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Comment by ws66 | Hacker News Reader

Remember, the general goal is to flatten the contagion curve, so hospitals can better respond to the demand. It is not a long term pause (hopefully), and the economy will recover - but maybe it will also change somehow...

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Long term is entirely relative. A month pause is a long term pause for many many businesses.

Also, people have to remember that any kind of pause will take along time to recover from. Businesses can't just start back up and immediately make up for the lack for production. They might be able to increase their production 10-20% in any given month but that means 5-10 months to make up for a single month of lack of production. And China has been down for 4 months...

China is recovering, but the supply chains are shot. Ocean freight is a mess. Meanwhile, with almost all Europe in lockdown and both the UK and the US about to join them, we have an opposite problem of demand going down, threatening the suppliers. US cutting off the bulk of EU-US cargo transport isn't helping either (passenger planes carried most of the air freight between Europe and North America). It's a mess, and it'll take long time to recover. I expect it will be survivable in terms of basics (food, medicine), but it might be years before trade works as smoothly as it did just few months ago.

Businesses will find they can now get away with stiffing many, many of their creditors.

If a creditor gets stiffed by enough of its clients, it will go bankrupt.

The creditors will remember after the dust settles?

While I'm absolutely supporting extensive lockdowns (and am happy my government enacted them earlier this week), here's a problem: the lockdowns will realistically have to last many months, and most people in the affected industries don't have enough savings to last that long, if they have any (a lot of people live paycheck-to-paycheck).

Given the sheer amount of disrupted sectors, I wonder if it wouldn't be best if government doing lockdowns simply bit the bullet and enacted UBI.

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