No they didn't. This literally makes no sense. Do you understand how big China is? Do you understand how many people there are? Are you seriously telling me every person in China was "locked down"? How does that make any sense? Wuhan was "locked down" and one of my good friends who lives in Cali but whose parents are in Wuhan told me they live just outside the city and could leave their house easily and at will. So if they weren't locked down, are you telling me all the many hundreds of smaller cities and towns were "locked down" too??

Only someone who had never visited China and seen the scale of the place woukd say such a thing. It's like saying I locked down all the termite colonies in Australia.

I'm not sure that locking the place down for a little while per se will cause a recession. Numbers will take a hit for a while because people are prevented from spending and working, but the normal course of action after a snow day or staying home with the flu is to get up and go back to work and resume spending money. This is the path China could be on for its economy overall, if not for its economic interdependence with the U.S., which is handling things differently.

The U.S. is steering itself toward a year-or-more-long issue that has people fearfully avoiding stores, deliveries, workplaces, and the consequences of this will ricochet. A recession happens when people and businesses restrict spending and hiring, and that's exactly what this scenario causes in a chronic way.

But who knows? Maybe Gilead's experimental antiviral will be approved within a month or two, and maybe that will be enough to make people not fearful and regain economic confidence.

A common definition of recession is a decline in GDP lasting for 2 consecutive quarters. It seems likely for this to cause a decline in GDP in Q1 and Q1 at a minimum, so a recession seems inevitable.

I do think there will be a point when going out becomes less of a concern and there will be a lot of pent up demand for travel. The recovery will likely be sharp (V-shaped).

I was speaking to the strategies that could be employed vs what we’re actually doing, and I am concerned that what we’re doing will cause a recession.

To relate the strategy to that formal definition of a recession, if everybody stayed home for a month this quarter, we might lose 1/3 of the quarter’s GDP. But if that break is structured so that it’s expected and we resume normal activity afterward, then in the next quarter we would see the GDP “grow“ a ton, if only back to normal because people are working and spending for the full three months, and we would cleanly avoid this formal definition for a recession.

Oh, I understand what you are saying now. I think the issue is that government officials aren't comfortable defining an endpoint right now. There are a lot of unknowns as to what could stop the spread at this point.

no vaccine will be approved at the earliest 6 months from now. By then the worst will be over. Most vaccines take 1+ years

Not really, read any news stories about it. Sure they were tough on people they quarantined, but people moved around.

Seems like they did but my suppliers have been back to work for over two weeks now.