> And bigger picture, I wanted to know if these are places that I would feel safe taking my family to.
I think this is the most important metric as far as “re-opening the economy” goes but it seems to be largely ignored by politicians.
I think this is the most important metric as far as “re-opening the economy” goes but it seems to be largely ignored by politicians.
Basically all metrics have been ignored. Two weeks ago it was all "We're going to do a phased reopening with checkpoints based on the data.". A few armed protests later and my state (NC) at least is going full YOLO reopening everything but bars, based on absolutely nothing but hopes and prayers. New infections here haven't even remotely peaked, and are still rising by the hundreds every day. This is going to be a catastrophe.
BTW, most all economists keep pointing the finger back at fixing the public health crisis to fix the economic problems, whatever their political stripes: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/05/sa...
But we have no coherent plans to do much about the public health crisis at a national level, and the president is busy tweeting out anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories.
It sucks it's come to this, but all of the states with lock-downs are desperately looking at states easing restrictions to see if these shelter in place orders are really worth it. We've heard that many of the people in NYC getting infected now are getting infected at home.
I'm really hoping that Texas and Georgia, as they slowly open up, do not go over hospital capacities. We already know a number of people haven't gone to hospitals when they needed to; as many cut off access in preparation for a surge that never came. It's equally likely these states may not see a surge at all, even post re-opening.
Yes, a lot of people may still die, but this virus is in the environment. A lot of those people would die either now, or six months from now. I don't understand how people can think complete eradication is even possible. You can't limit people's social contact forever. We are not laptops that can be placed on standby for a year or gears in a machine that can be stopped and oiled.
If we do test/trace/isolate, and start requiring masks in enclosed spaces, we could start opening up in a fairly safe way.
Mark Cuban's article indicates that masks are not as prevalent as they ought to be.
- At ~7:00am Sunday, May 3, I only saw one "customer" not wearing a mask at a grocery store inside the inner loop. (Quotes because this person got caught trying to walk out the front door with a 40 of something while I was still waiting outside for a cart; not inclined to count them.) All employees that I saw were masked, though I did see one pull their mask down under their chin for a minute or so to speak to a coworker standing next to them.
- Friday evening (May 9) we needed gas on the way back from bringing in a package for a relative who is out of town. The League City Buc-ees was bustling when we stopped by around 6:30pm; employees were masked, but I didn't see any masked customers. My spouse noticed an additional masked customer that I didn't see.
- On the way back in, I also noticed that the Twin Peaks in Webster had a pretty full parking lot. I saw a few people leaving who were not masked, but I wasn't close enough to get any sense of things like what fraction were wearing a mask, what fraction were seated outside, and how well-spaced the tables were.
Sample's too small to even try to reason from, but I've been wondering how much (if any) of the difference is accounted for by the type of establishment/patron demographics, proximity to downtown, and change over time.
This. It's hard to believe that a portion of the country is so anti-mask that they accept a 30% increased risk of a 50% chance of a multi day fever OVER a fashionable piece of homemade fabric or bandana.
If you want to reopen the economy - and we all do - masks are part of what makes that happen, and makes it "stick", without a second wave causing further stay at home orders as infections spike.
Eradication, to the point that contract tracing is a viable containment method, has been achieved by other countries. It is completely possible.
But we aren't doing this, we're instead bickering incessantly and fatalistically rationalizing a much worse outcome than necessary. It is a deep deep historical failure of leadership.
South Kora, New Zealand, etc where they are going for complete elimination. Now ask yourself this ... when will South Korea or NZ be able to reopen their borders? They will have little to no immunity, so possibly not for a year or more.
That last bit is a moot point. Herd immunity is not something we aspire to here in the United States. Even if infection results in immunity, which has not been proven yet, the number of people infected in the US that would be needed for herd immunity would involve millions of people dying.
> So we're seeing two different methods: Sweden (and I guess soon, the UK and the rest of the world) taking measures to slow the spread, but realizing it will spread to everyone.
I expect that's a pretty cartoonish reading of Sweden's public policy. (The UK's public policy is cartoonish lately, but they've definitely backed away from "let's all get sick.")
The US might not be able to do quite as well, but it feels like we're barely even trying.
Unfortunately, I think it's a bit too late for the USA to do that now.
Isn't New Zealand almost entirely free of it at this point?
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at, but there is a recent study showing that COVID cases correlate well with commuting in NYC - it's not the case that people who stay at home are getting infected just as much:
https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42665370
(this site is down for me right now, but it was working earlier when i looked at the paper!)
Maybe. But probably not. The fact that this decision is being made with zero preparation is terrifying. There is no PPE generally available. There are no contact tracing programs in place. There has been effectively zero federal response or any form of coherent strategy released. Hell, you can't even buy hand sanitizer in the stores again yet. Of course we can't live in isolation forever. But absolutely nothing has been done to make reopening any safer than we were two months ago. And saying "welp, let's hope it just goes away", with no safety measures in place, is going to mean hundreds of thousands of deaths.
My country (India) had one of the strictest lockdowns, but the economic fallout from it is too severe. The message now is that we will have to learn to live with the virus.
The simple fact is we cannot continue in the shut down state we have and the rules of the shut down need to be heavily revised so as not to appear as arbitrary and unneeded. It gets worse because there does not seem to be any acceptable date and that is unreasonable in an extreme. The line in the sand will have to be drawn and efforts put towards protecting the most at risk.
We also have to recognize just how much person to person interaction that many businesses truly are. From actual touching to handing items back and forth if not handling items in shared environments. Social distancing really cannot work in some businesses and this needs to be accounted for because they cannot be kept shut down without accepting some risk; namely hair care, massage, hair care, but not to be ignored the biggest one, medical care. If it safe for a dentist or optometrist to work on you then a hair dresser can follow similar but appropriate restrictions.
Besides telling people how to protect themselves they need to tell people how to be polite in this new world we face and how to protect yourself from people who don't take the same caution you do without aggravating the situation.
I will never be going to those restaurants. I may never return to Walgreens.
TL;DR If you don't fix the biology, you will not get the economy sorted. This will just make everything worse. Totally backfire.
This is unnecessarily insulting. Many places have peaked, especially if you look at new cases and not deaths.
There's a difference between a peak and a halfway point. We could have reached the peak but only 10% of deaths if there's a long plateau slightly lower than the peak.
We have the example of successful responses in places like South Korea and Taiwan, none of whose standard the US seems intent, or maybe even capable, of meeting. Instead, people in the US cling to phony performances of leadership by their various authoritarians, whether it be Andrew Cuomo for Democrats or Trump for Republicans.
This is not fair to people that have spent their lifetimes building businesses and are watching them go bust, or people that derive satisfaction from their employment.
Worse, for those that would rather not go back to work and are suffering, your comment comes across as "shame on them for not asking for more". This crisis is hurting so many people, and its impact will be felt for a long time. We don't need comments like this.
What is actually unfair to them is their businesses going bust, but here we are. We can either acknowledge the underlying reasons for why this is happening, or keep ignoring the elephant in the room of the ever-growing debt spiral.
You're shooting the messenger with grandstanding empathy, and that style of comment helps nobody. Indeed, people should be asking for more, rather than letting themselves be disenfranchised by fatalistic propaganda. People should be demanding a competent public health response. People should be demanding timely unemployment benefits that don't hinge on the whims of states forcing businesses to close. People should be demanding loans and disaster payments for small businesses that aren't stacked to benefit large connected companies. People should be demanding the right for workers to walk out over negligent conditions. People should be demanding a commercial rent stoppage. And people should be demanding an end to trickle-up economics so we aren't in these same inflexible overleveraged positions for the next crisis.
This will primarily be true of businesses with strong brick and mortar services (but especially those renting brick and mortar); the result will be that, in the future,
1. Owners will divest earnings as much possible rather than investing in growth in order to jump into bankruptcy protection more rapidly next time
2. Accountants will recommend accounting for 4 weeks of paid leave classified as sick leave that will be used up during a quarantine.
Your child is much more likely to be adversely affected (in the long term) by sustained economic stagnation than by this virus.