Reopening is an illusion - behaviors change rationally in response to the environment.

Bars will have patrons, but won't be as busy. People will travel, but not as much. Restaurants will still serve food, but half will be delivery.

The govt. has little control over real economic productivity except by handling the pandemic and the economic shocks produced by it.

Exactly. While things are closed, there's a reason for restaurants to demand support from the government. Everyone suffers, but homogeneously and less.

If we open up, support from the government zeroes out and bars and restaurants will find themselves in two circumstances: they will be partially full because people are scared to be in public (and will struggle to make ends meet and maybe fail), or they will be plenty full until someone brings in COVID-19, a bunch of folks get sick, contact-tracing tracks it back to the bar or restaurant, word gets around, and business at that place crashes because it's a plague vector. Some businesses will win in this circumstance. Most will lose.

It's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma deal.

> they will be plenty full until someone brings in COVID-19

Someone will bring covid 19, sure, that is fully expected, we know that since the virus spread easily, but we also know majority of them will be not get stick or only have some mild symptom. no need contact tracing, no need to get panic.

Ah yes, the whole "Most people won't show symptoms so that's okay" ploy. Next you'll be saying "kids are basically immune"

Seems a little pedantic or legalistic to argue that kids aren’t functionally immune to covid. Less than 2% of cases in the US have been kids under the age of 18. Of the ones that tested positive, less than 10% had symptoms.

Three total children have died in the US from complications relating to covid. It’s more dangerous to drive your kid to the park than it is to let your kid play in the park.

The kids themselves probably won't die from the infection, but they certainly are a near-ideal vector to spread it to other people.

One might hypothesize that kids have done pretty well because, you know, schools have been near-uniformly closed, so their "places of employment" have been near-100% remote. I bet the COVID numbers look pretty good for work-from-home tech workers too, that doesn't mean tech workers are "nearly immune" to COVID.

It's just a numbers game and if COVID starts to pick up big time then it'll surge through schools. You're spending 8 hours a day in close contact with 8 different sets of 30 students who rotate every hour, plus crowded halls and busses and all that stuff. Then you go home to Grandma and she gets it.

It's already happening: https://www.businessinsider.com/schools-reopen-coronavirus-s...

> Although kids are less likely to get severe coronavirus cases, mounting evidence suggests they can spread the virus. Most children have the same amount of virus in their upper respiratory tracts as adults do, according to a research letter published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, and children under 5 may have between 10 and 100 times more virus than adults (though this doesn't necessarily mean they spread the virus more efficiently).

Grandma may or may not get it, even if she get it doesn't mean she is going to be 100% die.

Given her age, any small diseases could kill her.

...Are they not?

Kids are, sadly, not immune.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6931e1.htm

> Basically immune

That link doesn't really contradict that. It contradicts actually immune, since kids can obviously catch it. However most, particularly young children, don't show symptoms. And most of those that do show symptoms only have mild symptoms.

So yes, basically immune. Kids don't have much to fear themselves, the concern is that they'll infect adults who actually do have something to fear.

I see what you mean. I wouldn't classify that as "basically immune;" "less susceptible to deadly symptoms" maybe. Immunity should include a lack of ability to communicate the disease, which is not demonstrated at all.

... and I still wouldn't put money on children being immune enough to, say, safely open schools even if we discard the child->adult transmission risk. Over half the youngest demographic in the Georgia camp were infected, and children are dying from this disease, even if at a lower rate than adults (how much lower is a really important question).

> and children are dying from this disease, even if at a lower rate than adults (how much lower is a really important question).

The data I've found is:

    Under 1: 15 deaths
    1-4: 10 deaths
    5-14: 20 deaths
    15-24: 225 deaths

The curve continues from there, peaking at 45,845 for 85 years or older. So yes, some kids do die, or at least they had covid when they died. But if this were all covid was, we certainly wouldn't have closed schools for the kids' sake over this. Clearly schools are closed due to the threat posed to teachers.

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...

What does that look like relative to the infection count? That's the numbers I can't get easy access to; it may be the case we've simply successfully kept the disease away from places children frequent.

I'm hoping that's not the dominant factor in the numbers, because school re-opening will be real ugly if it is.

The Dutch CDC (locally known as RIVM) concluded that risk to young children is very low, and Dutch schools have been open since early May based on this understanding.

In the Netherlands, 0.6% of the reported hospitalisations involved children under the age of 18, and 0 death have been reported under this age. Here's the summary page of the RIVM: https://www.rivm.nl/en/novel-coronavirus-covid-19/children-a...

Some googling reveals only corroborating reports that the case fatality (CFR) rate among young children is very low:

https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/sites/know4pol/files/j...

https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-fatalit...

https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/ep...

AFAICT if you just try to synthesize the existing research without prejudice, you'd have to conclude that the risk of young children dying from COVID-19 is very low.

Whether there is much risk of children -> adult transmission is more difficult to answer.

The risk to young children is low. But not having symptoms or being low death rate doesn't mean shit.

Kids require adults to take care of them. That means those kids who may have the infection could VERY easily spread it to higher risk people.

They aren't immune, they still get the virus, they can still spread it. That is not immune. They just don't show symptoms like older people. That's not an immunity.

On top of that we don't know the long term effects of this thing. While kids may not show symptoms what long term effects might this have on kids? There's still a huge risk there.

>not having symptoms or being low death rate doesn't mean shit.

It means a lot, its a good news, it means the virus is not that dangerous.

>On top of that we don't know the long term effects of this thing

Sure but there also long term effect of kids not going to school in person, that is bigger risk.

Not going to school in person isn't fatal.

Going to school is unlikely to be fatal either. The benefit of going to school is greater than the risk of covid.

If you are really really that paranoid, you can home school your kids.

> They aren't immune, they still get the virus, they can still spread it. That is not immune.

I never claimed they are, so I don't know what you're actually replying to here.

> it may be the case we've simply successfully kept the disease away from places children frequent.

That might be true to a degree, however the discrepancy is so huge, 2-3 orders of magnitude, that it should be pretty clear kids really do have much less to fear. I think some Olympic-level contortionism is needed to come to any other conclusion.

This argument doesn't give a shit about the ones who do get sick.

> but we also know majority of them will be not get stick or only have some mild symptom

That is utterly, utterly wrong. Even in those with only moderate symptoms, damage across the body results from catching the 'rona: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...

And it's across the body that the 'rona does long lasting damage, this is pretty rare in any form of sickness. And it's going to bite economies in the butt for many, many decades to come. The only way to prevent this is to prevent people from getting infected.

of course some population of people will have long term damage, any disease could do that.

Most don't; COVID-19 isn't "any disease." It's got both an R0 and a fatality (and, we've come to learn, long-term-injury) rate that are way too high to refrain from taking it seriously.

fatality rate less than 1% is very low. In regards for long term injury, given enough spread any disease could cause long term damage in some of its population. Flu cause long term damage.

The damage caused by lockdown is more than covid.

> fatality rate less than 1% is very low

If I told you that every day you lived your normal life, you had a 1 in 100 chance of dying, would you take it?

How about a 1 in 1,000 chance? That's an expected payoff of about three years before you die, Worth it?

The breakeven point is different for different people, but I think even 0.1% chance of death is too high for most.

Or flipping the numbers: if 100% of Americans become infected, a disease with a 0.1% fatality rate is about 350,000. That's more people than we lost in World War II.

>If I told you that every day you lived your normal life, you had a 1 in 100 chance of dying, would you take it

Of course, in fact that I'm doing right now, i try to lived my normal life as much as i still possibly can.

>The breakeven point is different for different people, but I think even 0.1% chance of death is too high for most.

There are always some chance of death everyday regardless of covid.

Do you think lockdown doesn't case long term damage ? The lockdown and the fear mongering cause more damage than the covid itself.

>That's more people than we lost in World War II

Sure but we have more people now compare to before.

Sure, and in 2018 we had 80,000 people die of the flu, but that was just expected because it happens every year (flu killing tens of thousands).

Everything has opened back up in my city but it's been four months since the first lockdown and now my behavior has changed. I no longer want those old experiences again, at least not as frequently.

I think everyone is underestimating the behavioral changes two months of lockdown can bring about. 60 days is exactly the number of days you need to cement a habit. We've had more than that.

If even 10% of the people end up changing their behavioral patterns, businesses that depend on these customers have 10% lower business. That's huge, especially when you borrowed debt expect +10% growth, not -10%

No, I mean I've had enough and I'm not alone. Reopen, let everyone go back to work.

There's no one stopping you from going back to work, except your coworkers who don't want to.

Yes because everyone is rich and can choose not to work, so let's force immunocompromised Americans to go back to work. Excellent idea.

Economic activity is not the be-all, end-all purpose of human life. But even if it was...

Every business opening tomorrow as if there was no pandemic does not mean the economy will magically return to Nov 2019.

People who do not feel safe do not spend money freely. People without financial security tend to not spend on frivolous things. People with crushing medical debt do not contribute to the economy the same way that they used to.

It's OK to want a return to normalcy, but it will only happen through a careful process (which is already not happening). Getting frustrated and saying to hell with caution has no chance of success now, or ever.

Hundreds of thousands of people dead would be bad for the economy.

we already have hundreds of thousands of deaths... It was not because of suicides.

I guess we will find out, won't we? I will bet you a shiny dollar that suicides and overdoes deaths are higher than covid related deaths. https://townhall.com/tipsheet/micaelaburrow/2020/07/28/redfi...

I'd take that bet, even though it's not a reasonable comparison.

COVID-19 deaths are over and above expected deaths, which is why "excess deaths" is much higher so far this year, and the spikes and dips in excess deaths match COVID-19 spikes and dips pretty well.

I'm not even sure whether overall suicide deaths in 2020 will be higher than suicide deaths in 2019, let alone 150k higher and counting. Even the link you provide relies primarily on one person's assertion about high schoolers at a given point in time, without supporting information. Yes, many high schoolers commit suicide. Not enough, I think, to exceed COVID-19 deaths in 2020. Not even close.

Suicide is normally then 10th-highest cause of death in the US[0]. Currently in Texas, where I live, COVID-19 is 3rd, behind only heart disease and cancers[1], and it seems like it will be easily in the top 5 nationwide.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/23/health/covid-rank-leading-cau...

[1] https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/dallas-county-report...

How many of these suicides are due to economic despair? The economy is not coming back until we get Covid under control. The fact that we just ignore this is mind boggling to me. Most western nations have this under control now, its just us looking for every reason under the sun to essentially say "Its too hard, we give up, now die for the dow."

"Where Redfield obtained his data is unknown, although a doctor at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, CA claimed the facility has “seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.” He did not say how many deaths occurred, or whether the statement was exaggerated for emphasis."

I am willing to have the debate but only with real numbers, this article from a biased news site is not that.

it's not november yet

Sad, but true.

No, we need to help individuals and people who are struggling with economic assistance. Economic assistance isn't sacrificing people onto the alter of capitalism.