There is a very real risk that won't work. If it worked, why would we only do it in emergencies? Government may as well provide funding for essential services all the time.
The government would simply be handing out money to the people working in essential services who are doing real (and quite risky, apparently) work while. You would be receiving the benefits without doing anything. That is almost the 'paid in exposure' meme that artists have to put up with.
The economic system is crafty, it will figure out that there is dead weight somewhere and start to optimise around it. This might be unprecedented so the failure modes are beyond me - but it won't be pretty if it goes on like that. Gluts would probably not be the end of the world but severe shortages are possible.
In Australia we had an official government inquiry into why the price of milk was so persistently low. No other problems. Just low milk prices. That is what happens when a free markets run the food delivery system. That won't happen if the government steps in and starts making decisions about what is fair and who needs which items.
If you're ignoring the rates then you might as well say that driving to work is like Russian roulette.
Do you have any figures (graphs ideal) for the lung damage (or other long term health effects) distributions?
I don't pretend to know where the correct balance lies between injecting liquidity and reopening things but there's certainly nothing clueless about doing so in a calculated manner.
Note that I said "safely". Essential roles are as hazardous as war and deserve the support and equipment that that entails. We are not doing that, and it is barbaric.
I'm not going bother with your dismissal of a government providing liquidity. It is clear you have no idea what that means, or how the financial system works. I can only recommend that you learn.
Good luck to you, elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves...
If we drive the economy into another Great Depression that will kill many people as well. Federal government liquidity injections are not a solution. At some point if people aren't out working to create value then society will disintegrate.
There is essential work, those jobs are wartime/highly hazardous jobs, and deserve all of the support and gear that actual war fighters get. That isn't happening.
Finally, Fed liquidity is a tool with far greater power than we are utilizing. To not exercise that power, and to not equip hazard roles- is simply barbaric.
Good luck and good health to you.
We don't have a model for how to understand exposure and immunity dynamics for this population. My personal sense/estimate is that between 10% and 20% of the child population has been sufficiently "exposed" to now be considered "safe" but I would not bet my children's lives on that measure. I am eagerly awaiting the day I can get my kids tested for antibodies, but even if they test positive I can't consider them or us to be "safe" until we know a whole lot more.
At any rate, given just the reported numbers, a conservative back of the envelope risk-of-significant-impact from "exposure" in the teen/pre-teen set is somewhere between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 10,000.
Which says there been three coronavirus related teen+preteen deaths with no underlying conditions (all of which were teens IIRC) in NYC and another 6 with underlying conditions.
Do you have a more reliable source?
Also, 1 in 1000 is close to the estimated infection fatality rate for the general population (estimated between 0.1% and 0.5% normally) and kids are supposed to be a couple of orders of magnitude less at risk than the population average. So your numbers all seem utter nonesense to me.
I've never even heard of a preteen death of covid.
Yes, this is the point I am trying to make. But most of the demographic here (who already work from home or easily transitioned to doing so) likely don't find it difficult and are mostly unaffected.
There are groups where symptomatic incidence is lower. Sure. But JFC some of those symptomatic cases are awful, with lifelong impact.
Someone used the Russian Roulette metaphor early on and it continues to resonate with me. We see over and over again surprising case histories all across the demographic, age, and health history map. Too many that are completely unexpected and for which there are presently no predictive metrics.
We are slowly learning more about what this virus can do, and we have a sense of what it will do when presented with a known vulnerable population. It is remorseless.
But even for "low risk" populations it is exactly like Russian Roulette. You and 9 others might be at the peak of known clinical health measurements and it may leave those others unscathed- that we know of- while it will destroy your lungs or your liver or cause you to have a stroke.
With all respect to the goal of broad population immunity, for my family- we stay carefully isolated and adopt all defensive protocols, we wait for a vaccine, and we advocate for govt entities to provide the liquidity to keep safely running the various life sustaining machines that our interdependent world depends on.