The virus is terrible. But our solution could turn into an economic catastrophe. It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time.
The solution is aggressive, continuous testing so that people can feel safe going back out.
1. Make hundreds and millions of the rapid tests available.
2. Deploy them to every business, every institution.
3. Test everybody coming into work every morning.
4. Isolate and quarantine the positive ones.
5. Elderly and immunocompromised self-quarantine.
Lets find the actual contours of this infection within the population. And then squeeze it down.
- Want to get into a theme park? You need a negative test result on your phone from this morning.
- You got tested at one of the thousands of mobile test stations. You received a code with your test.
- 15 minutes later, you get a test result on your phone - also sent to a national database in real time.
- The theme park worker scans your phone and validates the result.
This is not a fool-proof system. But it or something like it will instantly reduce anxiety of people trying to work.
If you knew that everyone at your coffee house, at your gym, in your lecture hall, etc. tested negative in the morning. You'd feel safer and we'd all be able to move forward.
China's Red Cross supposedly advised Italy yesterday that 'total economic shutdown'[1] is the only way to contain the COVID-19 situation in the country now.
It all comes to what part of the curve the country is now, the choice being total lockdown incl. economic shutdown vs aggressive testing.
Considering US lapsed on aggressive measures in the beginning and that proper test kits are just being flown in from Italy[2]; total economic shutdown seems to be the only option left.
P.S. There are still high-risk countries which hasn't gone into lockdown neither doing aggressive testing as of now, claiming the number of cases are low although the day-to-day delta is increasing exponentially.
[1]Italy correspondent of Aljazeera gave this information multiple times on live, couldn't find static link to it as of writing.
Can we make millions of the tests rapidly available? I am still reading about test shortages on both coasts, even under the restricted testing regime we have been in so far.
Maybe the no-contact thermometers could be a scalable approach. Go to the bank? Forehead scan to get in. Go to the grocery store? Same. At least until--and maybe even after--we can scale the RNA testing.
Considering that people generally go to work even when they're sick in the US, and that people are scared to go to the doctor because of the hidden cost, I don't think your solution is valid.
On the other hand, we cannot pause the economy for too long. The damages are already done but what is going to happen if we wait too much?
I cannot imagine the level of stress the people working at the government must be under now... Whatever solution they come up with could be the collapse of the US as we know of now.
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time.
Why not? This is a matter of survival. If the economic system breaks because of one pandemic that will last less than a year maybe that economic system needs to die and be replaced by something more solid and useful for most.
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time.
The Swiss Federal Council is setting aside billions of CHF (I think the total is currently at 32 billion) for exactly this: some relief for small and medium sized businesses. They've recently announced a process to have 80% of your salary insured up to a certain high cap, between 150k and 200k CHF.
There might be vastly different political and scale differences between the USA and Switzerland that make this infeasible for the USA. But Switzerland is showing that in principle it can be done. Making your blanket statement for the whole world, false.
> The solution is aggressive, continuous testing so that people can feel safe going back out.
I disagree, and strongly.
This would be a knee-jerk, hyberbolic, and woefully ineffective over-response.
Typical for the times.
The only thing this might achieve is creating an even greater climate of fear and loathing.
There will be false positives. And false negatives.
There are with every medical test.
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: Assuming we "test everybody", and assuming both a 5% rate for both false positives and false negatives -- which is better than we currently do with influenza testing![1] -- we would needlessly quarantine 12.5 million people, and fail to quarantine an equal number of infected carriers.
Not to mention, the data about COVID-19 is all over the map. We still know very, very little about this disease. Understanding it well enough to calculate the appropriate response will take time.
Testing is part of the solution, yes. But the economic and social impact of "test everybody, every day" would be catastrophic.
Until then, in the short term, there are things we can, and should, be doing, as individuals:
(1) Limit your physical contact with others.
(1a) Especially at-risk individuals. The elderly, young children, etc.
(2) Support your local businesses through delivery, online ordering, and gift certificates.
(3) DON'T HOARD SUPPLIES! You do not need a decade's worth of toilet paper. Three months' worth is fine.
(4) Related to the above, maybe use this as an opportunity to live a bit more sustainably.
I'm down to four sheets per wipe -- certainly fascinating, relevant, and not at all disgusting to all of our readers -- which means that a single CostCo-sized pack of TP might keep my household going for well over six months.
On that note, I'm learning to garden. Let's see if I can manage to actually grow a fucking potato this year, all I got last year was a big leafy plant with zero tubers.
A discussion on government policy in response to this is a big ball of... things that require four sheets of Kirkland Signature, so I'm so not going there.
Interesting that almost all of your examples of "contours of infection" are places that people don't need to go to, and the last one can be replaced by teleconferencing. That makes it sound easy: if you don't want to be tested, or it's too much hassle, just don't go there!
I assume in your system that everyone would need to be tested before going to work every day, because that's the most common in-person gathering for most people. The USA has run fewer than 50,000 tests in the months since this began. Your plan would require 100,000,000 tests in the USA every day.
No need to make the test stations "mobile". You could put 1,000 in every city, and they'd never have time to be moved. Every sidewalk downtown would be lines of people waiting for a test -- which itself would be a bigger gathering for me than just going to work.
Not to mention it isn't really solving the virus situation in most implementations. For example, everybody is packed into the local supermarkets at the same time in my area. Not only is there higher density due to closed restaurants, but also due to reduced hours (somebody thought curfews were a good idea).
In their panic, people want "something" to be done. In a couple years, we will be talking about how 90% of policies enacted during this crisis were a net negative, and 50% of them directly made the problem worse. Not to mention the ethical concerns of legal overreach.
* Disclaimer: It's a serious situation and I do not endorse a hands-off approach. That doesn't mean we can't have a civil debate about the complexities of trying to mitigate it, though.
Leave it to HN to come up with an oversimplifying app-on-your-phone-solution to any of the world's problems.
By the time you're done developing the app, deploying "thousands of mobile test stations", figuring out a way to get test results in 15 minutes (!!!) and implementing security checkpoints at each establishment from gyms to workplaces, we'll all be infected.
> Want to get into a theme park?
Nobody cares about theme parks right now. We care about getting infected at the supermarket, or bringing infected bags home. You're missing the forest for the trees.
It is a good idea, however it is too late to execute it well at this moment. As a society we should put incentives differently, so that things like adtech and cheap imports from China get less incentives, but health and solving social problems get more than today and can attract and retain more talent.
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time.
Is that actually true though? What resource are we low on? Do we not have enough nonperishable goods or public funds to pay for utilities and basic infrastructure?
>. It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time.
We need to develop that capability. Imagine the next pandemic was worse, spread more asymptomatically and/or required a longer isolation time to get over without spreading combined with higher fatality rate, or fatalities in a younger demographic.
This could also help us learn how to deal with more tangentially related things like grid disruptions (hopefully we don't eliminate cash in response though as that might hurt in that scenario).
I agree with the spirit, but theme parks specifically should probably stay cancelled until the virus is completely and universally suppressed. Temperature checks in smaller public accommodations, absolutely.
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time.
Thinking abstractly, why not? If the businesses are open, the money is there to pay everyone. If you send everyone in the economy home, where has that money that would have been used for salary gone?
Someone is holding it rather than distributing it, that's the only reason. So, take a look at who is hoarding money like a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold, tax it, and pay everyone else enough for a roof and food.
No, that will not work. This virus is so infectious, one person can infect a whole bus by just coughing a few times, or the whole elevator by just breathing in an elevator. By the time he tests positive, he had infected dozens of people.
That's what happened in South Korea, as far as I understand. They missed just one guy out of 31, and he started a massive infection.
Yes, massive testing is indeed better than what we do now, but if you let people to just walk around, it will do absolutely nothing.
the test kits would be positive when it's too late to stop this highly contagious virus. PCR tests are needed, which means, every day submitting a spit sample in some collection space, and get the result at night. It's not impossible, with a lot of automation and scaling of PCR machines and huge mobilization. It could become a routine for a long time if automated.
Worth discussing, but it would take months to deploy the level of testing required. You’d need to test a significant fraction of the entire US population every day. Say 30%, which is probably too low. So we need 100 million tests per day? That’s many months away, as is the miraculous (and privacy issue laden) database you’re talking about. By then, this will all be over and millions dead if we just let it run unchecked. We’re buying time to be able to actually implement something like that. It can’t happen in a matter of days or weeks.
Yep, I am not totally sure what you do about it (stuff like testing people at work is going to be tricky legally) but I came to this conclusion the other day too.
The issue really isn't the virus but the fact that people who end up spreading it, don't know they have it. Shutting down the economy is a backwards way of solving this...it is assuming that everyone has it.
I am not sure how exactly we get to that point and you are kind of hoping that people who have it isolate...but testing really should be priority. My govt is ramping up but the numbers they are talking about are still ludicrously small...total tested is 0.1% of population, and they are saying it is a resource issue (whilst they are spending literally hundreds of billions on stuff that is being caused by their testing strategy).
One thing that really horrified me was how quickly people threw away the economy.
Unfortunately, this virus is highly contagious (to the point that the vast majority of countries won’t contain it) and fairly lethal. We don’t actually know how lethal, but it appears 1%-3%, but without widespread testing we wouldn’t know.
At the moment, we just reduced our GDP by 30%-50% in regions under quarantine. Think about that for a second...
Now consider the fact that the supply chain is also all kinds of messed up and with the loss of jobs people have less money.
Finally, save this, but I don’t think the US quarantine is going to do much to lower the curve. Simply put, the west is not prepared. Our checkouts are run by people without masks or gloves. People still are closer than 2 meters (or 6 feet).
To lower the curve we’d need strict quarantine (no leaving the house) for a month or two. Even then we won’t have enough masks, hopefully we’d have enough ventilators and tests by then...
Point is, we are tanking our economy and mark my words — it won’t work. People voted, had spring break, celebrated st. Patrick’s day went out shopping in droves. It’s likely too late, one sick per household and they infect the whole house.
All this to say: we are losing our economy and probably this isn’t effective.
1.) Hedge funds levered up their capital 5 - 15x to make more money, then got caught with their pants down. So they all panic sold at once, crashing the market.
2.) CEOs of large corporations used cash to buy back their stock, inflating the stock price, and depleting their cash reserves. So now those same companies are on the brink of collapse, causing the credit markets to collapse, the stock market to collapse, and the rest with it. They can buy 50B worth of their own stock, but cant pay employees for a month without revenue.
This whole mess is in part due to financial engineering taken down by a black swan event. CEOs should be in jail and so should finance professionals. Laws need to be passed so that finance individuals cannot ruin the market for their own financial gain.
Instead of hundreds of billions in loans to businesses, which have to be underwritten -- and as discussed on Slides 17/18, the SBA did an abysmal job administrating during Hurricane Sandy, helicopter money might be the better answer.
Give everyone money, no criteria. If we do impose income limits, and since viable proposals do -- we ought to discuss it. Give them a check now anyways. We cannot be worried people will be "annoyed" if they owe their check back come next tax season. Future annoyance is a small price to pay if these businesses can't stay afloat. We will be feeling the effects for far longer than a quarter. The helicopter money needs to be distributed as soon as possible.
Distinguish between wealth and paperwork. As Bucky Fuller pointed out, if all the paperwork disappeared overnight we would have a hellofa fight over who owns what, but no one would (necessarily) starve. If the wealth itself disappeared: the factories, the distribution networks, and so on, we would be screwed.
In the situation today the physical basis of wealth is not under attack, the "human capital" is.
As long as the food and water keep coming we'll eventually be all right, keep your head, and keep your eye on the fundamentals: In approximate rank order from most important to lesser-but-still-very important, the base of Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs:
+Water (also soap!)
+Food Production & Distribution & Waste Management.
+Communications (under which I include governance)
+Electric Power
Pervading and fundamental to all these are keeping a level head and a civil society.
"It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency." ~Camus
Like a plane crash, there's a moment where the error is realized. Someone says 'oh sh!t' on the flight recorder when they realize the error, and that there's no time left to correct. Yet enough time remains to wait.
That's what this month has felt like. The grave error, in my opinion, was refusing to take dramatic action early on. We couldn't tolerate any economic slowdown, so dice were rolled, and here we are. Add in the (criminal) failure of testing in the United States...
It's been a week and you see plenty of calls to 'think of the economy', and put an end to the shelter-in-place. One week. But like I keep saying, this isn't a binary choice. It's not clear that we could just 'chose the economy' at this point, because of the path that was chosen weeks ago – which is a narrower, far more dangerous path, to both the global health, and the economy. Short-term thinking at its worst.
But this is not a literal plane crash. The majority of us will live. It's about the kind of world we want on the other side of this. What we need now is global cooperation to share knowledge and resources. We need people to come to their senses so we can make smart decisions and make sure we don't throw out our constitutional rights in the process. We need as much urgency in bailing out the millions of people who are already losing their jobs, as there is for the airlines that spent the vast majority of profits on buying back their stock.
There's cognitive dissonance at play. "This can't really be the situation we're in?" Well, it is. This path was chosen. Now we need to buckle-up and learn rapidly from the mistakes we've made.
If you are rich enough, you should be thinking about which small businesses you rely on and pull-in your purchases. My car mechanic just sent me an e-mail out of the blue advertising that they were still open. I will definitely be getting my car serviced early next week, even though it's a few months early. At work, I'm pulling in some of my "nice to have" projects to keep my favorite vendors (who haven't been shut down) busy.
This appears to be an appeal by Womply to direct a ton of stimulus money toward them, so that they can make loans to small businesses (instead of the Small Business Administration), and then they can take a cut of that.
Soviet approach to solving the problem would be: don't tell anyone.
There was a major flu epidemic that killed 100K+ in the Soviet Union in 1977-78 (long after gulags and all the scary Soviet stuff, when living standards were among the world's top, comparable to poorer Western European countries like Italy and Spain). None of my older relatives ever heard of it. just some old people died, that's it. Absolute zero of economic or social consequences. I think kids didn't go to school for some weeks and maybe streets were cleaned bit better than usual, nothing worse.
It's articles like this that really make me facepalm, shake my head and say "this isn't about whether America could survive this". America is the last of our concern. Almost ALL of the other countries on planet Earth have orders of magnitude LESS resources (in every sense of the word) than we do. Think about how likely those countries aren't going to fall into chaos. Their governments aren't equipped to deal with this sort of thing.
This wouldn't be such an economic disaster if the government had their shit together and acted fast. All they had to do:
1. Freeze mortgages, rents and interest for 90 days.
2. Send everyone checks for around $2,000 a month, let people choose to cash them if they need to, correct for it on 2021 tax returns based on your income.
Avoid having small businesses shut down and lay everyone off, call it a vacation and give people homework for the next 2-3 months while we focus on fighting this pandemic.
I have to think that as a society, we’re going to be introducing a lot of slack that never existed before. Consider commercial real estate: there are going to be loads of small businesses that can’t make rent in the next 3 months... but from a landlord’s perspective, it probably doesn’t make sense to terminate the lease (or hound the business into bankruptcy or something), because who the hell else are they going to get to rent the place?
If more banks follow suite with deferring mortgage/loan payments... All the stops are being pulled. If the governments can get their shit together over the next 2-3 months we could actually hit play after this pause and have a real shot at rebounding.
Other countries, and developing countries, may.. Will not be so lucky.
I was just talking to my mechanic by text at middlefield & n shoreline at the Arco on the southwest corner, just across 101 from the Googleplex. He may have to permanently close his business and get a regular job because his landlord will demand rent when there are no customers.
A similar situation is happening to Louis Rossmann who doesn't have business interruption insurance because they require flood insurance and weasel out of covering disasters.
Another situation is Michael Moore's nonprofit movie theaters won't be reimbursed to pay or govt pay their employees' salaries, and building lease/rent.
Also, tip-based workers are screwed too.
Only 20% of workers are getting some money, with a little promise of temporary UBI to some people.
And then the government has the gall to offer interest-bearing loans instead of no interest loans and grants? WTF!
The situation is there will be people working to put food on the table sick or not, and riots if people aren't made whole. The US economy will crash and burn for decades if this isn't handled correctly by clawing back some of the tens of trillions the MIC, corporations, and the rich stole from the little guys and regular folks.
The SBA statistics are sobering.
46 days for application, 24% approval per slides.
In my experience, asking for $50k was harder than $350k and a large distraction. Vendor financing and credit cards filled the gaps.
IME if you needed capital, you weren’t approved for capital.
If you were cash flow positive with solid income and 2 years of operating history and tax returns, you could put up collateral and refinance at a lower rate.
Over ~5 years I was denied ~5 times, discouraged from applying ~3 times.
I was approved once after several years of track record with a co-signer pledging a property with 100% collateral.
That small business (exited 2019) would have really struggled to survive right now. It would also be a difficult time to ask friends, family or spouse to help.
I wish I had a better policy suggestion to offer; it's a hard problem. Good luck to all small businesses out there, I’m pulling for you.
The problem is that businesses have been setup in such a way that they can't just stop spending money when they aren't earning any money.
But this can mostly be fixed by law, with a law that retroactively changes all rent, leasing, mortgage, employment contracts and in general any contract that involves periodic or future payments to be stopped at will, subject to no longer enjoying the service or product.
Then they can just stop paying rent and paying employees and cancel all supply deliveries, since they no longer need those, and they will not lose any money.
Then add a temporary UBI and a ban on actually evicting from rented spaces (since the economy is shut down, and thus there would be no other tenants) so that people can still have a home and food.
There is a risk that the response to this epidemic will tear some parts of American society apart. Some of the rhetoric in this thread is both representative and frightening in that regard.
People of low means do not like getting told that they must go back to work and accept the risk of losing their parents and getting permanent lung injury. They will also not like getting told to stay at home and default on their rent and mortgage.
People in a situation like that can take desperate measures, especially when there’s many millions of them.
You guys really need to step up the political measures to take care of these folks. Emergency bailout style. The time has never been more ripe to test out basic income.
Regarding restaurants. I live in Massachusetts where sit in is not allowed as of last week. I'm sure many restaurants are hit hard. But I also see many cafes and restaurants that adjusted quickly to take out and delivery and seem pretty busy. Some adjusted their menus and selling soup in bulk etc. Bars got hit harder.
Many sport studios quickly moved to online classes. Not everyone can of course. The climbing gym near my house is closed and who knows if they ever reopen. I'm not saying that we're not in a middle of a small businesses catastrophe, just that many small businesses find ways to survive. But obv they won't be able to for too long.
I wonder if the strict lockdown measures that are needed to try to contain the covid-19 virus perhaps will not be enough to contain the covid-19 virus, but as a side effect will extinguish all other virures with lower Rs transmitted among humans, such as the flu, etc.
That is, that after 3 months of strict lockdown and 9 months of pervasive social distancing, the only virus you will be able to catch is the covid-19 virus, until new viruses coming from animals appear.
Just a money grab by a special interest group - folks in the payment industry. Everyone is trying to figure out how to get their fingers on the $1 trillion that the Fed is handing out. This is saying, the SBA can't give out the money fast! Trust us acquirers/processors to do so! Give us the money and responsibility instead!
[+] [-] testfoobar|6 years ago|reply
The solution is aggressive, continuous testing so that people can feel safe going back out.
1. Make hundreds and millions of the rapid tests available. 2. Deploy them to every business, every institution. 3. Test everybody coming into work every morning. 4. Isolate and quarantine the positive ones. 5. Elderly and immunocompromised self-quarantine.
Lets find the actual contours of this infection within the population. And then squeeze it down.
- Want to get into a theme park? You need a negative test result on your phone from this morning.
- You got tested at one of the thousands of mobile test stations. You received a code with your test.
- 15 minutes later, you get a test result on your phone - also sent to a national database in real time.
- The theme park worker scans your phone and validates the result.
This is not a fool-proof system. But it or something like it will instantly reduce anxiety of people trying to work.
If you knew that everyone at your coffee house, at your gym, in your lecture hall, etc. tested negative in the morning. You'd feel safer and we'd all be able to move forward.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|6 years ago|reply
It all comes to what part of the curve the country is now, the choice being total lockdown incl. economic shutdown vs aggressive testing.
Considering US lapsed on aggressive measures in the beginning and that proper test kits are just being flown in from Italy[2]; total economic shutdown seems to be the only option left.
P.S. There are still high-risk countries which hasn't gone into lockdown neither doing aggressive testing as of now, claiming the number of cases are low although the day-to-day delta is increasing exponentially.
[1]Italy correspondent of Aljazeera gave this information multiple times on live, couldn't find static link to it as of writing.
[2]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/air-force-flew-500000-coro...
[+] [-] 609venezia|6 years ago|reply
Maybe the no-contact thermometers could be a scalable approach. Go to the bank? Forehead scan to get in. Go to the grocery store? Same. At least until--and maybe even after--we can scale the RNA testing.
[+] [-] ccktlmazeltov|6 years ago|reply
On the other hand, we cannot pause the economy for too long. The damages are already done but what is going to happen if we wait too much?
I cannot imagine the level of stress the people working at the government must be under now... Whatever solution they come up with could be the collapse of the US as we know of now.
[+] [-] zouhair|6 years ago|reply
Why not? This is a matter of survival. If the economic system breaks because of one pandemic that will last less than a year maybe that economic system needs to die and be replaced by something more solid and useful for most.
[+] [-] cjslep|6 years ago|reply
The Swiss Federal Council is setting aside billions of CHF (I think the total is currently at 32 billion) for exactly this: some relief for small and medium sized businesses. They've recently announced a process to have 80% of your salary insured up to a certain high cap, between 150k and 200k CHF.
There might be vastly different political and scale differences between the USA and Switzerland that make this infeasible for the USA. But Switzerland is showing that in principle it can be done. Making your blanket statement for the whole world, false.
[+] [-] donw|6 years ago|reply
I disagree, and strongly.
This would be a knee-jerk, hyberbolic, and woefully ineffective over-response.
Typical for the times.
The only thing this might achieve is creating an even greater climate of fear and loathing.
There will be false positives. And false negatives.
There are with every medical test.
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: Assuming we "test everybody", and assuming both a 5% rate for both false positives and false negatives -- which is better than we currently do with influenza testing![1] -- we would needlessly quarantine 12.5 million people, and fail to quarantine an equal number of infected carriers.
Not to mention, the data about COVID-19 is all over the map. We still know very, very little about this disease. Understanding it well enough to calculate the appropriate response will take time.
Testing is part of the solution, yes. But the economic and social impact of "test everybody, every day" would be catastrophic.
Until then, in the short term, there are things we can, and should, be doing, as individuals:
(1) Limit your physical contact with others.
(1a) Especially at-risk individuals. The elderly, young children, etc.
(2) Support your local businesses through delivery, online ordering, and gift certificates.
(3) DON'T HOARD SUPPLIES! You do not need a decade's worth of toilet paper. Three months' worth is fine.
(4) Related to the above, maybe use this as an opportunity to live a bit more sustainably.
I'm down to four sheets per wipe -- certainly fascinating, relevant, and not at all disgusting to all of our readers -- which means that a single CostCo-sized pack of TP might keep my household going for well over six months.
On that note, I'm learning to garden. Let's see if I can manage to actually grow a fucking potato this year, all I got last year was a big leafy plant with zero tubers.
A discussion on government policy in response to this is a big ball of... things that require four sheets of Kirkland Signature, so I'm so not going there.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/rapidlab.htm
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
I assume in your system that everyone would need to be tested before going to work every day, because that's the most common in-person gathering for most people. The USA has run fewer than 50,000 tests in the months since this began. Your plan would require 100,000,000 tests in the USA every day.
No need to make the test stations "mobile". You could put 1,000 in every city, and they'd never have time to be moved. Every sidewalk downtown would be lines of people waiting for a test -- which itself would be a bigger gathering for me than just going to work.
[+] [-] ringshall|6 years ago|reply
If everyone is tested, the disease can be controlled:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/scientists-say...
[+] [-] lend000|6 years ago|reply
In their panic, people want "something" to be done. In a couple years, we will be talking about how 90% of policies enacted during this crisis were a net negative, and 50% of them directly made the problem worse. Not to mention the ethical concerns of legal overreach.
* Disclaimer: It's a serious situation and I do not endorse a hands-off approach. That doesn't mean we can't have a civil debate about the complexities of trying to mitigate it, though.
[+] [-] airstrike|6 years ago|reply
By the time you're done developing the app, deploying "thousands of mobile test stations", figuring out a way to get test results in 15 minutes (!!!) and implementing security checkpoints at each establishment from gyms to workplaces, we'll all be infected.
> Want to get into a theme park?
Nobody cares about theme parks right now. We care about getting infected at the supermarket, or bringing infected bags home. You're missing the forest for the trees.
[+] [-] throwaway9980|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polskibus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingbirdy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron_m04|6 years ago|reply
Is that actually true though? What resource are we low on? Do we not have enough nonperishable goods or public funds to pay for utilities and basic infrastructure?
[+] [-] cma|6 years ago|reply
We need to develop that capability. Imagine the next pandemic was worse, spread more asymptomatically and/or required a longer isolation time to get over without spreading combined with higher fatality rate, or fatalities in a younger demographic.
This could also help us learn how to deal with more tangentially related things like grid disruptions (hopefully we don't eliminate cash in response though as that might hurt in that scenario).
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|6 years ago|reply
Thinking abstractly, why not? If the businesses are open, the money is there to pay everyone. If you send everyone in the economy home, where has that money that would have been used for salary gone?
Someone is holding it rather than distributing it, that's the only reason. So, take a look at who is hoarding money like a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold, tax it, and pay everyone else enough for a roof and food.
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|6 years ago|reply
That's what happened in South Korea, as far as I understand. They missed just one guy out of 31, and he started a massive infection.
Yes, massive testing is indeed better than what we do now, but if you let people to just walk around, it will do absolutely nothing.
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxaf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ghthor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tathougies|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|6 years ago|reply
Also HIPPA laws prevent what you propose.
[+] [-] senordevnyc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hogFeast|6 years ago|reply
The issue really isn't the virus but the fact that people who end up spreading it, don't know they have it. Shutting down the economy is a backwards way of solving this...it is assuming that everyone has it.
I am not sure how exactly we get to that point and you are kind of hoping that people who have it isolate...but testing really should be priority. My govt is ramping up but the numbers they are talking about are still ludicrously small...total tested is 0.1% of population, and they are saying it is a resource issue (whilst they are spending literally hundreds of billions on stuff that is being caused by their testing strategy).
[+] [-] lettergram|6 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, this virus is highly contagious (to the point that the vast majority of countries won’t contain it) and fairly lethal. We don’t actually know how lethal, but it appears 1%-3%, but without widespread testing we wouldn’t know.
At the moment, we just reduced our GDP by 30%-50% in regions under quarantine. Think about that for a second...
Now consider the fact that the supply chain is also all kinds of messed up and with the loss of jobs people have less money.
Finally, save this, but I don’t think the US quarantine is going to do much to lower the curve. Simply put, the west is not prepared. Our checkouts are run by people without masks or gloves. People still are closer than 2 meters (or 6 feet).
To lower the curve we’d need strict quarantine (no leaving the house) for a month or two. Even then we won’t have enough masks, hopefully we’d have enough ventilators and tests by then...
Point is, we are tanking our economy and mark my words — it won’t work. People voted, had spring break, celebrated st. Patrick’s day went out shopping in droves. It’s likely too late, one sick per household and they infect the whole house.
All this to say: we are losing our economy and probably this isn’t effective.
[+] [-] codingslave|6 years ago|reply
1.) Hedge funds levered up their capital 5 - 15x to make more money, then got caught with their pants down. So they all panic sold at once, crashing the market.
2.) CEOs of large corporations used cash to buy back their stock, inflating the stock price, and depleting their cash reserves. So now those same companies are on the brink of collapse, causing the credit markets to collapse, the stock market to collapse, and the rest with it. They can buy 50B worth of their own stock, but cant pay employees for a month without revenue.
This whole mess is in part due to financial engineering taken down by a black swan event. CEOs should be in jail and so should finance professionals. Laws need to be passed so that finance individuals cannot ruin the market for their own financial gain.
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|6 years ago|reply
Give everyone money, no criteria. If we do impose income limits, and since viable proposals do -- we ought to discuss it. Give them a check now anyways. We cannot be worried people will be "annoyed" if they owe their check back come next tax season. Future annoyance is a small price to pay if these businesses can't stay afloat. We will be feeling the effects for far longer than a quarter. The helicopter money needs to be distributed as soon as possible.
[+] [-] um_ya|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
In the situation today the physical basis of wealth is not under attack, the "human capital" is.
As long as the food and water keep coming we'll eventually be all right, keep your head, and keep your eye on the fundamentals: In approximate rank order from most important to lesser-but-still-very important, the base of Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs:
+Water (also soap!)
+Food Production & Distribution & Waste Management.
+Communications (under which I include governance)
+Electric Power
Pervading and fundamental to all these are keeping a level head and a civil society.
"It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency." ~Camus
[+] [-] fl4bfl4b|6 years ago|reply
We can shelter-in-place as long as needed. And no businesses go under, and no one loses their home.
[+] [-] gdubs|6 years ago|reply
That's what this month has felt like. The grave error, in my opinion, was refusing to take dramatic action early on. We couldn't tolerate any economic slowdown, so dice were rolled, and here we are. Add in the (criminal) failure of testing in the United States...
It's been a week and you see plenty of calls to 'think of the economy', and put an end to the shelter-in-place. One week. But like I keep saying, this isn't a binary choice. It's not clear that we could just 'chose the economy' at this point, because of the path that was chosen weeks ago – which is a narrower, far more dangerous path, to both the global health, and the economy. Short-term thinking at its worst.
But this is not a literal plane crash. The majority of us will live. It's about the kind of world we want on the other side of this. What we need now is global cooperation to share knowledge and resources. We need people to come to their senses so we can make smart decisions and make sure we don't throw out our constitutional rights in the process. We need as much urgency in bailing out the millions of people who are already losing their jobs, as there is for the airlines that spent the vast majority of profits on buying back their stock.
There's cognitive dissonance at play. "This can't really be the situation we're in?" Well, it is. This path was chosen. Now we need to buckle-up and learn rapidly from the mistakes we've made.
[+] [-] georgeburdell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glass_of_water|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anovikov|6 years ago|reply
There was a major flu epidemic that killed 100K+ in the Soviet Union in 1977-78 (long after gulags and all the scary Soviet stuff, when living standards were among the world's top, comparable to poorer Western European countries like Italy and Spain). None of my older relatives ever heard of it. just some old people died, that's it. Absolute zero of economic or social consequences. I think kids didn't go to school for some weeks and maybe streets were cleaned bit better than usual, nothing worse.
[+] [-] unexaminedlife|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_ke|6 years ago|reply
1. Freeze mortgages, rents and interest for 90 days.
2. Send everyone checks for around $2,000 a month, let people choose to cash them if they need to, correct for it on 2021 tax returns based on your income.
Avoid having small businesses shut down and lay everyone off, call it a vacation and give people homework for the next 2-3 months while we focus on fighting this pandemic.
[+] [-] s3cur3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rapzid|6 years ago|reply
Other countries, and developing countries, may.. Will not be so lucky.
[+] [-] forkexec|6 years ago|reply
A similar situation is happening to Louis Rossmann who doesn't have business interruption insurance because they require flood insurance and weasel out of covering disasters.
Another situation is Michael Moore's nonprofit movie theaters won't be reimbursed to pay or govt pay their employees' salaries, and building lease/rent.
Also, tip-based workers are screwed too.
Only 20% of workers are getting some money, with a little promise of temporary UBI to some people.
And then the government has the gall to offer interest-bearing loans instead of no interest loans and grants? WTF!
The situation is there will be people working to put food on the table sick or not, and riots if people aren't made whole. The US economy will crash and burn for decades if this isn't handled correctly by clawing back some of the tens of trillions the MIC, corporations, and the rich stole from the little guys and regular folks.
[+] [-] jriley|6 years ago|reply
IME if you needed capital, you weren’t approved for capital. If you were cash flow positive with solid income and 2 years of operating history and tax returns, you could put up collateral and refinance at a lower rate.
Over ~5 years I was denied ~5 times, discouraged from applying ~3 times. I was approved once after several years of track record with a co-signer pledging a property with 100% collateral.
That small business (exited 2019) would have really struggled to survive right now. It would also be a difficult time to ask friends, family or spouse to help.
I wish I had a better policy suggestion to offer; it's a hard problem. Good luck to all small businesses out there, I’m pulling for you.
[+] [-] devit|6 years ago|reply
But this can mostly be fixed by law, with a law that retroactively changes all rent, leasing, mortgage, employment contracts and in general any contract that involves periodic or future payments to be stopped at will, subject to no longer enjoying the service or product.
Then they can just stop paying rent and paying employees and cancel all supply deliveries, since they no longer need those, and they will not lose any money.
Then add a temporary UBI and a ban on actually evicting from rented spaces (since the economy is shut down, and thus there would be no other tenants) so that people can still have a home and food.
[+] [-] marvin|6 years ago|reply
People of low means do not like getting told that they must go back to work and accept the risk of losing their parents and getting permanent lung injury. They will also not like getting told to stay at home and default on their rent and mortgage.
People in a situation like that can take desperate measures, especially when there’s many millions of them.
You guys really need to step up the political measures to take care of these folks. Emergency bailout style. The time has never been more ripe to test out basic income.
[+] [-] tinyhouse|6 years ago|reply
Many sport studios quickly moved to online classes. Not everyone can of course. The climbing gym near my house is closed and who knows if they ever reopen. I'm not saying that we're not in a middle of a small businesses catastrophe, just that many small businesses find ways to survive. But obv they won't be able to for too long.
[+] [-] antaviana|6 years ago|reply
That is, that after 3 months of strict lockdown and 9 months of pervasive social distancing, the only virus you will be able to catch is the covid-19 virus, until new viruses coming from animals appear.
[+] [-] segmondy|6 years ago|reply