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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

The most infuriating part of the shutdown is the disconnect I see between comments on Twitter, where the shutdown is basically a game because everyone has a WFH-capable tech job, and in real life, where I have family members suddenly unemployed, with wild uncertainty about whether they'll get their job back (in a month? two? three?). It's incredibly stressful, and not a fun joke.

Like, independent of whether you think the shutdown is the right risk / reward tradeoff, please at least think about the 70% of the workforce that cannot work from home, because they work in restaurants or physical service jobs. If you are still working (or at least pulling a paycheck), you're incredibly lucky -- please don't act like you have the only voice of moral authority about when and how this should end, and the calculus that goes into that tradeoff.

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Thank you for stating what my mind couldn't quite put into words. I see lots of people with professional-class, WFH jobs being very sanctimonious about any suggestion that we should in any way take into account the financial impact when making the risk-reward decisions. Which, taken to its logical conclusion, would suggest that a worse-than-average flu season should also shut everything down, since tens of thousands of lives could be at stake. If this were somehow a pandemic which impacted the professional class more than the working class, I suspect we would see a very different moral calculus at work.

I agree with the grandparent that we aren't worried enough about the large percentage of people that can't work at home but your statement that "would suggest that a worse-than-average flu season" is not backed by any science. There are 12-60k deaths a year from the flu according to the CDC (last year is in the 24-60k range). There are 37k deaths from COVID right now and the number is still increasing at non-linear rates. This is /on-top/ of the flu deaths. So this isn't just "a slightly worse flu season".

I don't mean to suggest that this won't be worse than the flu when all is done, but you're comparing global COVID-19 deaths to US-only flu deaths (US COVID deaths are about 3,000 right now, not 37,000).

I misread the data. I assumed it was global, but it was US only data I was looking at.

For the record global flu deaths some years are about 600k.

There is a good chance the lockdowns are saving more lives due to the normal flu then covid.

https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html

Poster above was not equating COVID to Influenza. They were making a point that at a certain point we have to weigh the tradeoffs of halting our economy versus saving X numbers of lives.

Totally agreed. I hate to repeat a phrase that's essentially a right wing / denialist talking point, but, at a certain point, the cure is definitely worse than the disease. You can see this pretty obviously if you imagine shutting down literally everything, so that GDP drops 100%. Clearly, people will die in that scenario.

So, the question really is: at what point is the cure worse than the disease? To answer that, you have to look at the impact of people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, not professionals who are WFH and largely insulated from it.

This is asking for a lot, but maybe this crisis will help Americans re-evaluate why we think it's such a good idea to set up society without a safety net, such that temporarily shutting down the economy for a few months is such a disaster. Can we make structural/political changes that reduce the impact of such shutdowns? I know this is expecting way too much outside-the-ideological-box thinking from politicians, but maybe this kind of thought will inch toward the mainstream.

That is probably asking a lot, but maybe we might get at the very least a re-evaluation of how we look at sick time for food and service industry workers. It's not just a job benefit, subject only to negotiation between employer and employee. It ought to be a public interest question, affecting lots of people other than employer and employee, so it ought to be handled more like social security or unemployment insurance. Even that is a stretch, but I could see it potentially happening.

Pretty soon many of those WFH pros in the big multinationals will also be furloughed or laid off. It hit mine because all forecasts show this will outlive June. Factories are closing, supply chains are drying up, and business to business sales have all buy stopped for a huge part of the economy. Given share prices also ranked, what do we all think is going to happen for all but the cash rich enterprises that can gobble everything up.

My company is healthcare adjacent so we've actually seen an uptick in business - but my wife had to lay herself off as the small manufacturing plant she works at has no incoming business.

I think it's important for us to band together and make sure we can all make it through this stress together and I don't mind if, as someone on just barely in the "haver" side of thing, I need to surrender some of my stuff to make sure those worse off do well.

That all said, I'm up in Canada where I don't gush lovingly over the government, but I find it to be reasonable and well intentioned... And I think the US has a real problem coming up where nearly nobody wants to help the common good because both sides have been constantly fed that the government is terrible and only acts in the interest of big businesses (which, generally, it does).

Our government just initiated massive federal unemployment benefits, grants to small businesses who keep their payroll going, a moratorium on foreclosures for federally backed home loans, and temporary UBI. The primary focus of any complaints I see are about the bailouts of the investor class.

This cartoon I found on the Colombia subreddit describes this inequality: https://i.redd.it/vpdqwhnawmo41.jpg

I'm between jobs and I'm likely pretty fucked, but I take no issue with people using humor to get through this stressful period and wish them the best.

If you want to get mad, get mad at incompetent politicians who aren't doing enough to ensure a speedy recovery.

That's why you should support rent strikes and the temporary shutting down of evictions and removal of utilities being cut off

Those people out of work are significantly less in trouble if they don't have to pay rent

Landlords are in significantly less trouble if they don't have to pay their mortgages.

That's all you have to do to help out Americans out of work (along with unemployment)

The stimulus bill along with local and state government's are already doing most of this...

> rent strikes

One of these things is not like the others.

Gotta be subversive somehow ️:)

Well, I am a big fan of subterfugue after all.

Um no. Pension funds rely on interest from banks (collected from mortgages and other debt-based securities) to pay out senior pensions. People rely on interest from banks to pay their annuities. Banks rely on mortgage payments to be able to have cash on hand to give to customers withdrawing money.

I don't disagree that we will have to figure out how to make all this works without collecting 100% of mortgages, but the idea that it's so easy is crazy.

Until the banks foreclose on the rental property and evict them anyway.

This separation of society is the worse problem here.

Every comment I see and make asking the question of what the appropriate measure of response should be is grey.

It seems as if the HN community feels very strongly that either this should not be questioned or that the only acceptable response is nobody should die from a virus, no matter the cost.

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