If you care about the economy, the best thing we (the US) can do is follow the lead of other countries that have gotten this under control with evidence-based measures, and push the government to provide support to those in need, so the economy can bounce back quickly, rather than sliding into depression.

You currently do not have a government that will be swayed by evidence.

It isn't only the government, it's a significant minority of the population nationally; and at a local level it can approach significant majority.

A Marion County Florida Sheriff ordered that staff and visitors to his office cannot wear masks. That order is uncivilized behavior. The state governor should have removed him from power. People speeding on roads get sanctioned more, for being less of a menace to society.

At least the kooks who wear masks to have Zoom conference calls aren't subjecting anyone to risk their health or life.

You've touched on exactly what worries me most about the Trump era. Somehow, unnecessary combativeness and flamboyant disagreement has come to be valued in and of itself. As if somehow anyone wins by acting childishly.

> As if somehow anyone wins by acting childishly.

Certain people apparently do.

Some appreciate it. Some find it too tedious to bother pushing back on it. Meltdown on aisle 5! Toddler requires, and has gone, Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!

It's conservative virtue signalling.

This is missing context. Marion County, specifically Ocala, has a very high crime rate, one of the worst in US. The sheriff is not allowing masked people to enter because of safety concerns due to the current hate/distrust people are showing towards police. He doesn't want to guess if the next masked person who enters the station is a visitor or assailant.

Yes, we’d be much better off with the currently sidelined government that has suggested the evidence should be ignored as long as you’re protesting civil rights.

People were pretty worried about this, but so far there isn't any evidence that protests caused spikes in case numbers. Obviously there's a lot about the virus we don't know or can't fully explain, but the prevailing explanation is that the combination of widespread mask usage by protesters, quarantining by would-be protesters who know they've been exposed, and being primarily outdoors prevented transmission.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

PolitiFact tried to examine claims from the LA mayor and health director that: "it’s highly likely given the increased numbers that we’re seeing that some of this is in fact people who may have been in a crowded situation at one of the protests where there was spread."

They concluded:

> there’s not enough data to draw any definitive conclusions ...

> Medical experts say the protests likely contributed somewhat, but so did family gatherings [and] the reopening of businesses

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jul/21/how-much-did-...

Actually, the handful of half-competent governments who have handled the pandemic the best disagree: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-13/forced-is...

New Zealand has just had to quarantine 1/3 of their population, again, because of 4 cases. Until the virus is contained everywhere you will yo-yo between closing everything and opening it.

Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years.

The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?

After 100 days clean and zero deaths, Vietnam just discovered a few cases from some Chinese who had snuck into the country illegally. Those have now grown into many more cases... and deaths.

NZ is seeing what has just happened in VN only days before and acting on it because they know what will happen if they don't.

They didn't "have" to do that and most places aren't yoyoing around, they're over it already and bumping along the noise floor of cases.

NZ leadership has chosen this illogical and self-destructive path because they don't understand risk or data or, apparently, economics.

Evidence from other countries suggests that there is no way of getting this under control and returning to normal, and it wouldn't save the economy anyway. Europe is seeing a resurgence of cases, previous success story South Korea is stuck unable to reopen without a similar resurgence and with no path to eliminating the disease, even the latest remaining success stories Vietnam and New Zealand discovered the hard way that their belief they'd eradicated the disease was an illusion after it had spread unimpeded. And even countries which have managed to dodge much of the direct economic damage have suffered a huge amount of indirect damage from the entire rest of the world shutting down.

Edit: I can't reply due to rate limiting, but you can't just dismiss the resurgences of cases in Europe because the absolute number of cases is small now - this is exponential growth with a rather alarming exponent, and that always starts out small until it isn't. Remember, it takes the same amount of time to go from say 1 to 2 cases per 10k as from 15 to 30.

The “resurgence of cases” in these other countries are less than 1 per 10k. Florida has been having 30-40 per 10k.

It isn’t binary. All economies will take a hit. But if the US was doing 30x better then the economy would be better.

And if there is any seasonality at all the Fall could get quite a lot worse and make the economy worse than it already is.

> if the US was doing 30x better then the economy would be better.

As a counterexample to that claim, the Euro zone GDP fell 12.1% in the second quarter. That's an annualized rate of 40%, even worse than the widely reported annualized drop of 33% in the US.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/euro-zone-gdp-q2-2020-as-cor...

US decreased 9.5%. The difference seems fairly marginal and could be affected just by timing of when the virus started. Germany though bought something with that. The interesting question will be what Q3 and Q4 looks like.

I'm sorry but this is just poorly informed. The US is projected to be either near the top, or at the very worst right in the middle, of projections for GDP growth to finish out 2020.

There is a sliding scale here, of course. If we locked everybody in their houses, we could get the covid numbers to 0, but it would also completely destroy our economy, and obviously would result in substantial loss of life due to the effects of poverty. What the US has done instead is to take a hit on covid in service of economics. So far it seems to be working (with regards to GDP, I mean.)

People (especially online) have been shockingly dismissive of everything, in COVID context.

Worried about the economy? You probably only want to get rich on the stock market. Worried you might lose your job? You probably have one of those shit-jobs we've been hearing about, no big loss there. Worried remote schooling might affect children's long term development? Schools are useless anyway. Worried that art and culture like concerts, museums, theatres might disappear? We don't need them, just watch operas on Youtube and browse pictures of famous paintings. Travel? Just go to StreetView.

It's scary how quick people are to let go of elements of society and civilisation, some of which took centuries to build. Yes, nothing is perfect but these attitudes are not working towards implementing something better.

The article says that parents are 5x as worried about C19 than about paying their mortgage. They're 1/5th as worried about the possible deaths of their family members as they are about their mortgage, which suggests that they, too, are very concerned about the economy.

> The article says that parents are 5x as worried about C19 than about paying their mortgage.

> They're 1/5th as worried about the possible deaths of their family members as they are about their mortgage

These two statements seem to be in conflict? I think your 2nd statement means to say "They're 1/5th as worried about their mortgage than they are about the possible deaths of their family members."

Yeah, I flipped the terms in the second one. The intent remains clear I think.

It feels like that this is an issue where the problem is looking at the averages, which are meaningless here.

We have a bunch of people who are rightfully very worried about their finances, but we also have very many people who are quite certain that their finances are going to be okay while other people will get kicked in the nuts by the downturn resulting in poverty and bankruptcies, so they have other priorities that they are worrying about - such as infection and schooling.

If 1 in 5 people can't pay their mortgage, that's an economic catastrophe - but even if such a catastrophe is upcoming it makes all sense if the other 4 in 5 people wouldn't be worried about paying their mortgage.

the problem is not people who are worried about their finances - that is understandable. The problem is people who want to put finances over covid, mostly because covid requires certain measures in order to be eradicated (objectively) whereas an economy can (at the very least temporarily) be switched to a mode where people do not have to worry about their finances (such as UBI or a command economy). What makes at least me angry is people who are pretending that the way our economy functions right now has to be how it functions in every situation. It comes off as dogmatic and religious thinking.

100% this. The economy isn't part of nature. In it's current form it's a relatively new social construct that honestly doesn't seem to be working very well for a lot of the global population

I would even dare to the say that post keynesian economics has been worse for a major part of the population inside a western economy.

Economic growth in and of itself might be better, but how much of the population sees the result of that? basic commodoties like housing and social wellbeing/services are worse, while most of the economic growth seems to be stuck at the top.

Also, having massive growth is simply not sustainable for our planet.

Dire change is needed, the question is what? It seems most major forces in politics are stuck in maintaining the status quo and not thinking long term. Change from that system would be hard to realise, especially in the complete gridlock of american politics.

>mostly because covid requires certain measures in order to be eradicated

I thought we were flattening the curve...

What makes you think this can be eradicated? Source?

If a virus cannot transmit itself at all it will eventually die off completely as it cannot reproduce.

Lockdowns only cannot eliminate this coronavirus. You'd have to also eliminate the virus from bat populations, or eliminate bats, else it will jump back into humans.

The most likely outcome for this is that it becomes endemic, another variant of the common cold, like the several others that already exist.

The 1968 flu killed 1-4 million people, in a world with half as many people. This is nothing unusual, diseases happen, part of being human, shocking news headlines to the contrary.

> The first thing to remember is that we haven't been successful at eradicating many viruses at all. Really the lone exception is smallpox, but many of these viruses exist not only in the human population but in animal populations.

> And then the expectation I have is that this virus will actually become the next common cold coronavirus. What we don't know with these common cold coronaviruses is if they went through a similar transition period.

> So, say something like OC43, which is a common cold coronavirus that was originally from cows. It's been historically reported that there was an outbreak associated with the transition of this virus from cows to humans that was very severe disease, and then after a few years, the virus became just the common cold.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/09/900490301/covid-19-may-never-...

The US implemented essentially an entire year of forbearance on federally backed mortgages (6 months automatically, and another 6 months for filing a form with no documentation). Remaining local eviction moratoriums will expire in the next few months, although court backlogs will probably provide an additional time buffer. There are still more initial unemployment claims than there were at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. The $2400 per month unemployment subsidy has just expired and won't be fully replaced. In other words, the economic and social fallout has barely begun. Overdose deaths are already up 50% from last year in many places.

>Remaining local eviction moratoriums will expire in the next few months, although court backlogs will probably provide an additional time buffer.

Only if you're lucky enough to live in one of the progressive states, Louisiana has already started evicting people. In Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has already released documents saying that local governments can't stop or delay evictions.

Tennessee just made it a Class E felony to camp outside the capitol. Protesters have been doing this for months but it would apply to squelch protesters and homeless alike. Up to six years prison, and loss of voting rights, is the penalty.

Republicans hate the poor and yet are so willing to create more of them.

I'm not sure they want to create more, there is a risk of "rebel's dilemma" if there are too many or things get too awful.

But the Republican party is merely the political wing of a certain aristocratic mind set which includes conservatism: rich people are better people, it is a fact. There should be either no public services or inferior versions compared to the free market, because that's how rich people are rewarded for being inherently superior people - they can afford to buy more and better things. This properly includes education, health care, clean air and water, and justice. These things are not rights. They are products you buy.

It's similar to prosperity theology. The closer to god, the more you are rewarded. The more rewarded you are, the closer to the deity you must be. Monarchies, feudalism, and Mandate of Heaven.

You can also be worried about both but more worried about one or the other. I'm a parent who was laid off because of COVID and I'm more worried about my kids health than the economy or my ability to get another job. That doesn't mean I'm not worried about the economy or trying to minimize the impact a bad economy will have on society/individuals.

Is this due to news in the US? Media and politics there is so different and confusing that I feel it's a completely different reality.

> Whether you like to admit it or not, the economy is vitally important to our health, life expectancy, and quality of living. You can be worried about both COVID and the economy.

We have the technology to revive an economy - remember, we're on an all time stock rally & going higher.

At least from the NZ example (or Canada), it is clear that a war footing on the pandemic does bring back demand - the supply is easier to revive.

The economy is made of people, even if the entire supply side is automated.

Though if you automate both sides, you can end up with a two-body simulation of a high GDP economy[1].

[1] - https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-14