Here in Texas we are currently in the process of re-opening the economy/ getting rid of various Covid-19 restrictions. The same is happening in many other places as well. Assuming that Covid-19 flares up and that we have major outbreaks in a few weeks to a month, how will people react? Will there be any appetite for restarting the lockdown, or do you all think the let it burn through the population crowd will end up having things their way?
I don’t think we know whether or not you can get it twice. That would be a big problem. It would be a never ending cycle.
Is suspect some will get immunity/be immune, but what if it turns out like the common cold, you get it once or twice a year and 1% die from it. It would absolutely devastate the community that is already in compromised health.
I would guess it will be a mixed bag. Many are fine with working from home. Many obviously can’t. I wonder if there will be backlash/stigma against those that can work from home?
Given the “let it burn through the population/the economy is more important than other people’s lives” crowd seem to be driving the reopening, sad to say, I think there will be a worse spread of the disease than before the lockdown.
It will be interesting if we start getting flare-ups in rural communities. I think a lot of the resistance comes from people in fairly rural places that haven’t really been hit. In their mind, COVID is something that happens in the cities, it’s irrelevant to them, but they are being asked to sacrifice a ton for it. And you can’t blame them: we should have shut down a lot more when Italy shut down, but we thought COVID was something that happened in Asia and Europe, why should we destroy our economy? It’s true that rural areas are much less densely populated, so outbreaks presumably won’t ever reach NYC levels, but they also often have really limited medical capacity. So I feel like rural America may be the next crisis.
I’m hopeful rural communities will maintain enough social distancing to avoid this: it seems like rural life would make it more possible. But people have to take this seriously for that to happen.
Even assuming that you can only get it once, we’ve still had a very small number of the total population infected. We’ve just passed one million cases, so there are still over 300 million Americans who haven’t had it. IMHO the reason the numbers are so low is because the various restrictions have worked. Unfortunately those in favor of lifting the restrictions seem to have come to a different conclusion. It seems to me they’ve decided that rather than having had successful restrictions, they concluded that what really happened is that Covid-19 isn’t all that bad.
That’s why I’m wondering if there will be any sort of backlash against that crowd if things really do start to get out of control in the next month. Will the restrictions return, or will we collectively just throw up our hands and give up, letting the coronavirus do it’s thing?
As was pointed out the other day by Pritzker in his new’s conference, quarantine, or the lifting of quarantine, is NOT Marshall Law. People can make personal choices, Just because a state lifts quarantine restrictions doesn’t mean that people are mandated to march forth to their impending doom. We have the right of personal choice, and we should be responsible for the choices we make for ourselves and not play the blame game. Eventually, one way or the other, we are going to have to live with this thing just like we have learned to live with the other rock stars of the pathogen world.
“The common cold” is not a virus. It is just a general bunch of symptoms we call “a cold.” A hundred, maybe hundreds, of viruses, from different families of viruses, cause colds - in fact, this coronavirus has probably caused a few people to have “colds.” The reason no one is immune from the cold is simply that it’s unlikely anyone has caught every single virus that causes it.
SARS-CoV-2 is one virus. If humans cannot develop immunity to it, it’s literally the most amazing discovery since they figured out what viruses are. It would be like finding out gravity doesn’t apply in houses with stucco walls, that’s how weird it would be. It would also pretty much mean we’re all dead.
Oh, and to answer the OP, there are two possibilities here when Plague 2.0 comes, and it very likely will.
-
People won’t react much at all. Humans have an amazingly capability to accept risk they’re accustomed to.
-
They’ll panic.
Whether it’s 1 or 2 just depends entirely on how bad it gets. If Round 2 is about the same as Round 1 people will be accepting of it to an extent that will shock you. If it’s is WAY worse than Round 1, and that is a really strong possibility, you could have mass panic that made Round 1 look like a minor warm up. I’m talking hoarding that’s ten times worse, and people genuinely losing their trust in the apparatus of state. Genuine civil unrest. Economic collapse; food shortages.
If COVID-19 flares up in a place without stacks of bodies being shown on the six o’clock news, people will just shrug their shoulders. Doesn’t matter if a lot of the people who get sick are hospitalized and acquire permanent disabilities. People will initially be shocked but become desensitized as long as most people recover OK.
But if flare-ups result in mass graves and the collapse of their local medical systems, then it will be harder for people to justify a “business as usual” approach.
I hate to say the following but I’m gonna say it anyway. I think it will take the latter scenario happening in rural, predominately white areas to convince a certain vocal minority that we really are in a messed-up situation. The same people who confidently declared that COVID-19 was no worse than the flu have now changed their script to “This is an urban (read black people) thing.” Seriously, twice I have had to correct the misconception that black people are only dying from this. People are too stupid to understand that “disproportionate” is not the same thing as “predominate”. Or maybe it’s a coping mechanism. If people feel like a problem is a “them” thing rather than an “us” thing, they can sleep easier at night.
Well buckle up, because we may be in for one amazing discovery.
…or because hardly any of those 300 million have been tested for the virus. It’s ridiculous that the first priority of the trillions being spent to ameliorate the effects of this virus on the economy isn’t to eliminate the economy’s worst enemy; uncertainty. Is it really beyond the capacity of American industry to turn out enough test kits to test every person in the country?
Nitpick: martial law, or direct military control of the government.
When I see “Marshall Law”, I can’t help but picture General George C. Marshall in a cowboy hat wearing a star, with Chester at his side. 
I think this is the answer to the OP, although not in the “plucky Americans” way that I think Jasmine meant it here.
Overall America has taken drastic measures to turn what could have been an unprecedented catastrophe into a “mere” annual flu death toll. But unlike other countries that actually have their shit together, like Taiwan, South Korea, and New Zealand, the US is in no position to do the sort of testing and contact tracing required to keep this thing from running its course. And so even if we’ve flattened the curve, even the new estimates of an IFR that we’re getting based on anti-body tests point to 1 to 2 million dead Americans. It might take a year to hit that number rather than the couple of months we were looking at back in February, but it will happen eventually.
Personally, that seems unfathomable, to just let millions of Americans die in order to get back to business as [modified] usual, but I think the groundwork is being laid by the “open up America” crowd for just that to happen. We’ll rationalize away the death toll as being a factor of age, or co-morbidity – it’s just old people who were going to die soon anyway – or by claiming that the cure is worse than the disease. Rather than beef up unemployment or figure some other way to keep people afloat while we beef up testing, we’re just going to accept that 1 or 2 million people will die over the next 12 months and it was juts always inevitable. Brave Americans sacrificing themselves for our way of life.
And then of course there is Marshal Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshal_Law_(comics)
Where is he when we need him?
I came to pick the same nit.
I always have to look and make sure it doesn’t say *marital *law, which is a whole 'nother thing. 
And then, of course, there’s maritime law…
And the Marshall Plan, which the world will never again see from the USA. But I digress…
Leaving now.
Yeah, rather than just give people money to live on, FFS!
One of the issues with reopening is by the time you know you went too far it is too late already.
The answer in NY seems to be along the lines as long as the hospitals are not projected to be overloaded and Ro stays below or around 1 they want to have a staged gradual reopening. It’s a reopening then see what happens, and try to balance the need to reopen vs the virus’ rate of spread (Ro value) with reopening. With a staged opening it’s going to be easier to delay stages not yet reopened then to go back on closing reopened stages.
When I read that my first thought was that Marshall law might be part of a new Marshall plan to rebuild America. I didn’t make the martial=Marshall connection right away.
ETA -Thelma Lou beat me to it, but the font was really really small so I missed it.
The issue is not whether or not we will develop immunity, but rather what the process of developing immunity will look like. As you mentioned in your second post, it probably means a few million dead, and maybe tens of millions with permanent damage of some sort or another.
Hell, we could be halfway there already. The world is reporting over 200,000 deaths but for all we know that’s an understatement.