I don't see a way around this. Lock down costs $2 trillion a month.... and a vaccine is not coming any time soon. So that only leaves the slow painful crawl towards herd immunity and potentially a million dead.
Less if the vaccine gets here first.
Unless there is some other Plan D to fund the country while simultaneously protecting everyone from dying via an invisible highly contagious virus.....
Your assumption that this costs us $2 trillion/month is flawed. I'm not saying that we aren't bleeding money, but the number is off because you're counting all of the spending in a bubble. The government spends massive amounts of money per month, even without Covid, and some of that spending has been shifted.
Further, "slow painful crawl towards herd immunity and potentially a million dead." isn't how I would characterize it. Over the last 2-3 months we've lost 90,000 lives. And that is with lock downs that people are complaining about. And toward "potentially a million" dead is a vast mischaracterization. That is an OPTIMISTIC death count. Do you really believe we have any solid evidence that only 1 out of 10 people who get this are showing up in the hospital? Where is the data that shows this? I'm not talking non-peer reviewed news articles that used research that was obtained using subjects from Facebook, and used tests with high false positive rates that dramatically skewed the data. Most of the people who have a solid grasp of the data - believe the death count is dramatically understated.
I was talking to a dr. friend of mine who was saying he was looking at the stats in his hospital and he couldn't believe that our county is at 6% death rate. He stated, as I have read elsewhere, that the flu numbers are totally calculated. Nobody is actually reporting them and confirming them like this. If they were, the flu numbers would probably be much lower.
I was intentionally skewing my numbers to be as optimistic as possible - that's a minimum. It's also based on the data we've obtained during this lockdown - if it runs free, of course that will increase in rate and size.
But I do agree on two points. A vaccine, if one works and is discovered quickly, is probably the best way to correct this, and finding another plan is very difficult. I'm not sure we can sustain the economic outfall of this regardless of which direction we go.
You will definitely face the same problems we will be contending with. The tourism industry simply can’t take priority over public safety. While some establishments aren’t going to be open, people are still going to travel to their own properties and then frequent local public areas/essential businesses that are open.
Hopefully it won’t take too long before the governors realize that the “mandatory” 14 day self quarantine order for people crossing our state borders isn’t doing anything. It’s being treated as a mere suggestion to be ignored.
There will also be some hostility and violent acts occurring between local citizens and out of state travelers. It’s just a matter of time..
Yeah, and it won't. Everyone is acting like we can simply open businesses and it will be fine. We have an ice cream shop where I live that has been in business for 19 years. We are a seasonal area and most businesses close down during the winter, open during the summer and make their money from all the tourism. This ice cream shop opened its doors 2 weeks ago with a plan in place to try to enforce social distancing. It turned into such a sh1t show that after 1 day open and the customers berating teenage girls and not following rules, the guy that owns it decided to just shut down because he realized being open during all of this would destroy the business he has spent 19 years building.
Of course, what's it going to do when some restaurant opens up and an asymptomatic customer comes in to have a meal and infects 100 other patrons and they all get sick and 6 of them die? I know when a restaurant has food poisoning cases like that, it's pretty damaging. I wouldn't want that to be my restaurant's reputation. Are people gonna give that restaurant a pass when they want a meal?
The real issue though, where I live, is that we have 3 small hospitals that service the area. They generally run at 96% capacity, and during a heavy flu season, etc. may run over 100% capacity for brief periods. You throw 6 million tourists in a cluster and spread sickness, they will be overrun in a heart beat. But all of these people coming to their summer homes aren't thinking about the economics of the area and how we really don't have the capacity that other areas do because things are shut down for 5+ months of the year and our population is a small fraction of what they see in the summer. We just can't support the infrastructure year round to handle something like this.
the problem is that the employees at stores are high risk of getting virus, what happens if there is no one to run stores?
This is a great point. I think people are overlooking the fact that even if we open, it won't be business as normal.
As a tangent, I think it really speaks toward having systems in place. I do know some businesses and restaurants around here that are doing a good job of making things work. I now one chinese food restaurant that makes you call in your order, pay with a card, and then call again when you are there to pick it up. They will put the food out on a table after you call and you come and get it. Their employees have almost no exposure to customers, which I think is the real key. Of course, this restaurant is facing increased labor costs to keep all this going, and their suppliers are doing the same thing so their supplies are higher and the restaurant has implemented a 10% surcharge. There's a word for that in economics - inflation.
Further, I do some work with logistics companies and they have implemented health checks and all kinds of strategies. This may become more of the norm.
But these all have an economic cost as well - so if the government is spending 1T to keep people home or losing 1T in tax dollars because all of these businesses have increased expenses - what is really better long term?
The million that will potentially die won't be all at one time (maybe two+ years) or all in one area. And the vast majority are beyond retirement age so will not affect the operation of stores much if at all.
Just a horrible toll both emotionally and financially.
No, they won't all be dying at once - mostly. But of course, again, that million is a highly optimistic number. Other data has suggested that 80% of the patients aren't being counted, not 90% and even this would double that death rate. And 50% infection rate to reach heard immunity is the most optimistic number anyone has. It may need to be as high as a 90% infection rate. Do that math.
90% of 330,000,000 = 297,000,000
0.6% of 297,000,000 = 1,782,000
And if it's actually closer to 1.2% infected death rate (which I think is still reasonable) - over 3.5M deaths.
Sure, maybe it will take 3-4 years. But that only serves to increase the death rate, not reduce it - because new people will be born and they will need to be infected in order to hit that 50-90% number as well.
And keep in mind, approx. 3 weeks ago I was having an argument on here where people were telling me, "Maybe 100,000 people will die from this at most" and 3 weeks before that we were thinking, "This is like the flu. 60,000 people die from the flu and that's the number we're gonna hit with this."
I do agree with the sentiment that shutting down is extremely costly, and I'm not sure what the alternative plan is to make this all work - but the two options that are on the table are both pretty bad and one of them really requires us to ignore a lot of reality and try to push ahead with business as usual - which isn't really a plan either.