This is not complicated. Give everyone money in the short term to buoy everything. In the meantime ramp up to millions of tests a week so you can use that to manage and control the peak of the disease while also managing how and when different parts of the economy go back to work.
The overwhelmingly worst case scenario, and there is not a close second for lives lost or the economy, is the healthcare system becomes overloaded. The first goal should be to prevent that. Then you can move to bringing the economy back online. Fortunately the solution for both those things is shared. Trump has even used the DPA today to start getting more tests made.
The idea of sending people back to work right now is absurd with New York three weeks away from their peak and our testing still being so low.
It would let him blame the economic crisis on Democrats. He doesn’t care about the economy or human life. The play is to paint the Democrats as the party of not caring about/causing the depression. If he lucks out and some treatment appears or the death toll ends up being dramatically lower than people are claiming, he looks like a genius. Even if lots of people die, he can just shrug, say it was a natural disaster, and hammer Democrats for tanking the economy in a containment effort that didn’t even work. The latter trick doesn’t necessarily work, but it’s a hell of a lot better than having to own both the deaths and the depression, which is the truth.
It’s the wrong way to phrase the question though as it makes the idiots look like heroes, by saying they’d die for our country. The real question is whether you’d happily kill thousands of (mostly old) people to avoid economic issues.
Right I mean the correct framing here is more like “would you take every single one of your 168k twitter followers, plus their spouses, and murder their grandparents to maybe avoid an economic downturn”
No fever, aches or sore throat yet, just that buzzing sound in my head and extreme tiredness, so I’m hoping to sleep it off quickly in a day or two and still intend to make today’s first NLHE game.
I mean if the message is “ok guys we’re through the worst of it, now let’s just try to be responsible and get on with our lives”, everything will basically go back to status quo immediately. It’s not like people have this inherent desire to practice social distancing. When you tell them it’s ok to go to the store or the movies, you’re telling them what they want to hear, and that is dangerous.
As a side note I don’t share the optimism that most in this thread have about Cuomo. Like, he spent a week trying his damndest to do half measures starting with 50% workforce reduction, then 25%, then 100%, and talking about how he’s not closing his bars because then everyone will drive to New Jersey to drink. He’ll buckle on this quickly if the messaging from Trump and CDC changes. He’s an idiot, just cut from a slightly different cloth than Trump’s idiocy.
How’s he supposed to handle it though? NYC has 8 million residents plus another 10 million people that travel into the city on a daily basis from 2-3 different states with their own set of problems. It’s not like San Fran or Seattle where the closest border is at least 50 miles away. Managing an outbreak of this magnitude in a city like NYC is a pretty hard job.
He seems to be listening to doctors which is really the most you can hope for.
It’s kind of exhausting keeping up with things, just wanted to say thanks to everybody in this thread for keeping us up to date and for the worthwhile discussion and occasional comic relief.
The way I feel about the potential for how the pandemic plays out in the US is kind of how I’ve felt about Trump’s election chances, where I vacillate between WAAF and “there’s no way it’s as bad as they say because X and Y and Z” depending on the day and what I’ve been reading.
All I can tell from what I’m reading lately is that the end result is gonna lie somewhere between “We and our leaders were all morons and we managed to get half of the country sick at once and had bodies piled up in hospital hallways”, and “it turned out that a surprising % of folks are totally asymptomatic, and our shitty suburban sprawl and drive-everywhere society actually kept things from spreading badly in most areas, and humid weather really did slow everything down nicely while we built herd immunity”…just hard to say where.
I’m trying to wrap my head around what is happening. Here are the questions I have in no specific order:
1)It does not seem like heat plays much of a role in this thing. Countries like Malaysia and Thailand which I assume probably do not have large amounts of testing going on have had their cases increase every day for like 10 days now. Countries like India would not be going on full lockdown if they thought heat was going to kill it off. Does anyone still think it does? If so, why?
2)If Trump gives the all clear here in 6 days will people actually go back to work? Will people resume normal life or will it be something in the middle?
3)If we do go back to some semblance of normal life, what happens to the economy? Most of the world is shut down so isn’t that going to heavily negatively affect our economy even if we decide to just say fuck the olds and go back to spitting all over each other drinking beers at Buffalo Wild Wings?
4)If we do go back to normal life how many people die?
5)How much of the lack of cases in many states are due to either being not as far along as the curve or due to no testing?
6)NYC seems like they are likely not going to get overrun(I may be optimistic here but their cases are flattening the last few days) is that a good sign?