I use a site called Fangraphs for fantasy baseball. (not very essential, sue me)
They are advertising (begging) for money from their readers. They applied for a gov’t loan on day one that it was available; they got nothing.
Oh, non sequitur here…Wall Street is making a killing in the stock market, guaranteeed. Hedge funds will finally out perform the general market for the first time in a long time.
I don’t disagree. I’m not an endless lockdown supporter, I don’t think we can even maintain one for another month without serious civil disorder.
I can acknowledge that while admitting that this is uncharted waters disease-wise, and we are well and truly in there dude.
This thing is nasty and we do have to open sooner rather than later, I can’t come to any other conclusion.
Ya, I don’t think we really disagree. We need to take reasonable precautions like social distancing, teleworking where possible, voluntary use of masks, etc… I just don’t think we can sit here and be like “30M people out of work just need to deal with it for the next _____ months/years.”
They’re saying 18-24 months before immunity now. The private sector would be decimated. Most large companies wouldn’t even survive.
It’s not even the large teaching hospitals that worry me. It’s the hundreds (thousands) of rural hospitals tens of millions of people rely on because they don’t live in a major city.
Well, they’re just going to be ignored, so they won’t cost anything to bail out.
heavy sarcasm
Thanks, @Legalsteel!
(Just a note. Those Kawasaki-Like Syndromes; as of now; are an extremely small number worldwide. The idea of the robust immune system theory is very intriguing.)
I beg of you: stop using semicolons where commas are appropriate.
That’s the thing though, I bet 15-20 million remain out of work after mandatory restrictions are lifted because the voluntary demand won’t be there for a while.
There are so many stores/bars/restaurants that pack people in with maximised floorplans and still barely turn a profit… And they’re the few that don’t go under even in good times.
I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying really, just that I don’t think lifting mandatory restrictions will provide the boost we all wish it would.
China is experiencing this right now- stores open, ppl too scared to shop
Yes - and scientists, policymakers, and politicians of both parties decided, based on the best information available, that that price - while steep and painful - was better than the alternative. Models were run showing what was expected to happen if we didn’t take measures and that no-action situation looked worse.
Don’t like that trade-off? Ok. Just stop pretending it was some irrational choice when there was an obvious easy answer everyone skipped over.
Ok - so? The issue is capacity, and if hospitals aren’t bursting at the seams, that means something we’re doing is working.
What you seem to be missing is the desire to prevent something worse from happening. You don’t wait till hospitals are overwhelmed - you try to take action to prevent that nightmare scenario. That they aren’t currently overwhelmed isn’t a sign we got the policy choice wrong - it’s stronger evidence we got it right.
Another reason to try and prevent transmission - to give us a chance to get testing up.
Drops in economic activity due to policy restrictions?
Ok.
I agree that the damage has probably already been done. My wife and I have talked about this a few times. I doubt we’ll do most of the activities we usually do with the kids when things open back up. We’ve already cancelled a fall vacation and likely will cancel a summer beach vacation.
This situation is just infuriating. Why is Wall-Mart with their millions of employee good, but the local barber with his 5 chairs and 3 employees forced to close? It makes no sense.
Ya don’t NEED a haircut, but you do NEED food. We wanted to shut down as much of unsafe society as possible while harming the economy as little as possible. You basically had a death panel for businesses making these decisions… To avoid the need for real death panels in hospitals.
The line as to what is essential or not needed to be drawn. And everyone wants that line drawn just behind them. It’s a shitty situation. On my last day in the office back in early March, the Mexican spot downstairs was giving away free food- the owner was barely meeting payroll as is and knew they wouldn’t last through the quarantine. I imagine lots of similar stories are out there.
It makes sense because of the close physical contact hair people have with your body. The also use tools repeatedly on different people, and I don’t know how effective the ultra violet light is on anything other than lice.
That is certainly a rosy view of how things have gone down.
What trade-offs. Stay home or be fined/go to jail. Wear a mask or be find/go to jail. Close your business or be fine/go to jail. Here’s a small business loan, just kidding the money’s gone. Here’s $1,200 one-time check that’s taxable FYI.
There have been almost no trade-offs. It’s been panic and hide while the “scientist, policymakers, and politicians” have moved the goal post a hundred times on why we’re shut down.
“it slows the spread to allow health care resources to catch up and deal with it - i.e., flattening the curve.”
Most hospitals are not even at capacity. The idea, outside of New York, that we need to allow healthcare resources to catch up has largely been wrong.
No, it doesn’t. It means something we’re doing might be working or, outside of certain hotspots, this one-size-fits-all approach to the virus is unnecessary.
If I’m missing it so are you. 1/3 of the US population could be unemployed by the end of the year. I’m trying to prevent The Great Depression part II.
You can’t overwhelm a hospital if it closes due to bankruptcy.
It isn’t strong evidence that we got it right. The underlying reason why most hospitals aren’t overwhelmed has yet to be determined.
Let the government mail you a ration then.
Besides, I don’t believe all Wall-Marts sell food. I’ve never been to a Target that sells anything other than Starbucks, which is also essential for some reason. Restaurants sell food. Malls have food courts (closed in MD). Dunkin Donuts, open. Local begal shop, closed.
But, again, that’s not really the point. If the millions of employees at Wall-Mart aren’t getting sick by the thousands why in the world would a 5-chair barbershop be a problem?
Who said this? That’s not why Wal-Mart’s open. It’s open because it provides necessities and we’re willing to rake the risk of infection because the need outweighs the risk. For a barber shop, the nees doesn’t outweigh the risk.
C’mon, man. You’re not even making sense now.
Most of your body is covered with a plastic sheet and they use tools to cut your hair. Does contact with hair transmit COVID-19?
They could potentially use fresh tools per customer like a tattoo shop and clean them nightly.
At any rate, if my local barber sees 25 people a day I’d be surprised. My local liquor store is probably the same size as the barbershop and I’ve been in it with 10 other people before.
As I said, none of this makes any sense.
Well, I saw a post from the mother-in-law of a friend that is interested in seeing government restrictions lifted from businesses, saying something to the effect of, “If you believe in your precious free market so strongly, let the strong survive. The strong businesses will be able to deal with this shutdown, and the weak won’t.” LOL
I think it’s shaky on some of that for sure. I’m in a town of about 12,000 and we don’t have a single restaurant closed unless they decided to close themselves and not offer delivery or some type of take out option.
Why shut down the tatoo parlor, massage parlor, etc then? We can look at it a few ways imo. Either we needed to shut down as many places as weren’t deemed necessary as possible or we didn’t. We could quibble on if locations got the necessary part right.
I think the data was there that a temporary shutdown of a lot of places made a lot of sense. Especially based on the knowledge we had at the time. We were looking at the type of death levels Italy had and the way it spread through other places. And it’s spread over this country and had exponential growth and death in spite of these actions. Unprecedented actions taken by the vast majority of Americans to limit something.
We can always Monday morning quarterback it and say why did we call that play? But I think calling the play made a lot of sense at the time. We can’t simply have today’s knowledge and then say “can’t believe we did all that shit and it’s only this bad!” We will never be able to tell what things would be like with a different action taken.
I’m saying if Wall-Mart has millions of employees still working at their stores and distribution centers without large numbers of people getting sick then why can’t small businesses operate while taking precautions?
I’m not. I think Wall-Mart and every other business deemed “essential” should be shut down until herd immunity or a vaccine is obtained. The government can issue rations to each household providing all necessities. Let’s beat this together!
There are like 4 people in a barbershop at a time. The chances of being infected in a barbershop are probably as close to zero as possible.
There are a thousand people at Wall-Mart buying all kinds of non-essential items. How many non-essential items are being bought from places like Amazon where hundreds of thousands of workers are still picking products in their warehouses being delivered by UPS drivers touching hundreds of non-essential packages a day?
I suppose I finally qualify for public office then.
They should in time. We can argue about when that time should be. I think it should be based on location. It’s pretty much now in some areas or will be soon.
We had numerous cases pop up from a few areas including a Tyson plant near where I grew up. I think the idea that a lot of people aren’t infected is definitely up for debate. With as shitty as testing has been we still have over 1.1 million confirmed cases and more death than the Vietnam war in just a short time. Who knows what the numbers actually are?