I think the more substantial critique of this position is that the option to reopen the economy is a fantasy. The notion that we're all going to go out and start going to restaurants again amidst stories of people dying in hospital hallways for lack of medical equipment is ridiculous.

We have already seen the outcomes for countries skeptical of the lockdown strategy, they have paid dearly for it, and the worse is yet to come.

Exactly. I sure as hell am not going out to eat or sending my kids back to school or... anything I can possibly avoid until I feel safe doing so.

This is a public health crisis. You have to fix that to start fixing the economy.

To put this in perspective, NYC is projected to run out of ventilators early next week[1]. That means if you catch it now and need ICU, there's no medical equipment to save you.

Whether government mandated or not, people are gonna stay the fuck home because they don't want themselves or their parents to die in a hallway.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...

> The notion that we're all going to go out and start going to restaurants again amidst stories of people dying in hospital hallways for lack of medical equipment is ridiculous.

It's not as ridiculous as you think. Most people would just go about their lives and risk the disease because most people will be okay. If people weren't forced/threatened to quarantine, they wouldn't. If the nba season wasn't canceled, people would still attend the games. Same with baseball games, comedy clubs, concerts, etc.

The question is the cost-benefit analysis. What is lost and what is gained via the lockdown/shutdown and whether it is worth it.

Some would go, but I think it’d be a worst case middle ground where activity is slowed enough to keep us in a depression but not enough to slow the growth of the virus

You gotta come to a compromise, a middle ground. Especially since a vaccine is at least 13 months out. We cannot continue this. And the problem with this disease is it's got this asynchronous transmission. It's shutting down entire nations, but not all regions are equally affected. And so, we may get this situation where NYC hits its peak in 2-4 weeks but then Dallas gets their peak in 2 months but then San Diego gets their peak in 4 months but then Phoenix gets their's in October and so on. This is how it's playing out across the globe. You can require masks in public. You can strongly encourage the elderly to stay home. You can shut down public transportation. You can go to 50% occupancy in restaurants and theaters. But you can't commit economic suicide. It will kill more people in the long run than the disease does.

> The insanity is that people pushing to re-open the economy are being called shills for wall street.

I don't know where you're hearing this. I think people generally understand that SMBs are getting fucking wrecked by this.

The argument against has nothing to do with Wall Street. It has to do with there being a pandemic and keeping people away from each other. We re-open too soon, people die and this gets even worse.

We _should_ be talking about how businesses weather the storm. But conversations about re-opening the economy are not simply "do we want to stay closed and help rich people or do we care about the little guy."

> I don't know where you're hearing this.

I've seen this sentiment on Twitter. What happens is that, as with any concept that gets put through that digital meat-grinder, it gets simplified beyond all meaning. In this case people read it as "Republicans are suggesting we should sacrifice vulnerable lives to the economy". And when they see "the economy", they read it as "the rich". "The rich think we should sacrifice our lives for their pocketbooks" is obviously an inflammatory idea, and therefore it spreads. Small businesses never enter the conversation.

Nevermind the fact that big businesses are about to go bankrupt too. The airline industry is in trouble. Deep trouble. The tourism industry alone is huge and completely decimated right now. Disney World is shut down. Universal. Beaches shut down. Entire regional economies are built on tourism, like Florida's. You're putting hundreds of thousands of employees out of work. And even the big businesses have capital expenses and they're not sitting on 6 months worth of savings. They're going to have to make massive and permanent layoffs that will take years to crawl back from.

I think the issue is, a) We reopen early, transmissions rates rise again, we have to go through another shutdown, let's say that's another month and a half. b) We wait an extra two weeks, things reopen, no cascade in transmissions.

In either case, "Wall street" will do fine, in case (a), "Main street" gets extra dead.

(time spans are made up, but the idea that a relapse would be longer I think is solid)

It is impossible to reopen without Taiwan-style temperature checks & mask requirements outside buildings, contact tracing, large-scale testing, and quarantine enforced by penalty of law (with corresponding support systems - get the police to do something useful and bring people groceries). Anything else and we'll be right back in lockdown inside of a month.

Then this is all pointless because it will take years to retrofit everything with that level of testing and tracing and make it useful in some way as well as enforcing isolation. We might as well open up and suffer the consequences until we have herd immunity even if that means a lot of deaths.

It doesn't sound like a particularly tall order to me. Also, the alternative isn't opening up - which is utterly psychopathic and would kill millions - but continue in lockdown until a vaccine is developed within two years.

You’re forgetting the possibility that a large percentage of the US population is already infected and asymptomatic, in which case the shutdown was ineffective in the first place.

We can’t act on that possibility without data.

That's why we should be conducting random tests on samplings of the populations. This would be a statistics problem.

I absolutely agree, but we’re currently SOL.

No, Wall Street will not do fine. There's real risk of a great depression and a series of bankruptcies and massive layoffs.

Wall street, elite wall street, is licking its chops right now. They have direct access to the virtual printing press, and can manufacture money (debt) whenever they want. The more distressed properties become, the better for them.

Individual investors and low level financial industry employees will be hit hard, but that's not who I'm talking about.

Maybe attitudes are changing? I feel like a few days a go a post like yours would have been downvoted to heck.

You should target a different elite for "not helping the average family feed itself" than gates. Actually, he's more altruistic than that. He helps out the dirt poor African farmers who are far more screwed than Americans are.

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/...

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/...

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1844632,00...

https://reliefweb.int/report/world/uk-aid-partners-gates-fou...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/gates-fund...

Gates is being super tone deaf right now. We don’t need a billionaire telling us what to do. For some reason reddit is eating it up.

He even mentioned Microchipping everyone To prove our vaccine status to be able to enter businesses.

> For some reason reddit is eating it up.

From the AMAs?