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1996

> In the space of just three weeks, nearly 17 million people in the United States applied for economic impact payments.

Maybe that wouldn't have happened if the government hadn't forced businesses to close? As in, if you make it illegal to go to work, people will be without a job.

> In the 2008 financial crisis, it took two whole years for the country to reach even half that number.

Morale of the story: the government could in 3 weeks destroy the economy to a level that in the 2008 crisis took 2 years for the private market to achieve.

Scary, and I'm not sure it speaks for more government.

Unfortunately, this is not what the pro-state pro-intervention crowd that dominates HN wants to hear. I long for the old days of the libertarian hackers...

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It wasn't three weeks of forcing businesses to close. It was three months of doing almost nothing to stop the spread, and decades of being socially unprepared for a crisis such as this.

Plenty of governments around the world took extreme measures, for months, to contain the virus, and saw massive economic damage in their country as a result of the measures.

So your American-centric, politicized explanation is misinformed.

Also, the US had more than three weeks of lockdowns.

>>and decades of being socially unprepared for a crisis such as this.

What kind of social preparations would have prevented the economic cataatrophe that occurred?

My response was to a comment on America's response, so yes, it was American-centric. That said, the lack in response also applies to Europe. The longer we waited, the harder it was to contain and the longer lock downs would need to happen, thus making the entire economic situation much worse.

> What kind of social preparations would have prevented the economic cataatrophe that occurred?

I never said anything would be prevented, but there's plenty lacking that could have helped. The people that are struggling right now were struggling before, this has just exasperated it immensely. Put it this way: it took weeks to get a single check out to Americans in need and they haven't seen anything since. Are these not things that could be improved?

Both could be true. Acting earlier could have prevented much of the economic damage, and the lockdowns could be causing them.

Taiwan and South Korea never instituted a lockdown. They instituted mask-wearing and aggressive contact tracing and did so early-on.

It could also be true that not acting early only leads to economic devasatation if the govermment's response to a high death toll is to institute lockdowns. In Sweden, the government did not respond to the high per capita death rate with a lockdown. In the EU and the US, most states did.

>Put it this way: it took weeks to get a single check out to Americans in need and they haven't seen anything since. Are these not things that could be improved?

So more personal savings is the kind of preparation that you're referring to, that would have lessened the damage? Well it's a well known fact in Economics that a social safety net reduces the personal savings rate.

One reason China has a personal savings rate of 40% is that it has very little in the way of a state-administered social safety net.

So to encourage people to better prepare with respect to personal savings, the West should have reduced its social welfare spending, instead of massively increasing it over the last 50 years.

Would it have been scarier to have let this virus rip through the population?

People die. It's sad a fact of life.

Now people will still die + their families will be without a job.

This virus has a higher mortality than the flu, indeed. But the jury is still out to see if the current scenario will be better that the alternative (after you factor in suicides, depressions, overdoses, etc)

But personally, I would have much preferred to live in the alternative world where the virus would have spread freely and we'd already be in herd immunity (and with the economy not destroyed)

Companies are also taking steps to limit liability due to the virus, which also depresses employment and spending.

We don’t have to guess whether or not COVID-19 could be contained to a meaningful degree. The EU seems to be succeeding at it right now. The U.S. is digging its own graves (unfortunately literally in this case.)

If you think fear from COVID-19 would not have crippled the economy, well, maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see if that’s true in some localities. I’ll firmly bet on No, it totally would still, especially as the severity increases.

So far we are not digging more mass graves. While there is still some time for the lagging indicator to catch up, there doesn’t seem to be the massive deaths expected even though we have spikes.

The states caused our deaths. New York and others shoved the elderly (an at risk population) into nursing homes. This isn’t due to good or bad responses from the Feds. The state governments are what killed us. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/opinions/steady-death-rate-co...

Ultimately the disease was going to infect us. The only question was “could we slow the spread of the disease in such a way that we don’t overwhelm the medical system?”

> If you think fear from COVID-19 would not have crippled the economy, well, maybe we’ll get the opportunity to see if that’s true in some localities.

Two reasons to believe fear of the virus would not have, by itself, crippled the economy:

1. If people were that afraid they would have been sheltering in place before the government ordered them to do so, but they were not doing that, and they only started doing that when the government ordered them to.

2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended.

>1. If people were that afraid they would have been sheltering in place before the government ordered them to do so, but they were not doing that, and they only started doing that when the government ordered them to.

People don't tend to fear something until it's tangible to them. When one of their family members or best friends gets ripped apart and then dumped into a grave, it will become a lot clearer very fast what kind of danger it can pose to oneself.

>2. The behavior of people after the lockdowns ended.

Some people are behaving that way, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly limited to America where we've decided wearing a mask is a political statement. (There are exceptions, but they are also often other places with similar or worse anti-science/medicine sentiment.) It's hard to even know what the outbreak would look like if both businesses and all ordinary people went back to normal. I know the economies have not recovered anywhere where lockdown has ended.

> I know the economies have not recovered anywhere where lockdown has ended.

On the other hand, we do know that the economies of countries that never locked down (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden) are doing better than economies in countries that did.

If countries that locked down are not recovering, that is likely a consequence of the lockdowns themselves. It's not a surprise that ordering everyone to stay at home would tank an economy.

As long as nothing bad happened to you, right?

The mortality is around 1%. So in the US alone that would leave over 3 million dead. Due to this 50 state lukewarm solution I think we'll ultimately see 1 million dead. The economy is made up of people, by the way.

your moral high-ground has us increasing the powers of the government which is permanent. That's bad for everyone. Susceptible people could have stayed home, but now everyone else is paying for it.

> The economy is made up of people, by the way.

And there is almost always an economic boom after any plague or war. Vacuums get filled, create opportunity.

In addition to the mortality we're seeing people with permanent damage to lungs, kidneys, heart and other organs. There are people in their 20s and 30s who didn't have "serious" cases (as in they didn't need to be hospitalized) that are still having symptoms 3 months after onset that prevent them from working. There are estimates that up to 10% of people who have covid have symptoms lasting longer than 3 weeks. There could be additional economic consequences if a largish number of people end up with permanent disabilities due to covid-19.

From the get go, it was estimated that 80% of the world population would be infected within 18-24 months.

All the shutdown was intended to do was to "slow the spread" from the 18 months to 24 months, and to hopefully keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.

Once we knew how infectious it was, Covid was always expected to infect nearly everyone eventually, whether the economy was shut down or not.

The Chinese military has already given the go ahead to start injecting a vaccine developed by CanSino Biologics into military personnel. That's potentially 2 million people. https://fortune.com/2020/06/29/china-coronavirus-vaccine-mil... This vaccine has already gone through their phase1&2 trials. Whereas in the US a vaccine probably won't be available for about a year, it's quite possible that other countries will follow China's lead and accelerate their vaccine development & trials.

Slowing the spread was to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed (flatten the curve) but it was also to minimize the number of people infected before either a vaccine or effective treatments became available. In the US a vaccine is likely still a year off, but we already know more about how to treat this than we did 4 months ago. And in another 4 months we'll likely have even better treatments and protocols.

It's not inevitable that 80% have to be infected within 18-24 months. Other countries have slowed the spread with Hong Kong, S Korea and Taiwan being 3 of the more notable examples.

3 or 4 million people out of 350M would be expected to die. Maybe a bit of empathy would go a long way.

Perhaps it's more a damning evidence for the unrestrained capitalism you hold so dear, that it spells catastrophe and misery if people aren't unable to keep working their bullshit jobs in the middle of the most pressing public health crisis of the last 100 years.

Suicide dropped substantially during lockdown, a lot of people realised that there's more to life than the daily grind.

I can say from my experience that the economy runs a lot smoother and recovers a lot quicker if people aren't terrified about a pandemic causing them long term health implications and killing their family.

Since this isn't our first pandemic, it would be interesting to look back on the 1918 pandemic and the 1950s pandemic and see if anything can be learned from them. I don't have an opinion either way because I haven't studied them. But due to how drastically this situation continues to affect the entire world, I'm kind of surprised that I haven't really seen any mainstream comparisons.

How long did it last? What did they do? Was there a mass economic decline? If so, how could it have been avoided? If not, why not? Etc.

I suspect that because these questions are not being asked, it may be the case that there are things to learn which are counter to popular narratives. I could definitely be very wrong about that. But it might be worthwhile to explore.

You don’t have to look at 1918. You can just look at nearly every other country in the world and how it’s been impacted. South Korea, Italy, China, and so on are all reopening or have been reopened despite having been hit just as hard as the US in the beginning - they just acted much more swiftly in the beginning. The less action our government takes, the longer this is going to go on.

Sure you don't have to, but then you potentially end up with a bias and you definitely end up with an incomplete perspective, when completeness is defined by considering the complete set of experienced circumstances.

It may be the case that a hammer-like lockdown has largely stamped the virus out of many countries and that the US failed at that and is worse-off for it. It may also be the case that the US will build herd immunity faster and it the average infection rate and death rates will eventually converge to the same everywhere. We simply do not know yet, but people are judging as if we do.

If we look to the past, we may be able to gain insight into how it played out until completion and how it was or was not affected by regulation, local & international laws, and the layperson perspective. In the current instance, no country has yet played it out to completion so that is something we could not learn from other countries right now.

Just to give one counter-point:

Take New Zealand. Its geographical isolation, low population density and strict national lockdown and contact tracing, led to it eliminating the virus.

However, now it has a set of policies that increase its isolation, and is stuck with them until an effective vaccine or treatment is found:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/new-zealand-beat-back-t...

In the absence of a vaccine, herd immunity is the only durable solution to the virus, and New Zealand is foregoing that solution to avoid a spike in deaths in the short term.

And indeed, the original plan, of 'flattening the curve' was tolerant of COVID19 deaths, and aiming for herd immunity.

But somewhere along the way, death from COVID19 became politically intolerable in the US, and now any rise in deaths leads to a call to re-lockdown, even when COVID19 cases are well below ICU capacity.

One thing we learned from the 1918 pandemic is to not to give 40 mg of aspirin to people. One of the major causes of death during that time was bleeding out internally. We now know that 4mg is the max. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091002132346.h...

What caused the 1918 pandemic to become significantly more deadly in its second wave was the war inadvertedly forcing healthy asymptomatic carriers to stay in place, instead of preferentially spread their strain of the virus, while sending symptomatic carriers of the virus to hospitals which acted as conduits for transmission:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Transmission_and_m...

The one glaring difference from previous pandemics is that we are not quarantining our sick people from other members of their household, instead choosing to enforce "stay at home" orders. I'm not sure how much more evidence we need that this is a bad idea, particularly in multigenerational households.

In 1918, the death toll spiked once people stopped giving a shit about self isolation, refusing to wear masks, etc. This is the same shit different day.

It might have been possible to curb the spread of the virus without drastic economic shutdown measures. Japan, for instance, was able to avoid such a drastic lockdown. However, Japan is not the US; it is very different in terms of geography, culture, and economy. Whether or not that kind of plan would have worked, the US response was (and is) suboptimal.

> Would it have been scarier to have let this virus rip through the population?

That's what is happening now in a lot of states that reopened. The lockdowns only delayed it. We wasted the opportunity of the lockdowns and didn't develop widespread testing, so as a result the lockdowns have done nothing except add government-enforced destruction of the economy on top of the damage the virus is doing.

The US has massively increased the amount of testing it's doing. It has some of the most widespread testing out there. Your media just kept on continually moving the goalposts on testing for stupid, partisan reasons whilst intentionally misleading you all about how America compared to the rest of the world.

Source? (Genuinely, could you link to an article comparing testing per 100k?)

Not easily. One of the ways the media maintains this illusion is by carefully avoiding comparing coronavirus testing per-capita once the US figures became too good. For example, if you Google for this you'll only find articles from mid-May like this one: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/12/health/us-coronavirus-tes... and even those carefully only compare to the countries which had more tests per capita in order to push the narrative the US is far behind everyone else.

Looking at the chart at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, the US is 27th, with most of the countries above it being much smaller ones which are not an apples-to-apples comparison because there's more of them to cherry-pick and the wealthiest few can massively increase their per-capita numbers just by ponying up money and buying a disproportionately large share of global supply of consumables. The only large countries above the US are Russia (extremely fishy), the UK (whose press has been pushing about as hard on the narrative that our testing is behind the rest of the world as the US media has), and Spain. About a quarter of the countries above the US on the list don't even have 100k people, and only the ones I listed have much above 10 million. (New York State - population 19 million - would also easily beat the UK, Russia and Spain if it were a country.) It's also well ahead of the well-publicised testing success stories like South Korea and Germany.

Current testing rate in tests per day per capita is even more impressive: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing

Incidentally, the US was one of the countries the UK press used to point at in order to convince us that our coronavirus testing was falling masssively behind the rest of the world and our government was failing us.

What if the virus really is a scam?

I mean, yes, it is killing some old people, but not all. And it is killing some younger people, but not all.

It’s mortality rate might be similar to the regular flu.

But the kicker, is that Spain just announced that they detected the virus in their frozen waste water from January 2019. This is almost a whole year before China even detected it in December 2019.

So it’s possible that this virus has been circulating around the world for a lot longer than we even realized. And if Spain’s announcement is legitimate, then, this means we have no clue where this virus could’ve originated.

>> I long for the old days of the libertarian hackers...

I share your feelings... I cam up in tech the early 90's, I can hardly recognize the hacker and free software communities any more

Very sad that authoritarianism is replacing individualism, free thinking and libertarian ideals that gave us soo much prosperity

> Very sad that authoritarianism is replacing individualism, free thinking and libertarian ideals that gave us soo much prosperity

Indeed, very sad. This is not what I signed for.

So I'm not sure I want to be in tech anymore. This is not my type of people, and not my ideals. I feel I was born too late to taste this spirit of freedom I can only read about, but not experience.

Are you kidding me? Did the government close down businesses for the heck of it, or by gross mismanagement, or... because there was a pandemic raging? If anything they've been accused of doing to little.

"Pro-state pro-intervention"? If there's anything even most hardcore (but sensible) libertarians think should be the job of the state would be catastrophe management (and defence against invasion and the like).

Just like anything, there are limits. I can empathize on your point about libertarianism, but in the case of a public health crisis versus individual rights, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Our government got that half-right and half-wrong, in my opinion. They did right by closing things down and creating ways enforce social distancing and masks protocols. They did wrong by spending more money propping up businesses as opposed to making payments directly to people. The extra unemployment benefit is a boon to most, but it runs out far too soon. The $1200 stimulus was far too little.

We need to incentivize not working, thus not spreading the virus, in the short term. We also should take this opportunity to force the Great Unwinding, let value-less businesses fail and the market return sane levels and not these QE-fueled, post-2008 crazytown numbers.

Worth repeating for those who aren't paying attention.

The virus has affected the economy. There was no escape from that. With no enforced closures people, for example, aren't going to restaurants because of the pile of bodies. Sociapaths may wish everyone ignored the piling up of the bodies and acted exactly as they would have without all those dead bodies but that's simply not how humans behave. Some fantasy that letting everything rip would have had the economy unaffected is just delusional.

So now we look at how to minimise the effect on the economy. (1) overreact early. (2) testing and contact tracing (3) quarantine (4) mask wearing. Taiwan. South Korea. Japan. Hong Kong. These are the models worth understanding.

The government does national defense. This fight against the virus that is killing us is national defense. The problem was hopelessly incompetent government. Becuase, as a libertarian, this is exactly when you need the government. There's literally no other option. It's the same as property rights enforcement. It's the same as pollution control.

As a libertarain I do not feel I have the right to discharge firearms at random in the street. I do not feel the laws against and punishments for doing so infringe on libertarian principles at all.

And so it goes for steps 1 through 4. Don't harm others for your own comfort. The end. Wear your mask when going inside anywhere that isn't your home like a genuine libertarian. This way we minimise the economic cost of the virus.

This way we save the most lives - more important to me.

(And maybe consider that being libertarian has nothing to say about being sociopathic, that's kind of the point, but we can choose not to be as well. That pile of bodies, each of them was loved and is a person who is missed. Taring libertarians as not caring about that at all s^%ts me. There are socialists who also don't care and irk me similarly).

There is a big problem with the argument that the virus would have destroyed the economy no matter what — look at how people are behaving in the places that have reopened. They were behaving that way before the lockdowns too. Restaurants are packed.

People just don’t want to hide in their homes from this. If they had been doing that, the lockdown orders would have been unnecessary and superfluous.

It’s fair to say that the virus would have damaged the economy, but it’s just not reasonable to believe that damage would have been as bad as, or worse than, the damage caused by the virus plus the lockdowns.

Taiwan did not lockdown and minimised the economic impact by not acting like a pack of muppets in office.

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