Dollars > people… can you quantify that? Can you quantify how much more Republicans are valuing dollars than Democrats, who are also managing reopenings, etc.?
When a political actor reopens anything these days, are they valuing dollars over human lives?
Specify! Quantify! That’s my point.
Well, when we shut down the first time, it was because they were throwing out wild numbers like 2.5 million dead in the U.S. One might argue it’s because of that shutdown that we are not doing even worse, but I do wonder if we had had a crystal ball if we would have shut down as hard as we did. I mean, the numbers are bad, but not “4x the Spanish flu” bad (and the death demographic is much much different).
Oh… “both sides so it!”
Okay.
“Expert engineers have told us if you don’t make urgent repairs to the dam, it will fail, and thousands of people downstream will die!”
<makes half-hearted repairs to dam. Dam develops slow leak and kills 10 people>
“Look what you’ve done! You told us that thousands would die and it was only 10! You have wasted our money!”
When it comes to providing cost-benefit arguments, both sides fail to do it.
Trump has been a multidimensional disaster in this crisis, but I think one must assess state and local leadership, whether Republican or Democrat, on a case by case basis.
That’s international flights, which are a minority of flights. The airlines saying they will respect social distancing in booking unless too many people want to get on aren’t helping.
Yes, mechanics stayed open. Good example of something that could be done with social distancing. So what?
Well, shutting down all large attendance venues and international flights seems like a killer blow to the hotel and airline business to me but I guess we can disagree.
My only thinking is that we can’t be sure exactly how much people would have gone out in a “let 'er rip” or mid ground scenario. What’s Trump rock bottom core support numbers? A decent number of chain restaurant patrons?
Tourism within America is not banned - it just isn’t happening out of fear and because a lot of destinations are shut down. It’s true that many large events are shut down, but I’m involved in running a conference and even if we could hold it (it’s in November, so it is kind of likely) we wouldn’t expect many people to show up. So it is going online, and the hotel isn’t getting our money this year.
Right now people are going let it rip - thus the spike.