You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.

In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

I.e. the US and UK have gone ahead wonderfully; the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, South Africa.. not so much

What they have done is: - allowed companies who's income has dropped by 30% to claim $600/employee/week of salary support - negotiated with all the banks to allow mortgage holidays

Think of it as trickle up stimulus and trickle down rent subsidies to keep people connected to companies and as many companies as possible still viable

We're getting close to having Covid beat(only 5 new cases today, all from known sources), next week we slowly start dropping out of lockdown

Yes, government isn't some omnipotent god but neither is it some helpless pathetic entity that can't sort things out at a time of extraordinary crisis.

My assumption is that governments are taking on some sort of debt here.

(Even if you hardly needed to before just by sheer size.)

The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

Of course it doesn't. Governments all over the world aren't making decisions for the benefit of the economy right now, they're doing it to save the lives of their citizens.

Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.

The term "bail out" is usually understood to mean replacing funds after the owner of them lost them through bad decision making. What's happening here isn't a conventional bailout. Governments have destroyed the businesses of private investors deliberately and explicitly - reductions in the damage aren't bail outs.

Bay area issued the first national stay at home order on March 13. By then demand had already dropped precipitously. If your restaurant is seeing 60% fewer bookings, are you going to keep as many wait staff? Are you going to order as much food? How is that going to impact your supplier? And their supplier?

On the flip side we have places like Smithfield food that stayed open and their workforce became infected. Smithfield alone has as many infected as the entire country of Sweden reported newly infected yesterday. These are problems of different orders of magnitutde. How does a factory stay open with 500 people infected at once?

And yet Sweden still disproves your point. Businesses have stayed open, including restaurants and other such businesses, and yet Swedish companies are not evaporating due to their workforces being too sick to work. That's not even close to happening, is it?

``` A record 36,800 people were handed their notice in March, more than 10 times the number from the same month last year.

The government has offered loans and guarantees and expects to increase expenditure by around 84 billion Swedish crowns ($8.35 billion) this year.

At the same time, the central bank has poured money into the financial system, offering 500 billion Swedish crowns in loans to companies via banks and boosting its purchases of securities by 300 billion crowns.

Banking group Swedbank said recently it expected the economy to contract 4% this year. ``` https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

The U.K. government is also backing loans for businesses to limp on with, interest free for the first 6 months or year (I forget the specifics).

So how does that work? Instead of right now, they'll get evicted and become homeless as soon as things open up, because they've been piling up rent with no income in the meantime? Would you find that comforting?

This seems like a “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. It’s rational for an individual landlord to evict a delinquent tenant and seek a new one. However, if everyone does this the entire market collapses. It’s better for everyone if the landlord takes a short term haircut to preserve the market.

Since cooperation is expected to break down between individuals, the government must step in to prevent collapse.

Capital owners are not a special class of citizen. If you have assets and need cash, there is a way to convert one to the other. It's called a "market". You may have heard of it.

It seems that during recessions, asset-rich/cash-poor people, nominally Capitalists, turn into overnight socialists because making cuts to the ol' lifestyle is for the little people, not them.

Honestly, because its unlikely that most people will be able to share the burden of theses costs and we need only look at 2008 to see how a financial crisis reduced people to forced evictions (of people who even owned their homes, no less) because of delinquency.

Personally, I want to believe we could do more as individuals, as relying on the Government for solutions isn't going to work.

I'd prefer to enact a local/community based approach for this pandemic but I have serious doubts as to how it will take place or who would actually honor them when its clear so many businesses (even large corporations) are insolvent in the US. not to mention the level of wide-spread ignorance as seen with these quarantine protests taking place.

I'm starting to really wonder, especially as this can easily lead to a global depression if hasn't already, if we will have to have a debt jubilee given the severity of COVID.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubi...

Most Americans are broke, it's just not really talked about.

Sure, and I'm very aware of my privilege in that sense. If people have the choice of getting the disease or missing rent payments that is a social failing we should all be ashamed of. I also don't mean to ignore the global perspective. The U.S. is materially wealthy enough that we could take care of people who need help as we get through this. Other nations don't necessarily have the resources.

This is the statistical morality question that we're very bad at dealing with. Here, move this trolley switch lever. There's a 1/100 chance that doing so kills somebody. No, you can't tell whether it will, or even whether it did afterwards. Here's your cheque.

This makes me wonder if there might be some kind of eminent domain case to be made: If the government orders a business closed due to no fault of the owner/management, is that sufficiently similar to seizing the property that they owe some kind of remuneration for the action?

There is a legitimate place for cost-benefit analysis. There isn't for "5G causes coronavirus" or "it's a myth being put about by the new world order". Those kind of memes are also a kind of virality that needs to be quarantined.

(Let's not pretend there's a censorship rubicon; Facebook will remove anything vaguely "adult" or related to copyright infringement very aggressively.)

Privately-run communication channels have always been arbiters of truth. Fanzines and newsletters chose what to publish. The town supermarket chose what flyers it would allow on its bulletin board. The local book store chose what books and magazines it would sell. Social clubs imposed standards on their membership. And this has always been (at least arguably) both their right and their duty.

The problem is not that Facebook does this. Unless and until they seek some form of common carrier status, they continue to retain the same curatorial rights as pretty much any other private organization that isn't a telecom. The problem is that the town bookstore is gone, the town grocery store no longer has a bulletin board, the Masonic temple and the Elks club have been converted to condos, and we have generally allowed the available media for disseminating information to consolidate into a worldwide oligarchy, with Facebook as its most powerful member. The problem is that my mom gets almost all her information about the outside world, including what's happening in her local community, from Facebook, and I honestly don't know where else she can go.

And that's a problem even if Facebook doesn't try to actively arbitrate truth, because you'd still have all the other problems: The tying of access to information to an abusive monetization policy. The tying of most opportunities for community engagement to an abusive monetization policy. The single, easy target for astroturfing and political manipulation. The way that lies and misinformation generally have to be left to spread like wildfire because you can't do anything about it without people complaining about free speech.

The internet allows a wealth of information, and you should not trust FB as the arbiter of information anymore than you should absolutely-without-question trust Washington Post, Buzzfeed News or the freaking Daily Stormer.

FB 'censoring' some ridiculously unscientific and dangerous information, like COVID19 disinformation, doesn't completely hide that. You can still find it out there, but you have to look for it.

I would agree it opens up a door. You censor one thing, you think it might be worth censoring another thing and so on. But 'slippery slope' is a logical fallacy for a reason, and this disinformation is an inherently difficult problem, we can't just look to easy answers like "don't allow censorship."

(Does anyone have a definitive "masks will not help" statement from the WHO? Rather than a "masks should not be worn" one)

And regarding Corona: Sweden never introduced a quarantine, and they seem to be in good shape compared to others. Not saying I agree with that policy, because I don't. But the topic isn't as "black and white" as it appears.

Here in Germany, as of today, many of the already few restrictions where lifted as well.

We don't have the data was markbnj's point. (I'd go even further and say most of the people on HN don't even know what data would be good to have, and wouldn't have the capacity to comprehend the full meaning of those datasets even if we did have them.) He's also correct when he posits the very strong likelihood that the people who do have the data and the capacity for actionable understanding thereof, don't spend their days on trivialities like posting to HN right now.

He's right, they are busy. They're doing the real work of extricating us from this situation and they need a bit of space. Adding more pressure on them right now is not necessarily going to help. In tech terms, it's like working on a giant software release with features that have never before been implemented, (coronavirus), and telling your boss, (the people), you're not sure you can hit the release date 4 weeks from now.

Then your boss decides to help you by only requiring you implement the most difficult features, and moving the release date up to friday.

This is a misleading way to phrase (or perceive) it. Yes, most shops are open again under strict limitations. No restaurants, bars, churches, stadia, theaters, big shopping malls etc., even in the most permissive state (NRW). No gatherings even in private. At the same time, more and more German states are requiring citizens to wear masks for shopping and transportation. Travel within the country is subject to limitations. A few schools will now open to conduct final exams, but most schools and especially kindergartens will remain shut for months. With the R0 still close to 1 anything else would be madness.

Not sure why you felt the need to call it "misleading".

Sweden is currently seeing an increase in both confirmed cases and deaths.

The only reason things aren't worse in Sweden is that they've implemented a mild form of lockdown. There's a lot of debate in Sweden about their approach, and plenty of people think they need to be on tighter lockdowns.

There is still great difference in how deaths are counted between countries. For instance, Italy mostly counted dead at hospitals. In Sweden, if someone dies, it's up to the doctor in charge to call for a post mortem test or not. There has been quite a lot testing in homes for the elderly.

What all of this means, is that it's very difficult to compare between countries. I think it will be much clearer in retrospect, but maybe not even then.

And this mild lockdown is the point - no tracking of citizens with apps, no quarantine orders, no Police and Military (Finland!!) or closed roads. People are changing their behaviour without all of that. The politicians in charge are worried that a hard lockdown will create fatigue - and they want us to be able to keep up mitigations for a long time, because the virus may be with us for a long time.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per-mill...

They seem to be doing better than average.

Germany is one of the few countries that has managed to do test+trace well enough to contain outbreaks. It's definitely a model to be copied .. but you have to get the testing in place first!

And no, we didn't contain the outbreak. But we have 20,000 ICU beds. Unlike France, Italy or Spain, who only have about 5000 each.

While in those countries, people could not be treated for lack of capacity, here in Germany we still have about 50% free ICU beds (as of two days ago, according to the health ministry).

That's why we have low mortality, while still having a pretty large number of infected people.

Absolutely not an expert and being married to a critical care nurse doesn't make me one. From what she has told me and what I have read ventilators are not about oxygen, they are about the mechanical work to move the diaphragm in and out, something the body gets too tired to do at some point after a long battle with respiratory illness. In fact the arguments against ventilators that I have read is specifically that they put pressure on the lungs without actually increasing the absorption of oxygen. But this is one of those things the actual experts are trying to figure out right now.

1) Your anecdote is not consistent with the national concern - it's local to your area.

My father is currently in a hospital for an unrelated reason and it's almost empty -> they are 'prepared for war' and there isn't a single COVID patient in the entire area, let alone hospital. They are all empty.

The vast majority of hospitals in the US are not warzones they are quiet.

"The general opinion is that the system can't handle much additional strain, and I don't think any of us are in a position to argue the point with them. "

Yes - we are! Your local hospital is not 'the system'. We have to take this into consideration.

2) It's disingenuous to somehow imply that 'because some hospitals are busy' that this means 'all doctors think we must be locked-down, everywhere' and more importantly, that people should not be able to protest the lockdown, or that major media outlets should be suppressing this.

3) In the fact of a lot of different variables, people absolutely have the right to come to their own conclusions, and protest, and certainly to drum up support for said protests.

Edit: to be clear, I agree with the lock-downs, but we really should not be suppressing people's will to express themselves. I see a lot of doctors talking about policies without a real instinct as to how existentially destructive they are. Folks we are printing money as never before seen in history, there was a 'fire in the engines' and so we shut them off, but we are now headed straight down to the earth, very quickly. We have to be conscious of that and look very hard at other things (Korea, Sweden etc.) and be real smart about it.

Which is just as anecdotal. The virus doesn't spread everywhere at once, and there are a lot of places in the country/world that aren't NYC/North Jersey yet. If they have similar population density and do a similar job of social isolation then what magic do you suggest will make the outcomes different there?

" social isolation then what magic do you suggest will make the outcomes different there?"

If you'd bother to consider outside the narrow confines of the USA you might want to consider what 'magic' the Singaporean, Hong Kong and S. Korean systems are using because they are considerably more dense and doing really well. Sweden is also dong 'kind of ok' without any lock-down.

The real issue however is the suppression of people's right to communicate and gather, even if online.

We have a situation in which the nation is forcibly locked into their homes, and large conglomerates are suppressing further their ability to communicate. This is existentially disturbing.

The most important right we have is to effectively gather and confer with one another, because the first thing authoritarian regimes want to do is stop people form 'meeting to figure out how to get rid of the regime'.

I wish the protestors would practice better social distancing, and I do think we should remain locked-down, but I absolutely support their right to voice their concerns.

In fact the government should be doing much more to mollify concerns over freedom of movement and expression etc, legislating limits to such rules, requiring oversight etc..

Recall that the outbreak started in central Europe weeks before the USA locked down. Even in the harder hit countries, there are quiet hospitals almost everywhere. Look at Switzerland - it shares a huge land border with northern Italy and has large numbers of people who move across the borders, it volunteered to take Italian patients in. Swiss hospitals are receiving financial bailouts because they're so quiet, it's on the downcurve for a long time now yet it has never implemented house arrest (just closing shops and other gathering places). Even the Italians didn't need to send Ticino patients in the end.

There's a lot of experience with this right now. There are a few cities or local hotspots where for unclear reasons the disease hits harder than the vast majority of places. But even in those harder hit places field hospitals are hardly used.

It is incredibly bad news that Facebook is attempting to interfere with the social processes of figuring out when lockdown should end right now - and yes, that includes protests. There's no evidence lawmakers have any better insight into what's going on than anyone else, and quite a bit of evidence they may have worse insight. Silicon Valley needs to butt out or see its reputation sink the journalism-like lows.

I got some news for you: these protests seem to be indirectly financed by powerful politicians.

https://www.salon.com/2020/04/16/conservative-grouplinked-to...

Really, think about what you're implying here - that Americans somehow care so little about being placed under house arrest that they'd need to be paid to turn up to a protest about it? That's not the America I know.

As for "conservative group with links to conservative politicians", given the vague nature of the term "links" that's going to encompass a vast number of politically active people in the country. There's nothing surprising or sinister about people who distrust centralised state power organising protests against totalitarian actions. It's exactly what you'd expect to see.

Yes, I'm sure dark money funded protestors who blocked ambulances from going to hospitals have better insight than anyone else. What a load of nonsense.

Facebook is a private platform. It can moderate how it pleases.

Absolutely not; it is highly regulated (probably should be more so), subject to constitutional concerns, ongoing legislation and pressures.

I am one of those, who think that way, as a preferred solution. Now there are of course many problems with this approach, because who is "vulnerable"? Who decides on that. Because it also means, that those categorized as not vulnerable, would be expected to go to work etc. and those who do get quarantined should get compensated, otherwise they must go out, out of basic needs (money).

Now for some, this would mean, you can get paid vacation, if you just say, you have been a heavy smoker. Abuse of the system. So medical tests for classification of "vulnerable"? And then who compensates the relatives of the people who were classificated "non-risk" and forced to work, but did get sick and died of it?

So it is not easy. But I still think, that direction would be easier, because "We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work" is only valid, for people with lots of savings. People who live from paycheck to paycheck cannot. They would need help (from government most likely) or die. And who helps all those, who spend years building up a business and have it all wasted, to protect other people? Is that fair? And there are government programs in place all around the world, but I have serious doubts, that they really compensate in a meaningful way. So the result will be most likely, the big survive and prosper (see Amazon) and the small vanishes. So killing the weak in the name of protecting the weak?

Now yes, it is usually a different thing to die economically and to die literally, but for some the result might be the same. Their live work shattered.

So this is the other side.

There is no easy solution I see, but for context: look at all the poor countries, they really have no other way, than "let it wash over them". You can't really lock people in their home for long(even though they try), if their home is a crowded metal shed in the slums with no AC, power or even running water. They will be cocked, before they starve to death. So what can they do? Live on. But it does not seem to me, that Covid-19 really takes a higher death toll, than all the other diseases are already taking. Some die, but the rest lives on.

This is harsh, but the way it is for them and somewhat working. And in any case, that also means, that the virus cannot really be wiped out globally. So is the solution really to lock the rich world in and the poor world out, until someday maybe a reliable cure or vaccine gets deployed? Well, that seems to be the current plan and it might work, but not if the total lockdown goes on forever. Because then, some parts of the "rich" world will also turn into "poor", with no other choice than working again and take the losses.

Several European nations have already started to ease lockdowns. High risk people still stay home, but a lot of people get to go back to work. If the US gets it's shit together, that can happen here too.

What I hear from those I talk with: at what cost? Businesses are permanently closing. People are losing jobs. One report suggested 30% unemployment as an optimistic stat and that is worse than the Great Depression. Another report was that 50% of people under 45 have lost hours, been furloughed, or been laid off. 80% of Americans don’t have $500 in case of an emergency.

A lot of people are more scared of losing their home than of dying even if mortality rates are over 10%. They hear news that mostly immunodeficient and the elderly are at risk and many feel that those populations should keep under quarantine while the rest get back to business as usual.

I didn't offer anecdotal "evidence" of anything. I told a story from a professional who is on the front lines of this fight to illustrate that the numbers of people who die don't make it clear where the pressures on the medical system come from. They come from people needing care, whether or not they die. In fact whether they eventually die probably has little impact on the overall system load. If your statistical evidence, which is really just the odd bits of studies and reports you probably don't fully understand, disagrees with practitioner experience then it's probably wrong.

Anecdotal cases don't tell anything. Those people and kids could have other undiagnosed diseases or preconditions, they could lie about age, they could even have been miscategorized. All statistics shows that people at risks are 60+ , and people with another comorbidity. Just one example of study :

https://www.jwatch.org/na51296/2020/04/03/how-comorbidities-...

There are other studies if you look for "comorbidity covid19"

All that said 'the hospitals are being overwhelmed' isn't a good reason to shut down most of the economy. If people are going to park up in their houses for months anyway there isn't much difference whether they are sick or not. I know a bunch of work-hungry lunatics who would much rather catch the disease, risk whatever may happen and get back to work and the data I've seen says it is debatable on whether that is the wrong approach for someone in their 30s or 40s. And on the flip side I don't think there has ever been an experiment like shutting everything down to see what happens. We have no idea if we are playing with fire or or a fluffy pillow for some of these decisions around shutting down industries. There is a correlation with bad economies and war breaking out. Does that happen when the economic wounds are self inflected in a crisis? We really don't know. Probably not. But things are happening very quickly and a lot of serious turbulence is hitting the system.

It is a fair observation and somewhat compelling but there needs to be a better reason than 'ICU nurses are overwhelmed with work' to strip people of their right to make their own mistakes. It is good evidence but it is not the end of the conversation.

What happens when the kits are faulty or non-experts interpret the data? Lots of folks will think they're safe and go home to visit at-risk elders.

> All that said 'the hospitals are being overwhelmed' isn't a good reason to shut down most of the economy.

The hospitals are overwhelmed, so there will be no help for you when you need it. Any care that would have addressed accidents, infections, major medical emergencies will be under duress. People will die from preventable reasons.

> There is a correlation with bad economies and war breaking out.

This is outrageous to suggest.

> there needs to be a better reason than 'ICU nurses are overwhelmed with work' to strip people of their right to make their own mistakes.

Unfortunately when you get covid-19, you can spread it along and become part of an infection chain that leads to the deaths of others.

Do people have the right to drive under the influence?

That is basically what the CDC did. Having one organisation in a position where a totally ordinary and probably routine failure will kill tens of thousands of people, or worse, is stupid. It isn't like government officials are the only people in the world who care about stopping a blossoming pandemic; the law shouldn't pretend otherwise.

Better to ban tests if there is something wrong with them than preemptivly screw up the response.

In our area, nurses have been furloughed because there is not enough going on at the hospitals and clinics to bill and thus pay for the staff.

Also looking at the NHS as a whole doesn’t tell the correct story as the virus right now is concentrated in a few hotspots.

It just did. Something rather important.