That was certainly true earlier. I think people are questioning if it's still the right thing to do.

From what I see around me there a huge number of unfilled jobs because people are making more money from unemployment than from jobs.

Yes, the job could pay more, but that has its own set of pros and cons. It's almost acting like a backdoor minimum wage, but worse, because some people would rather make a bit less and not work at all. (I'm not saying that's you - I'm talking in generalities here.)

I think the generous unemployment benefits just exposed how little minimum wage people are paid. Many minimum wage people were being laid off, so they went for unemployment benefits. But those weren’t enough (because the jobs were barely paying enough). Enough people were finally complaining about their wages that politicians decided to just give everyone extra unemployment benefit money.

If the extra unemployment benefits from the CARES Act was just changing the unemployment pay to 100% your prior pay, it wouldn’t’ve been as big an issue. But for someone making $300 a week could possibly get $800 through unemployment (~$200 for unemployment plus $600 “bonus”).

The CARES Act suspending the “search for work” requirement didn’t help either. It was necessary at the time as there were no jobs available, but I think it is definitely time to reevaluate that. It encourages people to not go back when the business opens up because they’ll not only have to go back to work, but they’ll be making less.

Sure. That doesn’t change the fact that many are now being paid to not work.

Do you think we’re in the middle not near the end?

Unless rest of the world has enough vaccines the pandemic is not ending for anyone.

It takes a one mutation to make current vaccines ineffective. We also don't know how long immunity will last. If it's only a year or two then without eradicating everywhere it won't go away in the US either.

Vaccines are available to everyone that wants one. It's time to get back to work.

Are we still in the middle of the pandemic? At least where I live, anyone who wants a vaccine has been able to get one for a month, so pretty much anyone who wants to be should be fully vaccinated in the next few weeks.

Also, IIRC the CARES Act suspended the requirement to look for more work if you've been furloughed/laid off. A friend of mine who works in a restaurant was getting paid more to go surf at the beach than he used to get paid to go to work. When his employer opened up, my friend was understandably not motivated to get scheduled for very many shifts.

>Are we still in the middle of the pandemic? At least where I live, anyone who wants a vaccine has been able to get one for a month, so pretty much anyone who wants to be should be fully vaccinated in the next few weeks.

USA is still #3 in the world for cases per day.

It's kind of whack to use absolute # of cases instead of per capita numbers when country populations vary by orders of magnitude.

Countries with slightly fewer cases than USA (Turkey, France, Germany) all have MUCH smaller populations so it doesn't make sense to say they're doing "better"

Is it? I'm just pointing out that the USA still getting a lot of cases. I'm not saying that other countries are doing better. Would it be better to point out that just under a 1000 people a day are still dying from it in the US? What's the better metric?

The US is the third most populous country in the world. Even if the pandemic were over and COVID were incredibly rare and evenly distributed throughout the world, it would be the expected outcome for the USA to be #3 in the world for new cases because we are #3 in the world for total number of people.

>Would it be better to point out that just under a 1000 people a day are still dying from it in the US?

No, any sort of absolute count is going to be equally misleading. For example my city had 5 covid deaths yesterday. Does that mean that we're 200x safer than the rest of the US? Of course not, it just means that you're comparing two populations of different size.

>What's the better metric?

Anything that's normalized by population size. For example per capita new cases or per capita deaths.

>What's the better metric?

The question was rhetorical. There is no better metric for showing the pandemic is still on going. If you have 50k cases a day, and 1000 deaths a day, it doesn't matter if other countries are lower or higher, it's clearly on going.

Right now the 7 day avg is below 700 deaths per day and has been steadily declining since the peak in January when it was over 3,000. There's been roughly a 5x reduction in cases as well (45k cases per day over last week down from 260k per day over the worst week in January). To me the strong downward trend indicates that we're cruising towards the end of the pandemic. I can't see it lasting another 4 months, let alone another year (although the COVID rate might never return to 0).

How many deaths per day would you use as a threshold for being past the middle of the pandemic?

1000 deaths, 700 deaths. It doesn't matter. Is the pandemic still on going? Yes. The answer is yes. I really don't care to get into the minutia when the answer is still yes.

Can you explain how the case count is even remotely relevant if anyone that wants a vaccine can get one?

Because you're still getting 50 thousand a day regardless?