>I think this is the most important metric as far as “re-opening the economy” goes but it seems to be largely ignored by politicians.

Basically all metrics have been ignored. Two weeks ago it was all "We're going to do a phased reopening with checkpoints based on the data.". A few armed protests later and my state (NC) at least is going full YOLO reopening everything but bars, based on absolutely nothing but hopes and prayers. New infections here haven't even remotely peaked, and are still rising by the hundreds every day. This is going to be a catastrophe.

It is already a catastrophe, and it looks like it'll just keep getting worse, unless we get lucky somehow, which I'm not counting on.

BTW, most all economists keep pointing the finger back at fixing the public health crisis to fix the economic problems, whatever their political stripes: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/05/sa...

But we have no coherent plans to do much about the public health crisis at a national level, and the president is busy tweeting out anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories.

..or, business could open with the precautions they're taking and .. nothing happens. We see the same fatality rates, grow a little, lower a little, but generally level off.

It sucks it's come to this, but all of the states with lock-downs are desperately looking at states easing restrictions to see if these shelter in place orders are really worth it. We've heard that many of the people in NYC getting infected now are getting infected at home.

I'm really hoping that Texas and Georgia, as they slowly open up, do not go over hospital capacities. We already know a number of people haven't gone to hospitals when they needed to; as many cut off access in preparation for a surge that never came. It's equally likely these states may not see a surge at all, even post re-opening.

Yes, a lot of people may still die, but this virus is in the environment. A lot of those people would die either now, or six months from now. I don't understand how people can think complete eradication is even possible. You can't limit people's social contact forever. We are not laptops that can be placed on standby for a year or gears in a machine that can be stopped and oiled.

> We've heard that many of the people in NYC getting infected now are getting infected at home.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at, but there is a recent study showing that COVID cases correlate well with commuting in NYC - it's not the case that people who stay at home are getting infected just as much:

https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42665370

(this site is down for me right now, but it was working earlier when i looked at the paper!)

>..or, business could open with the precautions they're taking and .. nothing happens.

Maybe. But probably not. The fact that this decision is being made with zero preparation is terrifying. There is no PPE generally available. There are no contact tracing programs in place. There has been effectively zero federal response or any form of coherent strategy released. Hell, you can't even buy hand sanitizer in the stores again yet. Of course we can't live in isolation forever. But absolutely nothing has been done to make reopening any safer than we were two months ago. And saying "welp, let's hope it just goes away", with no safety measures in place, is going to mean hundreds of thousands of deaths.

> I don't understand how people can think complete eradication is even possible.

Eradication, to the point that contract tracing is a viable containment method, has been achieved by other countries. It is completely possible.

It's not clear that it has been. Singapore was at that point, until a sudden spike in new cases overwhelmed them and they had to lock down. South Korea just re-closed their bars and pushed back school reopenings, because a single guy started a cluster of 80 cases and they don't trust their contact tracing to handle that many. Taiwan and Vietnam are either lucky or have better strategies than simply "do a lot of contact tracing", but in either case it's not obvious that other countries can replicate their success.

It's not eradication, but it's a much more fine-grained tool that lets some of the economy open back up in a safer way. It's what we should be aiming for everywhere.

The US might not be able to do quite as well, but it feels like we're barely even trying.

Agreed. But everywhere I know of, including Texas, is indeed aiming to do lots of contact tracing so opening up the economy is safer.

So we're seeing two different methods: Sweden (and I guess soon, the UK and the rest of the world) taking measures to slow the spread, but realizing it will spread to everyone.

South Kora, New Zealand, etc where they are going for complete elimination. Now ask yourself this ... when will South Korea or NZ be able to reopen their borders? They will have little to no immunity, so possibly not for a year or more.

> They will have little to no immunity, so possibly not for a year or more.

That last bit is a moot point. Herd immunity is not something we aspire to here in the United States. Even if infection results in immunity, which has not been proven yet, the number of people infected in the US that would be needed for herd immunity would involve millions of people dying.

> So we're seeing two different methods: Sweden (and I guess soon, the UK and the rest of the world) taking measures to slow the spread, but realizing it will spread to everyone.

I expect that's a pretty cartoonish reading of Sweden's public policy. (The UK's public policy is cartoonish lately, but they've definitely backed away from "let's all get sick.")

I think it might be fairer to say it was possible for countries that caught it early enough, and responded quickly enough to prevent it spreading out of control.

Unfortunately, I think it's a bit too late for the USA to do that now.

We're a long way from that being proven.

This is a strawman! You're right, nobody has shown eradication. But there are examples of control, with a straightforward set of techniques for getting there. It is difficult and requires competency to execute those techniques, but we should be coming together to do those difficult things and demanding competent execution of them from our leaders. There is really no excuse to do otherwise at this point, long after other countries have already done the work to cut through the uncertainty and demonstrate a much more successful approach.

But we aren't doing this, we're instead bickering incessantly and fatalistically rationalizing a much worse outcome than necessary. It is a deep deep historical failure of leadership.

Apart from Taiwan, who locked down travel from China in Dec-Jan even _before_ the WHO declaimed that "no human to human transmission is possible", can you please let me know which country has successfully eradicated Coronavirus ?

I think 'eradication' was a bad term and shouldn't be the focus in the US, because that's very, very difficult.

Isn't New Zealand almost entirely free of it at this point?

Why do people insist on unnecessary mass deaths when we have examples of how to effectively respond to this disease in countries like South Korea and Taiwan without them? Why do people lean into this falsely-premised fatalism instead of demanding what has been proven to work?

I don't get the downvotes for the above comment. The "choice" between "stay at home forever" or "open all the things up" is a false one.

If we do test/trace/isolate, and start requiring masks in enclosed spaces, we could start opening up in a fairly safe way.

> start requiring masks in enclosed spaces,

This. It's hard to believe that a portion of the country is so anti-mask that they accept a 30% increased risk of a 50% chance of a multi day fever OVER a fashionable piece of homemade fabric or bandana.

It's insane is what it is.

If you want to reopen the economy - and we all do - masks are part of what makes that happen, and makes it "stick", without a second wave causing further stay at home orders as infections spike.

That would mean it's safe for Dallas to open up, since the state is doing test/trace/isolate and the city requires masks in enclosed spaces.

This site doesn't show Texas as really having the capacity to do that effectively, but it could be wrong or a bit out of date, as much is these days even if well-intentioned.

https://testandtrace.com/

Mark Cuban's article indicates that masks are not as prevalent as they ought to be.

This kind of site is a core example of why people are skeptical of the "false choice, we can open up responsibly" narrative. In practice, if a graphic designer makes a nice-looking chart where a state is red, that seems to be treated as a conclusive argument that opening up isn't responsible. The site doesn't appear to have any specific argument why Texas is wrong to think it can safely open up, just fixed numerical thresholds which Texas hasn't hit.

Those thresholds seem reasonable to me. The fact that so many states are "red" on the map (not ready to reopen, not the political "red") is indicative that we wasted a lot of time in the US not getting ready. This failure is going to continue to cost us billions of dollars, to say nothing of lives lost.

I don't know if its similar in Dallas but in Houston when I drive by gas stations, bars, and restaurants most people aren't wearing masks.

Just anecdata about ~Houston but:

- At ~7:00am Sunday, May 3, I only saw one "customer" not wearing a mask at a grocery store inside the inner loop. (Quotes because this person got caught trying to walk out the front door with a 40 of something while I was still waiting outside for a cart; not inclined to count them.) All employees that I saw were masked, though I did see one pull their mask down under their chin for a minute or so to speak to a coworker standing next to them.

- Friday evening (May 9) we needed gas on the way back from bringing in a package for a relative who is out of town. The League City Buc-ees was bustling when we stopped by around 6:30pm; employees were masked, but I didn't see any masked customers. My spouse noticed an additional masked customer that I didn't see.

- On the way back in, I also noticed that the Twin Peaks in Webster had a pretty full parking lot. I saw a few people leaving who were not masked, but I wasn't close enough to get any sense of things like what fraction were wearing a mask, what fraction were seated outside, and how well-spaced the tables were.

Sample's too small to even try to reason from, but I've been wondering how much (if any) of the difference is accounted for by the type of establishment/patron demographics, proximity to downtown, and change over time.

I live in the heights but I haven't been to the grocery store since March. I wonder if the distinction is grocery store vs corner store/bar/restaurant. I imagine cautious poeple are much more likely to go to the grocery store than to a corner store/bar/restaurant.

Yes--it seems quite possible that the venue (and times of day) are strongly selecting for different patrons, which is a big part of why I hesitate to blame distance-from-downtown or wonder whether people have relaxed a lot in a week. But the latter wouldn't shock me, either.

That's because they instinctively know it's bullshit

the same reason they promote slashing public programs, welfare, benefits

Seems to be because we can’t spin up testing.

I'm generally an optimistic person but I can't see a way out of this mess barring a vaccine or proven cure. South Korea's recent spurt shows that a single super spreader event can undo all the gains of the lockdown.

My country (India) had one of the strictest lockdowns, but the economic fallout from it is too severe. The message now is that we will have to learn to live with the virus.

The issue here is politicians need to communicate a clear message on what is acceptable and what is not and instead even at local, city, and state, levels we see in many states politicians trying to one up or put down each other.

The simple fact is we cannot continue in the shut down state we have and the rules of the shut down need to be heavily revised so as not to appear as arbitrary and unneeded. It gets worse because there does not seem to be any acceptable date and that is unreasonable in an extreme. The line in the sand will have to be drawn and efforts put towards protecting the most at risk.

We also have to recognize just how much person to person interaction that many businesses truly are. From actual touching to handing items back and forth if not handling items in shared environments. Social distancing really cannot work in some businesses and this needs to be accounted for because they cannot be kept shut down without accepting some risk; namely hair care, massage, hair care, but not to be ignored the biggest one, medical care. If it safe for a dentist or optometrist to work on you then a hair dresser can follow similar but appropriate restrictions.

Besides telling people how to protect themselves they need to tell people how to be polite in this new world we face and how to protect yourself from people who don't take the same caution you do without aggravating the situation.

I wouldn't say it's been ignored, I think it's more accurate to say that there is an uncomfortable and at times stark difference between politicians who attempt to address the issue by making things safer, and politicians who attempt to normalize the danger with rhetoric.

Not only that. But even after they "come around", I will be avoiding those businesses that acted recklessly. For instance the Walgreens nearest me employees weren't wearing masks until recently. Some restaurants are open _now_ with table service outside being served by people not wearing masks.

I will never be going to those restaurants. I may never return to Walgreens.

Yeah. Sure you can reopen restaurants if you want, but I certainly will not go.

That is an entirely subjective measure that can only be determined by each individual/household rather than something that can be determined centrally and applied to everyone.

Furthermore, we have 75k dead. If we think we've peaked, this means we lose another 75k on the way down. And of course nobody with any opinion worth considering thinks we have peaked. So it looks like we could easily break 200k... If people weren't spending money out before, it'll be twice as worse.

TL;DR If you don't fix the biology, you will not get the economy sorted. This will just make everything worse. Totally backfire.

> And of course nobody with any opinion worth considering thinks we have peaked.

This is unnecessarily insulting. Many places have peaked, especially if you look at new cases and not deaths.

There's a difference between a peak and a halfway point. We could have reached the peak but only 10% of deaths if there's a long plateau slightly lower than the peak.

“Re-open the economy” talk has reached levels of collective delusion that I honestly find frightening. And it’s not a partisan issue either.

We have the example of successful responses in places like South Korea and Taiwan, none of whose standard the US seems intent, or maybe even capable, of meeting. Instead, people in the US cling to phony performances of leadership by their various authoritarians, whether it be Andrew Cuomo for Democrats or Trump for Republicans.

Every substantive viewpoint I've seen on the subject comes back to cashflow. Our national propaganda is so strong, that rather than the middle class asking "why do I have to go to work every day just to pay rent to the bank?", they've internalized the system so thoroughly that they're actually protesting to get back on the treadmill.

>Our national propaganda is so strong, that rather than workers asking "why do I have to go to work every day just to pay rent to the bank?"

This is not fair to people that have spent their lifetimes building businesses and are watching them go bust, or people that derive satisfaction from their employment.

Worse, for those that would rather not go back to work and are suffering, your comment comes across as "shame on them for not asking for more". This crisis is hurting so many people, and its impact will be felt for a long time. We don't need comments like this.

> This is not fair to people that have spent their lifetimes building businesses and are watching them go bust

What is actually unfair to them is their businesses going bust, but here we are. We can either acknowledge the underlying reasons for why this is happening, or keep ignoring the elephant in the room of the ever-growing debt spiral.

You're shooting the messenger with grandstanding empathy, and that style of comment helps nobody. Indeed, people should be asking for more, rather than letting themselves be disenfranchised by fatalistic propaganda. People should be demanding a competent public health response. People should be demanding timely unemployment benefits that don't hinge on the whims of states forcing businesses to close. People should be demanding loans and disaster payments for small businesses that aren't stacked to benefit large connected companies. People should be demanding the right for workers to walk out over negligent conditions. People should be demanding a commercial rent stoppage. And people should be demanding an end to trickle-up economics so we aren't in these same inflexible overleveraged positions for the next crisis.

> This is not fair to people that have spent their lifetimes building businesses and are watching them go bust

This will primarily be true of businesses with strong brick and mortar services (but especially those renting brick and mortar); the result will be that, in the future,

1. Owners will divest earnings as much possible rather than investing in growth in order to jump into bankruptcy protection more rapidly next time

2. Accountants will recommend accounting for 4 weeks of paid leave classified as sick leave that will be used up during a quarantine.

Frankly, if every substantive viewpoint you've seen comes back to cashflow, that means you're dismissing viewpoints you don't understand as unsubstantive. A lot of people derive most of their meaning in life from hanging out with friends and working to provide for their family; they find it miserable to sit on their butts all day watching Netflix, even if the government keeps them well fed.

The context is "re-open the economy", and so I was referring to the economic arguments. One doesn't have to just sit around watching movies. Doing so is a choice. For example, catch up on those home improvement projects you've been putting off - that is providing for your family. People that enjoy being productive will generally find a way to be productive outside the economic structure. This is still Hacker News, right?

Given that your children are unlikely to be at serious risk from COVID-19, I'm not sure why.

Your child is much more likely to be adversely affected (in the long term) by sustained economic stagnation than by this virus.

Considering most countries try to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system, your child is affected by it though not directly. It should just not get sick, or have any form of preexisting condition about to pop up, or infect it's parents to name some possibilities.

Considering many US hospitals are going under for lack patients, this is an argument that doesn't apply.

That's not really what the comment I was replying to was talking about though, was it?

I’m sure Mark Cuban would also like to avoid the risk of leaving their children without a mother or father too.

I am merely taking the wording at face value. The point was not "is this a place I would want to shop?", it was "is this a place I would take my family?" The implication is clearly different.

That’s an uncharitably narrow interpretation, and kind of a silly point to argue.

It's really not. That is the literal wording of the quote.

“Family” includes all members of the family, including the parents. If he wanted to refer to just his children he would’ve said “children”.

Tell that to the parents of the children who just died of Kawasaki-like inflammation from the virus in NYC. We’re still seeing novel presentation of symptoms in various cohorts and have no idea of its long term impacts on children or anyone else.

We’re not certain, but all signs point to it being so, and we’re rushing advisements to pediatric care providers accordingly:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-baby-s-...

I don’t understand why demanding caution against harm to children in a dangerous, unpredictable situation is “disgusting.” It certainly seems less so to me then an a false confidence that could throw them into harms way.

How would we know the statistical significance of the harm to these children in the case of novel symptom presentation, when we don’t know the rate of overall infection, the duration of immunity, or any myriad other things about the disease path at this point?

Instead of admitting our ignorance of the situation and embracing precaution, you’re painting that ignorance as strength and hiding behind appeals to decorum. So again, which is the more “disgusting” to engage in?

> Instead of admitting our ignorance of the situation and embracing precaution, you’re painting that ignorance as strength and hiding behind appeals to decorum.

Where in the world are you getting that? This is not something we are totally ignorant about.

Even if the syndrome you decided to tout is 100% COVID-19s fault, it has still only killed 3 children. That is the definition of statistically insignificant.

Again – statistically, with our current knowledge, children in general do not have much to fear from this virus. We know that people are dying, and we know that the vast majority of the people dying are not, in fact, children.

You seem to be saying that because we don't know everything, we can't make informed decisions at all. But we can. Based on what we know, children have very little relative risk.

> Even if the syndrome you decided to tout is 100% COVID-19s fault, it has still only killed 3 children. That is the definition of statistically insignificant.

This is literally not true. I think you're trying to claim it's not a big deal because most children who contract covid will not die in this way. But this doesn't have any relationship to the statistical analysis of significance that tries to determine causality. In your hypothetical you've stipulated that covid19 is 100% at fault. There's no need for statistics in this case because the confidence at 100% i.e. somehow science has proved the mechanism in your hypothetical.

> Again – statistically, with our current knowledge, children in general do not have much to fear from this virus.

You could have said the same thing about AIDS. Statistically with current knowledge circa 1981 straight people had nothing to fear from AIDS. Statistically in 1983, years after the initial outbreak the proportion of people dying from AIDS as opposed to those who were living with HIV was infinitesimal. And then people started dying at higher, alarming rates. That took over a decade. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_the_United_States#...)

I'm not saying covid is AIDS, but we're mere months into this thing and noticing strange syndromes in children. To blanket claim that "statics show us" anything with the certainty you're projecting is shortsighted.

You seem misinformed.

https://www.gosh.nhs.uk/news/coronavirus-covid-19-informatio...

Please stop with all the FUD and actually read up on what we know.

Not really seeing anything in this link that has any bearing on what I said in my post.

We know that COVID-19 is less dangerous, statistically, for children than it is for other populations. By a large degree.

Okay, but I wasn’t saying COVID isn’t more dangerous for children statistically. I said you are misusing the idea of statistical significance and and are overconfident about the long term effects of a new disease.