When Dillon with a problem like this, you just gotta take it to the Matt.
Keep this up long enough, and there won’t be anything for your money to buy.
The government can keep borrowing or printing money and handing it out as much as it wants, but at some point the real economy will assert itself - that being actual goods and services being created by actual people. You can’t just buy your way out of this. At some point, stuff has to be made. And that point may be closer than you think.
You want to see real panic? Keep everything locked down until supply chains begin to fail, and people go to the grocery store and find empty shelves.
The average city is three days away from food riots at the best of times. We rely on the steady flow of goods to keep everyone supplied. Right now, things are working okay, but eventually it will break down. You can’t just operate an economy on a quarter of the usual labor and expect everything to just keep on coming.
This is not a choice between lives and money. It’s a balancing act, and if we get it wrong lives will be lost either way.
I think the same thing will happen if the lockdown continues for much longer without a clear exit plan. If there is no progress on a vaccine, and herd immunity isn’t being built up, then we have locked everyone down into a holding pattern with no end. That simply can’t work. If we lock down so tightly that the infections basically stop growing, and only 1% of the population has been infected, then we’ve accomplished almost nothing except the destruction of trillions of dollars of wealth. If the lockdown goes away, we’ll be right back to the situation when we started it.
We need to loosen up the lockdown precisely in the rural and otherwise less dense areas where it’s less likely to run out of control as it spreads. That will buy us time to modulate the lockdowns in order to begin allowing the population to be infected and develop herd immunity without overwhelming the health care system.
At the very least, we need to understand what we are really trying to achieve with the extreme lockdown strategy. If it’s to buld herd immunity, it’s failing. If it’s to buy time for the health system to catch up with PPE gear and ventilators, we’re already there. If it’s ‘we are locking down until we have a vaccine’, then that will never work, because a vaccine, if we find one at all, is at least a year away and there is no way we can lockdown for a year.
I find the current strategies to be incoherent. I think a lot of it is driven by the extreme risk aversion of the political class and the experts they are consulting. No one wants to make a decision that kills people, so they are erring on the side of caution. But in this case, caution can kill just as readily.
You’re right that the current strategies are incoherent, but that’s largely because the federal response has been so non-existent.
I’m getting real tired of this “you can’t stay locked down forever” strawman. No shit, nobody is saying we stay locked down forever. If we have a competent national strategy the lockdowns would be like 3, 4 months. The game plan seems relatively simple in theory – lots of testing, contact tracing, social distancing measures and a strong public health presence.
So when Fauci says “We should stay locked down until there are 0 new cases,” that’s not an argument to stay locked down forever, or even for years. That’s not a pipe dream, that’s what countries with competent responses are doing in 3 or 4 months.
However we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. Over and over again. We were slow to react, slow to develop tests, slow to use federal leverage for production. And now in a lot of places we’re too quick to lockdown.
It bothers me that people then can use our own failures, the ones that have all but guaranteed a long and miserable fight with this virus, as rationale for opening up because the fight looks so long and miserable.
This is true if you believe everyone is really locked down in their homes, but they aren’t. There’s nothing critical I’m aware of where a supply shock is a realistic risk. We’re still producing plenty of toilet paper and isopropyl alcohol. Meat may have gotten close because of outbreaks in slaughterhouses, but for now Trump has ordered those open again. And it’s not even clear to me that meat shortages - not outages - constitutes a real disaster anyway.
Maybe there’s something hidden, like we’re not cutting down trees anymore so eventually toilet paper manufacturing will run out of raw materials, but I’m not aware of anything like that.
All the current evidence seems to be that we’re running our economy on something like 70-75% of normal labor (not 25% as you suggested), and it’s producing enough for everyone’s basic needs. We just need to make sure there isn’t a distribution problem - ie, everyone needs to have the money to buy for their needs.
It seems to come down to a question of how much of the population is expendable.
Well, the po’ folks, essentially. 
WHO appears to disagree with you.
There’s not a lot of evidence that they aren’t, either – there are cases of apparent re-infection, but we don’t know yet whether this is a resurgence of the original illness or a new bout, or even whether they’re cases of errors in the test. But right now this is on the unfortunately quite long list of “things we don’t know yet.”
Unsurprised. This is what we’re being told will happen.
For most of the country it really hasn’t hit yet. Texas, since it is mentioned in the OP, has been averaging under 1 new death/d. The idea that it will never get significantly higher than that seems unbelievable to me.
Even Texas though is not just ending the lockdown; as the OP states it is a process, with a plan to advance further if two weeks of “no flare” occurs. Agreed that two weeks of no flare will likely end up with them having moved on before they recognize the flare the previous step resulted in, when it does.
I have a hard time imagining that with plans to advance at two week intervals, with less than the best metrics to monitor, and only requiring “no flare”, they won’t have some flare, and hope that the flare won’t burn too hot.
What happens then likely depends on how bad the flare is. Certainly they hold off on advancing any further until it cools back down. Will they immediately back step one or more level until it calms down? Makes the most sense but not sure they’d have the political will to do that until it would be past the point that the step back had any more chance at tamping the flare down. Pulling back is harder to sell than advancing slowly.
But here’s a related question - how will it play to many other governors if (surprisingly and unexpectedly) their approach results in hospitalization/ICU/death rates still lower per capita than many other states are running?
>> Thread: How will people react if Covid-19 flares up when the lockdown ends?
As restrictions lift, those who feel they can, or must, will emerge and gather while the cautious stay holed up. When infections spike a very few weeks after partial or full openings, the cautious will feel vindicated; the rest will get sick, more or less. The economy will crater further. Supply lines will dwindle We’ll see REAL panic buying.
We’re still in act one, folks. Is anyone predicting act three yet?
since most of the people dying are the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions what makes you think the supply lines will collapse? The people dying are not the people working the supply line.
My first thought when reading the thread title was “IF???”
Act 2 is going to be really bad on the west coast because its going to hit when fire season is getting started. Fire fighting does allow for PPE and social distancing, but evacuations due to wild fires…yeah, not so much.
Tropical storms are going to be moving in soon as well.
By the time Act 3 hits in late fall, we will all be looking at Act 1 with fond nostalgia and calling them the good ol’ days.
WHO is not saying here that you can’t be immune to SARS-CoV-2.
I just read the WHO link, yeah, it doesn’t say you can’t be immune. It says we are still studying this NEW virus, so have no firm answers.
Depends on the vengeance with which the disease returns, but a Psychobilly Freakout is possible. Lotta people are going to break.
That’s all very well, but states reopening are starting to tell residents that they must return to work or lose unemployment benefits.
Meanwhile, Moscow Mitch wants to indemnify companies against liability for getting people sick, which means they’ll have no incentive to provide adequate safety equipment or follow distancing rules that protect people against the virus.
So, return to work and get infected and perhaps die, or lose the stimulus payments that were voted for workers a very short time ago.
Yeah, it’s not like natural disasters are going to wait under after the pandemic.
You don’t have to die to be too sick to work.
The meatpacking plants were shutting down because employees were getting sick, not necessarily dying (although some have). This CDC report on hospitalizations in March has a quarter of those hospitalized under the age of 50. The elderly tend to be more severely affected, and a greater percentage of the elderly end up hospitalized, in ICU, on ventilators, etc., but that doesn’t mean younger workers are unscathed.
I’m pretty mentally even all the time and have never had a serious psychological struggle of any kind, and shit, I’m despairing of this. I have never been more depressed - and I have a job I can do from home, so I’m not yet worried about paying the bills. There are MILLIONS of people just in Canada who’ll crack before I do.
We’re running a giant psychological imprisonment experiment and no one has really thought of how to help people through this.