of your disposition” and with medical experts who know what the fuck they are talking about. And we wouldn’t be having this debate at the federal level. It would be happening at the state level, as it is at the moment. There are crazy people out there advocating and fighting for this including at the highest levels of government.
How long do you think it would take to come to an agreement? Lets say that Dr Katz and co win the debate, and we begin to implement his final solution. How long will it take to sort out “who is vulnerable” and “who isn’t?” A week? Two weeks?
The reality is that you aren’t going to know the effectiveness of any solution until 2-3 weeks after it is implemented. So if we spend the next three weeks arguing about this, then we spend two weeks implementing it, it won’t be until about a month after that that you will see if Katz’s plan is working. Two months. How many deaths are you willing to tolerate based on a plan from a guy who has zero expertise in this field?
Thisis where you are now. The shit has already hit the fan. You’ve run out of time. The iceberg has already hit the Titanic, the boat is sinking and people are manning the lifeboats.
TLDR: America is fucked. New Zealand goes into full lockdown today. The borders are closed. We’ve currently had zero deaths from Covid-19. (Although we have no illusions that it will stay that way.) If you need to get tested you get tested. If you get it: then you don’t have to pay to get treated. Comprehensive tracing. I’m self employed and I’ve lost all of my bookings for the next couple of months. I’ve lost thousands of dollars of work. Two invoices from last month didn’t pay their bill. And I’m good with that. Because the lives of my friends and my family and the people of the land is more important than money. Almost everybody is on board down here. The message from our Prime Minister is one that is resonating throughout the country: “Be Kind.” It will be a very stressful 3-6 months ahead, maybe even longer. But we will get through this together.
I don’t know how America will get through this. I really don’t. You are taking none of the steps to get this under control. A large proportion of the population appear to be part of a “death cult.” The Federal government don’t give a fuck. And people like you are entertaining the most ridiculous of ideas. Millions of Americans are about to die. And you appear to be okay with that. I just don’t get it.
I think it is important to recognize that this is not the same problem in all parts of the US. NYC is our most densely populated city, it is no surprise that it is having so much trouble because a densely populated city is paradise to a virus like covid. On the other hand, Wyoming as a whole is much less densely populated. It still needs to take strong precautions in its population centers but the rural/wilderness areas do not need the same level of action because the sparse population and distances already create a natural social distancing.
We can, and should vary our responses based on 1) data and 2) the local situation. Much as in China, where Wuhan and Hubei had the most stringent measures applied but other areas of China did not need that same level of lockdown, areas less affected could be restored to more normal levels of activity. We may not be able to do that for several weeks, though.
Well… fleeing the country isn’t of much use during a global pandemic unless your destination is, say, Antarctica. In which case they’ll probably bring the disease with them and congratulations, now all the continents are infected.
I live in a fact-based world, and it’s the absence of one that kills people. I don’t feel bad for wanting people to suffer the consequences of their blind devotion to a fucking racist cult. Why should the rest of us suffer for their bullshit.
By and large the people in favor of the useless tactics and returning to normal right now are convinced that they themselves won’t get the virus and/or won’t get badly sick from it.
Except these days. I hope I am wrong that the intensification of the pandemic will make the idea behind Trump’s little optics show baldly out of the question.