Till when? How will people put food on the table if economic activity stops?
It's hard to imagine a better demonstration of how our economic systems are utterly unable to deal with real-world challenges, because they have no mechanisms for pricing non-trivial real-world consequences of externalities of all kinds, and provide no incentives for intelligent collective behaviour.
The reason of social isolation is to ensure the 3% that do get serious don’t overwhelm the healthcare system. The virus will spread, we just want to slow the spread.
> Till when? For as long as the disease outbreak is contained (it is not going to be forever)
> How will people put food on the table if economic activity stops? No idea! Maybe something like UBI will help? But the question will remain and will be more troublesome if the outbreak is not contained for sure.
How will that help the people who don't have your magical ability to derive sustenance directly from bank balances?
UBI is not a substitute for economic activity. Goods still need to be produced. We need to deal with the outbreak without shutting the system down.
To expand a bit more, UBI might help service workers and others other hourly wage workers to take care of themselves. The service workers are the people who interact with other people the most, so an infected service worker who doesn't have an option but to work will end up spreading the disease. UBI might be the answer to temporarily keep them alive.
All of us have to live on reserves if there's a shutdown. Just like China did. It is not going to be great. But the alternative is much worse. And I am not claiming this is a permanent solution.
Bars, pubs, gyms, museums, theaters, cinema and dozens of others could be stopped right away with minimal impact (except for the companies).
Shutting everything down isn't an option. The economy isn't some nice-to-have thing you can turn on and off on a whim. It's an essential part of providing the basic necessities that people need to live—which includes much more than just food.
No one is saying to shut down everything, because of course you don't want to starve everyone (starvation has a mortality rate much worse than COVID-19).
It's shutting down most things that is being suggested. Healthcare and food stay open.
Comment by "luckydata" in this thread:
> they have to shut down EVERYTHING now.
Only a person in bad faith would think something different.
But this thing is going to be a huge fucking problem no matter what, if we keep doing what we're doing about 17M people are going to die.