The Trumpy people I know around Boston are taking this seriously. I think precisely because the area is getting hammered, i.e. - your point.
The quarantine is popular. The anti-quarantine movement has -38% support:
Apparently they just confirmed a coronavirus death in Santa Clara from February 6. 
This seems very important? If there was an active case in California in mid-late January, it seems very odd that there arenāt a lot more cases than have been confirmed. In particular, if California got the disease directly from Wuhan, while New York was only infected via Europe (which I think is the conventional wisdom?), how come New York got clobbered and SFBA did not? The first confirmed COVID case in NYC was not until March 1 (I know, lol, etc, but stillā¦).
It is possible that there are multiple strains. It also seems the simpler conclusion is that the magnitude of the outbreaks we have seen is mostly determined by how many cases existed at lockdown.
I would point to Washington for some support on that. They had cases in January. We found out about it from that nursing home that was ravaged. That strain was obviously plenty deadly in the end. I would estimate that awareness the virus was in the area led to more people taking some precaution and taking precautions earlier. Also no part of WA or CA is as dense as NYC. WA and CA locked down first. We also know NY had to have cases in early Feb at latest bc they had symptomatic cases and death by the early part of March.
I think a lot of people are looking for some mysterious explanation to this or clinging to every study that has a shred of optimism because we are all in denial to one extent or another as a coping mechanism. Coronavirus is much more deadly than the flu and the evidence for that is simple. The worst Coronavirus death day is 5x or more the the worst day of seasonal flu. We also have tons of studies saying that it has a rate around or slightly higher than .5 which makes sense.
Occamās razor says this is a highly contagious and deadly disease that most of us havenāt had yet but are likely to get in the next year. I donāt think it is any more complex than that.
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Perfect post. +100 
I think lockdowns and social distancing have been pretty effective and probably more effective than expected. Too bad the powers that be are going to throw that progress away by opening up too soon.
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I may not be following you, but Iāve heard the European strain is more dangerous. If CA got theirs straight from the tap, it may simply be a less-deadly strain?
Some concept of āre-openingā is inevitable. There simply is no possible way to keep the worldās population locked down for the next 12-18 months (or longer, if there proves to be no viable vaccine). So, humanity is simply going to be opting into increased exposure to the virus. There truly is no other outcome that exists.
All we can do is hope for the best, take those personal steps that we individually feel is necessary to protect our own health and that of our family, and operate within our own tolerances for risk.
For the most part, Iāve made peace with the fact that we are going to continue to see widespread suffering across the world for the foreseeable future. I accept the fact that any lessening of restriction will lead directly to an increased loss of human life. I donāt like it. I donāt root for it. I also donāt envy those who have to make public policy decisions knowing that their choices are balanced against death.
Removing restrictions will lead to more death. Tightening restrictions will also have a toll in human life for our most vulnerable populations. Death, death, death.
Will we find the right balance? I sure hope so. But, Iām afraid in this one there are no winners.
Mr. Scientist, ignore the guy that was mocking you a couple days ago and letās get this thing figured out soon, please and thank you.
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So basically the second tidal wave of job losses is going to be the white collar people drawing nice salaries currently working from home. Unsurprisingly demand for their services is based on a normalish world and their employers are going into survival mode. Anecdotally I know a guy in marketing and heās telling me that advertising costs have gotten waffle crushed almost as hard as trucking rates (which are down by ~50% in a business that typically has <10% gross profit margins).
Economically this is going to get really gruesome. There are zero sectors that wonāt be impacted. If your business has customers who are only getting a marginal benefit from your product in good times youāre about to lose all of that business, and your competitors are about to cut their pricing to take your market share. You should already be figuring out how you can offer ludicrous discounts in an attempt to take your competitors market share.
There are four levers that society can pull here to avoid/mitigate the coming depression.
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Austerity. This one is hard/impossible because the bottom 60% of the population was already teetering on the edge of a financial cliff. Thereās no way to get blood from a turnip. The rest are now in similar straights because of the pandemic. There ARE places we could cut government spending: the military and healthcare (ironically by having the government take a much larger role in setting medical prices).
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Debt forgiveness/restructuring. This one is inevitable and will be big. There will be a huge wave of bankruptcies that the system will have to somehow navigate. I suspect weāre going to find out that a lot of entities were living way beyond their means and canāt keep the promises they made pre covid.
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Redistribution. Despite our entire system being designed to redistribute wealth upward at every opportunity I suspect that the choice for the people at the top of the pyramid is between a massive voluntary redistribution where they have some control vs a massive involuntary redistribution where they have none. My guess is that like the last time in the 30ās theyāll choose the former.
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Printing money/devaluing the currency. We probably arenāt going to be the global reserve currency when this is over. And if we are itāll be because there were no other alternatives and nobody will be willing to hold large amounts of any type of cash going forward.
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One thing that is really eating at me right now is there was literally no reason to lock down for the last 40 days or so just to open everything up again without taking some drastic steps. We should have spent this time building out a testing/tracing infrastructure and significantly ramped up production of testing. None of that happened.
In other words we would have been better off just never going into this halfass lockdown we have been in. It just delayed the inevitable by a month and caused increased economic damage for literally no benefit really.
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It is truly astonishing how this administration absolutely never gets anything right. This was a slam dunk and they still managed to blow it.
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Yup. Remember three threads ago when I said that I didnāt think we should do any lockdown at all? This is exactly what I was afraid of. Weāre going to take almost as many casualties from the virus as we would have AND weāre going to have 5+ years of 10%+ unemployment which will probably kill as many people as the virus in the end.
That being said I think this scenario was unavoidable with this administration. Trump was never going to take responsibility for the ādonāt close everā optionā¦ which is what would have been required to just tank this. Instead we had to do all this economic damage to show everyone why we had to take the damage.
We were already fucked in February when we didnāt already have a million+ tests ready and a fully staffed CDC standing by.
Everyone in this thread is going to be experiencing the consequences of Donald Trump having been President of the United States for the rest of our lives. When our generation really gains political power we need to be absolutely sure we put mandatory retirement ages back in. This mess happened because old people run this country full stop. The world moves way too fast now to have dinosaurs running anything that they didnāt 100% build themselves.
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In NYC, the lockdown definitely was a net positive. And hopefully that modeled what needs to happen as more and more places approach their own healthcare capacity breaking points.
Edit: but yeah, I agree that for large swathes of the country, ending the lockdown now is probably worse than if they had never locked down in the first place.
ā¦ right now. NYC is going to be continually reinfected by the rest of the country once the lockdown ends. NYC is the financial capital of the fucking world. It canāt actually be shut down for 12-18 months. Itās only been shut down for ~2 months as of now (has it even been shut down that long? Iāve totally lost any sense of time over the last 2 months lol).
There would have been massive economic damage even if the US had taken the Swedish approach. People were going to stay home in large numbers regardless.
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In that discrete time period the lockdown was probably a net positive for all of us. In the longer term it just delayed most of us getting it. The hospital overruns are still likely coming including NYC. This time if they happen it will be everywhere at pretty much the same time though. That or I am fundamentally misunderstanding something about how the virus spreads which I will admit is possible.
Iām speechless.
This is absolutely true. The question is how much damage. We were going to have a recession no matter whatā¦ the question is how large.
Ya no one is saying we werenāt taking heavy economic damage either way. Iām saying there needed to be some actual benefit of locking ourselves away for 40 days and there wasnāt (like buying time to develop systems to safely reopen, which did not happen). Most likely we just made the economic damage worse and we are still going to take this thing full force in the coming months.
Eta-To be clear I think we should be on lockdown as long as it takes to get the numbers down to almost nothing and have a functioning testing/contact tracing system. Since we arenāt going to do that I dont really see the difference in between letting this thing rage now vs. a month ago.
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