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.
To put it another way: most of the folks dying from COVID-19 were already dying. This disease is the straw that broke the camel's back.
Should we just give up on them? No! But instead of quarantining everyone, and sending us back to the stone age, we should work to quarantine these folks while the rest of us return to normalcy and build up our antibodies and herd immunity.
WHO director specifically mentioned in his briefing yesterday that 'Young people are not invincible and that data from many countries show number of cases below age <50 getting admitted to hospitals make up a significant proportion of patients'.[1]
It's not just fatalities, hospitalisation i.e. exhausting healthcare facilities is the primary concern with COVID-19.
There is no guarantee that young people wouldn't make up high mortality list in a poor country with high younger population, rich countries should get their acts together to stop that from happening in vulnerable countries.
Not to mention complications. Little is known yet, but there are indications that some surviving patients get permanent lung damage. Especially when intensive care is not available. Imagine having 30 million 40-year-olds who will be short of breath for the rest of their lives.
There are 40 million 40-somethings in the USA, you're proposing that 100% of them will have lung damage.
Let's imagine that 80% of the population is infected, that 80% of cases are symptomatic, and that 80% of the 4.90% of hospitalised cases (this 4.90 is direct from the report) get damaged lungs. This is one million 40-somethings, not the entire population.
1 million sounds like a lot, but its only 2.5% of the population at that age range, and assume worst-case.
You know what causes reduced lung functionality in adults? Asthma, driven by air pollution from vehicles and coal power plants. 7.7% of adults have Asthma. Where is the war-scale drive to eliminate fossil-fueled vehicles and power generation?
> You know what causes reduced lung functionality in adults?
Vaping. I see most of the young adults doing this. Its probably why they're having the higher hospitalization rates with coronavirus. They already have lung damage.
Yes, thank you. So many people are confused about this just being about the # of people dying from covid. The entire health system gets knocked down and all the other preventable diseases that killed us before are no longer prevented.
Stop spreading this. Median hospitalization age is 65. 40% of patients on icu are under 50. With the rates of hospitalization in 30-39 year olds no country would have enough icu beds even for them
This looks correct. Here's the data
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm?s_cid=mm...
Scroll down for TABLE. Hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and case–fatality percentages for reported COVID–19 cases, by age group —United States, February 12–March 16, 2020
Parent was referring to fatality rates and you instead presented hospitalization rates, why do you want them to stop spreading fatality rate information?
Gonna need to see some actual data. Median hospitalization age of 65 and then 40% of patients in the ICU being under 50 already doesn't even make any sense.
Sure it does. 40% under 50 years old means 60% are 50+ years old. The median is by definition the 50th percentile; aka, at least 50 years old and likely somewhat older, since more than half of all cases are in people who are 50+ years old. Median age being 65 aligns pretty well with that, given that 65 is somewhat above 50.
Maybe a moot question/point, but do we take into account patients in ICU that are unrelated to COVID? E.g. traffic accidents, workplace accidents, heart attacks, etc. I am not trying to spoil the discussion, and I do understand that medical services try to save all lives irrespective of age. So someone who's 80 and is down with COVID and someone who is 25 and fell from his Kawasaki doing 200km/h will each occupy a unit in ICU. That would skew the data.
(my bad, it's not easy to go through the slides on a phone)
Edit: by "skew" I imply mix the two categories COVID Vs "all other causes" and will give false average if we are trying to focus only on the COVID cases.
Honestly, what do you think is going to happen to these people if the economy totally shuts down? it's going to be easy to have a chronic & serious health condition? The same?
My feeling is that I'd rather be chronically sick in a good economy than in a depression. What happens when medicine becomes unavailable due to supply chains being cut off?
"these people" are dying in mass and overwhelming the medical system and even the crematoriums. And they deserve to have quality of life and die with dignity and proper care.
I'd rather a strong, comprehensive public health response than trying to economic recovery ourselves out of this problem. IMHO, the economy is a distraction to numb us from the tsunami of ICU patients and deaths to come.
The economy is not sacred, and is cyclical, and needs a good purge and rebalancing every 8 years or so. Recessions reallocate capital to be used more efficiently. After 2008 they were politicized as something to be avoided at all costs.
The part of the economy that is responsible for electricity, clean running water, food and emergency services absolutely is sacred. The rest of it can maybe be put on hold for a few months; but it will be very painful for many, many people.
What isn't sacred are the people who own all that. They are as disposable as are any other parts of the economic machine. Replacing them is probably a good idea.
> what do you think is going to happen to these people if the economy totally shuts down?
I expect the economic impacts to be rough either way. We don’t have a choice for “no economic impact” anymore. Either we do it in a coordinated and somewhat controlled manner now while we still have a handle on cases vs illness, or the impacts hit, roll, and peak along with the cases of illness while well/well-ish people try to improvise individual responses which probably have similar econ impacts but may not be as effective.
Or did we think that thousands on thousands falling ill at once wasn’t going to hurt economically?
How can you say the economic impacts will be of similar magnitude when looking at the age distribution in severe cases & death here? How do hospitals being overwhelmed have the same magnitude of effect as a literal shutdown of a country? Or, indeed, the shutdown of multiple?
To me it seems likely the difference between a recession (guaranteed) and a real, extremely serious depression which will be fully capable of exacting its own toll on lives.
First, while I fully expect that the worst effects will hit the advertised danger demographics the hardest, at wide enough infection coverage there are going to be poster children for folks who didn't fit that profile[0]. Not just a few.
Second, I expect that the illness impacts will hit even broader, both in sheer numbers and crossing demographic expectations, resulting in people directly absent from work and consumption for weeks at a time.
Those are the first order effects. The second order effects on psychology among a large number of folks having loved ones dying and acquaintances suffering are going to produce some behavior changes. Some of them would be similar to those we're seeing with lockdown, but as I said, improvised rather than coordinated, probably combining some degree of the same impacts but with less of the benefits.
The recession might be milder if we trade a higher death toll. Might.
But the financial markets sure didn't think we were going to escape one even before US civil measures started ratcheting up.
Honestly, what do you think is going to happen to these people if the economy totally shuts down? it's going to be easy to have a chronic & serious health condition?
The state with the lowest incidence of hypertension still has roughly 1 in 4 adults with hypertension. West Virginia is at the top with more than 1 in 2 adults. What do you think happens to them when they develop COVID-19? Hypertension is at the top of the list of co-morbidities that worsen outcomes. Medication to treat hypertension is often extremely inexpensive even without insurance ($10-$20/mo at the low end) and thus hypertension is often easy and inexpensive to manage.
How many folks working at pharma companies do you think have hypertension? What happens to the supply chain when people are incapacitated?
Even if a minority of the population will need hospitalization (hell, even if the minority is small enough to avoid overwhelming hospitals)... how many do you think will work through a SARS-CoV-2 infection?
The gravity with which I treat this pandemic is in large part based on government action. China quarantined nearly 100 million people. Iran is building mass graves. The uber-pro-business trump crony that serves as the secretary of the treasure took one look at the GOP plan and essentially said "double it, and make it cash with no means testing."
The folks arguing for immediately disruptive action aren't ignoring the economic consequences, they've decided that the economic consequences of doing nothing will be worse.
Let's assume for a moment that governments did nothing.
Obviously, the illness itself was always going to cause an economic blow by killing and sickening people.
And then there would be damage from behavioral changes. People were pulling kids out of schools, canceling events, and avoiding travel without being ordered to do so.
It doesn't seem like the "good economy" you suggest was ever an option.
I'm sure that accusing someone with righteous indignation here feels edifying, but it indicates to me that people are perfectly okay with trading on lives - future ones. At least admit it clearly and live with it.
I think the interesting question (that we don't know yet) is how much of these actions are political because they want to show themselves strong and the public demand some kind of action. And how many of these actions are needed to flatten the curve, prepare the healthcare system and to work on cures/vaccines? For example shutting down schools have a huge effect on society but does it have a similar huge effect on the spread of disease?
How long can you just shut down industries, keep kids out of school and will it make a significant dent in the total mortality? It could be that a couple of weeks of social distancing will be enough but can it be months and what are the comparable effects.
I know it is more dangerous than the normal flu and I will not downplay that but take Italy (that yes, would be worse of without shutdowns) you have 4k deaths so far; mostly old people while a couple of seasons ago they had 24k deaths attributed to a bad flu season.
The social distancing and shutting down society needs to work reasonably fast otherwise I wonder if it is worth it, at least in countries where you already have widespread disease.
The ultimate purpose of the shutdown is to not overwhelm healthcare providers, so people who need treatment actually receive it rather than die waiting in an overcrowded ER. So yes, they would fare better in a shutdown with lessened spread of the virus and fewer people putting strain on healthcare.
Why didn't you respond to the actual point? What do you think is going to happen to people with chronic health conditions in a depression, or when supply chains stop functioning? What happens when (random example) e.g. anti-HIV medicine shipments can't be made and we start to get new mutations in those diseases?
Do you just assume we'll treat chronic health issues as a priority in a depression? I'd like to think we do as well, but the point is that things may well just stop working.
People with chronic health conditions outside of the coronavirus aren't going to get much care in a crammed ER run on triage and therefore serving acute cases rather than chronic if we don't attempt to limit the spread. The staff shortage is worse than any supply shortage. In a healthy economy free of pandemic, CA is short on doctors and nurses.
Quarantine doesn't send anyone to the stone age. The economic shock will be devastating. But there is no long-term, sustained growth without occasional pruning.
Also...
You make the error of assuming that (A) high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease mean that a person is "already dying," and (B) people who survive don't become debilitatingly sick.
> Italy found that among fatalities the median age is over 80 (older than the average lifespan of an Italian man).
Selection bias. They're so overwhelmed they're using age as a primary factor to triage patients. Clearly, if you put your medical resources towards saving the younger patients, the younger people are going to have a better survival rate. Lack of a ventilator, when you have a severe lung disease, is a massive risk factor at any age.
> 99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses.
Again, if you look at the oldest people, you're probably going to find more diseases there. This could easily be just another consequence of age-based triage.
You will get tarred and feathered for your comment but you are correct.
Here is why you'll get tarred and feathered, because right now the media is covering the health costs of the virus extensively, but it's not covering the economic costs, which are already unfolding now in the form of businesses dropping vendors and announcing layoffs because their anticipated revenue until further notice is zero.
I've seen so many bros on my feeds who puffed out their chests a month or two ago and said, this virus is not a big deal. Then there were cases in their state and the media was reporting the deluge of new cases in the US and they said oh I was wrong, we need to be on total lockdown, and they're hiding in their apartments.
What will happen next is the jobless claims will come in, which we can clearly predict based on current business activity, and they will break records. I saw one estimate of around 1.5 million jobless claims this week, which is a record. I guess the bros will start squawking about the economic damage in 2-3 weeks once the media has covered this widely and people they know are out of work.
Small businesses (and some large ones too) typically don't have large cash reserves like Google. They also don't know whether this will last for one month or six. So they are in the process today of shutting down and telling everyone to go home without pay, they have to do this until they know what the long-term outlook is.
Nothing changes, most people are sheep, they parrot whatever's in their feed, they are poor at prognostication and self-examination, their attention is occupied by whatever narrative is being shouted most loudly. Nothing you can do.
I noticed yesterday for the first time that there is starting to be some discussion about the damage caused by the lockdowns. Before that I was amazed that no one was interested in even discussing it. So there seems to be a trend of people waking up to it. Thanks for your brave comment. Bros are slow ;)
> Italy found that among fatalities the median age is over 80 (older than the average lifespan of an Italian man).
> 99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses.
This is true, but what about the overcrowded hospitals this causes? People who weren't gonna die will now die. And what do we do about the doctors and nurses who are pleading with everyone to act?
Perhaps something along the lines of strict contact tracing could have been done, but now it seems like it's out of hand.
Based on what? According to the Bloomberg article -
”As of March 17, 17 people under 50 had died from the disease. All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions.”
They reached maxed capacity of beds or ventilators right? We read stories of doctors having to make life & death decisions. Where are the dead 18 year olds?
Spreading info like that on a hunch, or an exaggeration, is counterproductive if not damaging.
Current situation in Geneva, Switzerland - 2 critical male patients, one 27, one 29, no prior comorbidities at all. Not sure they will make it. Wife is a doctor and just checked this in their information system.
The idea that relatively young (most of folks here) will be just fine is not true. With overwhelmed healthcare, most criticals will simply die. Once doctors will get sick (and they will), it will make everything, I mean literally any disease and injury much more dangerous. Sure, most will survive, hopefully without any permanent lungs/kidneys/testes damage (was this confirmed or just a rumor?).
Maybe as humanity we've grown weak and can't tolerate medieval mortality rates anymore, but this is who we are right now. There is no easy solution to this. There is unavoidable harsh economic impact coming. Nobody has clue which option will be at the end better than others.
Accept it, and try to find ways to help fellow human beings instead. We are in this all together, rich and poor, left and right alike.
Two examples doesn't change the stats. There were 0.8% of deaths in Italy that did not have any prior comorbidities. Picking two of those examples does not increase the 0.8%.
I don't think any one is under some kind of delusion that some young people will die. The only question is what percentage and what changing those numbers will cost. Picking specific examples of bad outcomes and pretending the risk is as high as older people isn't doing anyone any favors.
>Current situation in Geneva, Switzerland - 2 critical male patients, one 27, one 29, no prior comorbidities at all. Not sure they will make it. Wife is a doctor and just checked this in their information system.
I don't know about the law in Switzerland but unless you are lying that is something she could be fired for in many countries.
For checking overall status without going into details? All doctors within given hospital have this kind of access here. 'Many countries' sounds rather like very few for this case, aren't you thinking US specifically?
It is as tough in Sweden, doctors and nurses have of course access to patient files but every access is logged and if someone is caught accessing files about a patient they are not working with they will be reprimanded or fired.
Fair enough, I should have said, ”In some areas”. A little snippet from the CDC I have posted a bunch that I found useful -
”Pandemics begin with an investigation phase, followed by recognition, initiation, and acceleration phases. The peak of illnesses occurs at the end of the acceleration phase, which is followed by a deceleration phase, during which there is a decrease in illnesses. Different countries can be in different phases of the pandemic at any point in time and different parts of the same country can also be in different phases of a pandemic.”
So, we know not all the hospitals are experiencing the same levels at the same time. A big reason I wish we were more precisely targeting shutdowns and quarantines.
It doesn’t make sense to throw these blanket executive orders over entire states. As we can see from the slides, the economic consequence are dire. Why not target the cities entering acceleration only?
In the meantime, start building drive thru testing. Distribute thermometers. Practice social distancing & aggressive sanitation, but not destroy out national security in the process.
But this part,
”All of Italy’s victims under 40 have been males with serious existing medical conditions”
Sure it’s early, but even in Italy, in one of the worst places in the world for the virus right now, that information should be very illuminating to us I think.
> Why not target the cities entering acceleration only?
Because the long incubation period and the lack of sufficient testing makes it impossible to know which cities are infected early on.
And, to put more bluntly, because we have two models to look at and choose from: the Chinese one, with harsh containment measures that were very effective (if you believe their numbers) and the Italian one, with moderate containment measures and a lack of sense of urgency from the populace, which resulted in a downward spiral with more deaths than China despite having only ~58% the number of cases.
> I should have said, ”In some areas”.
And no, you shouldn't have said that, you should just wait another week.
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.
> 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.
This is the reality in China. Literally every single public place have a remote thermometer they scan on your forehead. supermarket? scanned. subway? scanned. restaurant? scanned. If you have a fever you'll go into quarantine in no time.
People can do a lot of things. It's not a big deal that measures won't be perfectly effective - in the presence of any suppression measures, once the case count stabilizes, there's a lot of room between "literally impossible to spread the virus" and exponential growth.
That's nice, but one such person can shut down the entire production line in some factory, or the hospital department. (happened already in my country) Such people have disproportionate effect on the economy.
Get IDT or (other nucleotide synthesis company) to start mass producing the detection primers, and ship them to their whole active customer catalog, they all have thermal cyclers. Then figure out the other reagents needed to locally produce tests that trade off false positive rate for the lowest false negative rate you can get. How to get swabs to the closest lab with a thermal cycler, no idea, but we have phones with gps. Rate limiting step here is probably the step from swab to sample ready for amplification. I kind of wonder if it makes sense to tell people to start swabbing now and keep the swabs in the freezer until testing comes online so that we can start filling in the missing data.
I really feel like you guys are ignoring a lot of the difficulties in ramping up production to nation scale for this hypothetical test. A "rapid" test no less. These things are not as easy as everyone is making them out to be. Making one? Simple. Scaling that up to 8 figures worth? Not so simple. A lot of us are being a little too Jedi hand-wave-y about this issue.
And think about it, I'm only talking about getting up to 10 mil or so here. We'd need a lot more than that to implement the plans being proposed on this thread. Logistics really does demand that medical personnel, and emergency responders be tested regularly to ensure their continued fitness for purpose under such schemes. Consider, there are right around 12,000 law enforcement officers alone in Washington state. Not counting doctors, nurses, EMT's and firemen. (And lest we forget the most important emergency worker of all right now, the Walmart stock boys.)
Add all that up. Multiply it by 50 states, some much larger than Washington. Under the plans you guys are proposing, we'd need multiple tests as the crisis goes on for each of these workers to make sure they aren't out infecting citizens when they interact with them. (Or when they put food on shelves that a customer picks up 4 hours later.)
Please, try to be reasonable. Maybe the current approach is not tenable, but the ideas being proposed on this thread are problematic as well.
Aren't there multiple existing labs all over the country who do this regularly? Are these tests made in small batches or something? Do you need to grow viral cultures? What exactly is the limit here and why can't a typical lab just double production in a few weeks by doubling it's hardware?
You don't have to culture anything (if we did we might as well just give up). We use PCR to amplify a known section of the viral genome. With the oligo production capacity in this country alone we could synthesize enough primers test everyone in the country 10 times in a couple of days. That is not the limiting reagent. The limit is either sample prep or sample collection. Actually running the amplification shouldn't be a bottleneck, there are hundreds of thousands of thermal cyclers across the country. In my more cynical moments I might say the bottleneck is that some companies might want to make money from all the tests ....
I'm trying to learn a bit more about how testing works. Aside from the logistics (getting the samples to the lab, etc), what are the necessary steps for sample prep? Heating to inactivate the virus? Splitting the sample into RNA/DNA/proteins?
Also, where do you draw the numbers of primer production capacity from? IIUC, the only other things that an amplification needs are enzymes (just DNA polymerase for PCR) and "food" (nucleotides), but that I assume is not a bottleneck?
How difficult is it to safely dispose of amplified samples? Can you basically just dump them in the toilet?
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.
Let me put it in simple word: you'll loose your job. Your friends and family will loose their jobs.
As a result, when your savings run out, you'll loose your appartement. And so will your friends and family.
You won't be able to afford food without government assistance.
And even if shutdown lasts only 30 days, it'll wreck the economy for a long time. Once a restaurant defaults and closes, it won't just re-open. Those jobs will be lost for a long time.
Now, maybe you're one of the lucky ones with enough savings to ride this out and this won't affect you. But it'll affect millions of others.
Why do we need jobs to survive? That alone is an insane system. We desperately need to separate work activity and survivability.
Even without this pandemic, we live in a World where there is enough shelter, food and drugs for everyone but we still have homeless people, people starving or at the least malnourished and people dying in a rich country because they have to ration fucking insulin.
This economic system is not working at all. People die every die directly because of this system[0]. This pandemic just brings it to light.
How is it a failed system? I'd say people cannot afford insulin is proof enough that Capitalism is a failed system.
Just go ask Argentina[0], collapsing months after IMF was praising the "good" work Argentina was doing and how a good Capitalist country it has become[1].
This pandemic just made most people feel what the lives of billions is like all year long under Capitalism. And your dismissive comment is just shameful and disgusting.
ohh I dont know, the millions upon millions that have died in starvation due to socialism over the many decades that it has been tried
but those where not "real socialism" right....
Pointing to one good that some people can not afford (the reason is largely due to government control not capitalism BTW) does not in any way "prove capitalism failed"
it is true that sometimes with capitalism you will get breadlines, but with socialism sometimes you get bread
All of those are the result of the horrible 'economic system' we find ourselves in. People lose their apartments when they lose their jobs because we have few safety nets. And for small businesses we're demonstrating how little it takes for something to completely destroy them.
If humanity can't react appropriately to pandemics like this, then how can we expect to survive in the eventuality that something even worse comes along? And any economic system that gets crushed by this proves that it simply wasn't prepared and needs to be replaced, lest it cause even more damage to individuals.
We don't need restaurants. If you cook your own food the empployees can find a useful job. Until they do we can sustain them just like we could sustain them while doing useless work.
I think one thing that this pandemic is teaching us is that most people's jobs do jack shit to maintain the basic needs of society, and the ones with important jobs are often paid the least.
> the ones with important jobs are often paid the least.
that's the wrong way to think about it, and also a misunderstanding of economics.
If a teacher is paid the way a CEO is paid, there won't be enough money for very many teachers. You'd find it hard to afford a teacher for your kids, let alone free education.
A doctor, back in the middle ages, is only affordable to the nobility. These days, doctors are still quite highly paid (too high imho), and that is one reason why medical services are expensive.
Imagine if you associate the "importance" of a resource with its price. Water would cost more than diamonds and gold! Water is needed for sustaining life - you die without it. Therefore, in theory, it's so important that you end up paying infinity amount of money to have it, under your system!
The fact that we have water so cheap (literally 0.000001 cent per cup), is a good outcome. Everybody can afford water.
You are thinking about it wrongly. We should pay the CEO the same as the teacher. Managing a bunch of adults can't possibly be harder than teaching children. Education is an actual investment. Bullshit inc not so much.
> The owners of the company do, and it's paid out of the owners' pocket.
This is not true for publicly traded companies - where the board (consisting mostly executives at other companies) determines compensation on behalf of the owners
The board members operate only at the pleasure of the shareholders, so the shareholders ultimately determine CEO pay and are the ones who are paying it. Shareholders can (and often do) sell their stock the moment they don't like what the board and CEO are doing.
I'm sorry, I should have explained what seems so obvious to me. Let me try put it more sensible...
We have a finite amount of labor and a finite amount of resources available to us.
The thing our governments lack since the days of lords and god kings is direction. This is necessary since a group of people poorly working together isn't smarter than the smartest person in that group.
We all do stupid shit at times, if a lot of people decide to support the same stupid thing it is entirely possible to dedicate all time and resources to throwing virgins in the volcano, smoking opium or borrow money in stead of printing it. Who knows, someone might create the ultimate video game, we could retool our entire civilization to play the game non stop.
A [proverbial] god king would have other priorities, there might be a war coming with the neighboring country, there might be regular floods, there might be an insect plague, there might be a disease or the food might be running out.
We have distributed wealth recklessly (to put it blunt) and ended up with millions of little emperors who pay their little generals whatever they like. They are constantly at war with the next little empire.
The plague or the flood simply become economic developments that one can leverage for ones advantage. What is left of our government is a vending machine that one can use as a weapon to do whatever each little empire is willing to pay for.
I should mention we've made a ton of technological progress with this role playing game. It might just be that we've created the ultimate game already and that everyone is playing it. If so I'd have to argue we have one shitty dungeon master. The adventures planned out for most of us are not very interesting. Most of us are simply chasing the carrot on the stick. The heroes are not gaining as much experience points as they could, they are not learning as many new skills and abilities as they could. We can do better and we know it.
Say you are in charge for sake of argument. The orc's are getting ready to attack from the east, the goblins from the west but all your population cares about is opium. Would you dedicate resources to making swords and training or would you give the CEO of Opium inc in his competitive struggle with Meth corp the 10 000 men he wants for a promotional parade? The people might be enraged. If we make swords who will care for the poppy fields??
> Anyone is free to start a corporation
Indeed, I could create a product triggering superior production of endorphins. I could win a large market share and then present myself as if a philanthropist on a mission to help humanity with its struggles. I could prove it by moving funds into a non profit organization that might not do anything by design or struggle hard not accomplishing anything.
It's almost funny, the real needs retooled into a vehicle for public relations. If you play enough candy crush we will be sure to defeat the orc's.
> We have a finite amount of labor and a finite amount of resources available to us.
There is an infinite amount of labor available - because of improvements in efficiency. The manpower required to make a shirt has declined by something like 99% in the last 200 years. For growing food has dropped a similar amount. And on and on.
Resources are infinite because they can always be re-used and re-purposed for other things. For example, despite everyone eating chicken and ham, there is no looming shortage of chickens or pigs, because people figured out how to raise them efficiently.
Certainly, we live in interesting times. The capabilities are all there, what is left of the puzzle is tying it all together.
Gradually manpower to make a shirt has declined by 99%. It happened gradually so we continue to have more garment workers than needed. This is driving down salaries and it removes job security which again improves productivity.
I've seen stuff from up close that was much to ridiculous and I live in the Netherlands. I take all kinds of weird jobs just to see what things are like.
The latest trend is to reduce the work week from 5 to 2-3 days and the work day from 8 to 4-5 hours. That way you can make people work at insane speed. (Speed no one could work at for 40 hours)
In one such job (which wasn't the most idiotic example at all) a group of 5 people produced half a million boxes of cookies in a day. The conveyor belt moved so fast one couldn't scratch himself. After taxes I got 35 euro per day.
I kept getting back to the same thought. Do I need cookies to cost 99 cents per box? How terrible would it be if they cost 1 euro? Would we raise our nose and push the shopping cart ahead thinking "how dare they ask this much money for cookies?!" When shopping I couldn't care less if it costs 99 cents or 1 euro. I'm not saying we should pay people 1000 euro per day. I'm saying the customer certainly doesn't care if prices go up by that much. Only the Joneses would cry about it. They would demand salaries to go down to the appropriate 35 euro in a country where rent is 800. You'll just have to work 8 weeks to pay for it, you figure it out! You should have paid more attention in school then someone else would have had to package the cookies!
I can see how that line of reasoning works on an individual level and ill certainly make it work for me myself and I. I don't consider the societal puzzle solved like that.
On the second day I asked a manager if I could take a box of cookies. He couldn't look at me, he looked at the floor, then at the wall, then at the ceiling, then back at the wall. After 10 long seconds of silence he said, no not today sorry.
It took me days to figure out what thoughts were behind that expression, it was a simple yes/no question in my book... Then it struck me! The legal limit of gifts for employees (which includes product) is 1% of the salary! Having worked only 2 days there was no room to gift me the 99 cent pack of cookies.
At the end of the 3rd work day I found the manager at the exit. He proudly pointed out a pallet of test product. 1 box per person! He said!
Since I take such jobs somewhat as a corporate spy I had already learned that those boxes will be unpacked and the cookies will be sold as pig food.
Reading the expressions on his face this charade was much more painful for the manager than the employees.
The rules for taking cookies home were much less strictly enforced when people worked full time. No inspector would have considered it paying salary in cookies.
For the 4th time they are building a whole new factory now. I'm sure they will ramp up production to at least a million boxes per day. 3 out of the 5 jobs can be automated easily.
1 cent extra would then allow us to pay 5000 euro per day. Imagine how angry people would get?
Garment workers:
https://sustainablebrands.com/read/marketing-and-comms/garme...
"On average, they worked 60 hours a week and earned an hourly rate of 28 taka (the equivalent of $0.95 in purchasing power parity). They earned less than the minimum hourly wage 64 percent of the time and there was significant evidence to suggest that the more they worked, the less they earned."
forget ppp, 28 taka is $0.33
I'm simply suggesting we should build that world you portray rather than pretend it already exists.
> 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.
Out of curiosity, why do you think it's likely that something more solid and useful to most is likely to come out of an economic collapse? Economic collapses have happened before - are there any instances of a solid and useful system coming out of them (maybe the new deal after the great depression? That one is arguable though).
Imagine if we had a system where you don't have to pay for any basic necessities, from shelter to food to healthcare to education.
We all work in the system, some would make more than others but even those who work the least or not at all would not be left behind. So if you make more you can enjoy more "stuff" and gadgets and if you make less you are still stress free about life.
Would we have $1000 phones or shopping shelves filled with hundred of fake choices? Most likely not but at least we won't have people rationing insulin or people living in the street of the richest city in the richest country.
We live in a world with so much production and people spend their time worrying about surviving and getting ahead instead of relaxing and making the world a better place.
Perhaps it's rare due to man's tendency toward corruption.
Are there reasons you see why a more robust cannot be developed? I suspect HN could easily come up with a substantial list of improvements. Limiting stock buybacks seems like a good place to start.
Didn't even last a decade until they got themselves an emperor.
> Arguably the Russian Revolution if you accept the USSR as a step up from feudalism.
Considering that the USSR killed orders of magnitude more of its own people than feudalism under the Czars ever did, I'm going to vote "no" on this one.
It also brought an unprecedented amount of economic development to what was an incredibly backwards country.
Not that it's a model to imitate. Although some folks in this thread sound rather ready to sacrifice millions of people, for the sake of keeping the economy limping along...
> Although some folks in this thread sound rather ready to sacrifice millions of people, for the sake of keeping the economy limping along...
That’s because they believe they are young and would fight off the virus with no problem. Change one of those variables and they will change their tune.
I can understand that it is prudent to take a worst case scenario here but it depends on how widespread this thing already is without us knowing it.
So Sweden has right now 1,639 confirmed cases with 16 deaths so far. There are some young people treated in critical care but so far it has been older people who has passed away, often with other diseases as well. Sweden currently only tests older people, people with severe symptoms, healthcare workers and similar personal and those who can work from home these days and travel is discouraged.
One expert estimated that we have around 100k infected in total right now and discussed that some things like shutting down schools for younger kids will have a large effect on society but not do that much on the spread of the virus. Instead you should focus on protecting vulnerable groups, stay home if you feel any symptoms of cold etc.
100k out of 10 million population would fit roughly with Iceland who did random sampling and found 1% of their population affected.
Of course he acknowledged that there is no way to know and taking extreme measures are better than taking too small but emotional/political reactions vs practical is really a discussion to be had.
Immediate aftermath of October Revolution was widespread death and famine. It was so bad that the communists introduced market capitalism again, called New Economic Policy.
The immediate aftermath of the October Revolution was actually five years of a civil war that killed ten million people, which was then capped off by a severe drought.
The 'economic system' is based on fundamentally one thing: people doing stuff. If people can't do stuff, literally, like go out of their houses, then no new economic model can work. It's like, the one requirement for everything.
this assumes the existence of magical economic systems with infinite reserves in other planets. The economy is people, its a dynamic system, it doesn't actually have reserves
Ok, you can pay them money, but what are they going to BUY with that money? If people aren't working to produce things, there isn't going to be anything to buy with the money we pay people. That is how you get runaway inflation.
They don't need lots of money to buy lots of stuff. They need to keep themselves fed and keep the electricity on while they're out of work. Food and electricity are two things that will still be produced throughout any "shutdown".
> 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.
42 billions total now, the 32 billions just announced is on top of the 10 billions already put aside last week.
And yes with these measures essentially any income is now assured: Salaries, salaries of SMB owners (normally excluded from unemployement benefits for obvious reasons), hourly workers, limited contracts, internships/apprenticeships, self-employed (i.e. without being employed by an LLC or something else like that) business like artists. Also daily stop-gap money if you have to stay home for more than a few days to figure out how to take care of your homeschooled kids.
Plus like 20 billions in credit guarantees for small businesses to avoid a cash flow squeeze.
All measures use existing infrastructure for paymenet (commandeering the banks for the cash flow squeeze credits) to guarantee the money has arrived by end of the month, latest. And that it will continue to flow, like regular pay check.
> 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.
Your logic is off. In the absence of data there is more fear because you have no idea who might possibly be sick. Once you start testing you can bring epidemiological tools online and alert people to possible exposures. If you don't do that the only sure thing is to quarantine everyone because you have no data, that will tank the economy for sure.
> ...we would needlessly quarantine 12.5 million people, and fail to quarantine an equal number of infected carriers.
Well, the failure the quarantine would be the false negative rate times the infection prevalence. A significantly smaller number than the false quarantine rate, until the whole gadonkun no longer matters.
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.
> For example, everybody is packed into the local supermarkets at the same time in my area.
Well in my country (Poland) with all the noise and confusion some rational procedures get implemented. Supermarkets limit strictly the number of customers inside. Cashiers get physical protection from customers. Contactless payment limits have been doubled. Etc.
So we are getting time for implementing changes and the life can start returning to 'new normal'.
> 90% of policies enacted during this crisis were a net negative
Compared to what? An exponential explosion, like what we saw in Italy, prior to the measures, but ten times worse, because you don't even do anything to check it?
Thank you, I thought I was the only that see these government measures as not only being destructive to the economy but actively make the situation worse
They are shutting down many businesses, and more or less forcing people in to situation where the virus will spread further.
the Panic in society currently right now will do more to spread this virus than anything.
But hey lets destroy our economy as well, that will do wonders to stop the panic
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?
We might have enough food etc stockpiled, but the servicing of debt (upon which everything is built) drives a certain modest urgency through the whole system.
The need to service crushing debt is a large part of what everybody is hoping will fall away. A primary economic concern right now is people losing their homes for failing to make rent, whether they rent from a landlord or "own". Businesses will go bankrupt for much the same reason - high burn rates that were mainly just going to the banks.
Debt has metastasized and spawned many industries, so its retraction is unlikely to be a peaceful event. But it is a cancer that will kill our society some time. The only question is if now is that time, or if some patching will get the system through this and we can go back to pumping the stock market as a false idol of productivity.
As a point of theory, in a highly deflationary scenario the correct response may be for the government to (controllably) print paper. Given the right distribution mechanism debt could be serviced on the freshly printed paper. The effectiveness of such a strategy is dependent on how efficient the mechanism to distribute paper to end debt holders as well as how well monitored the money supply is.
The worst case on such a scenario is that an economy sits on rationing for a period of time, followed by a strong and possibly inflationary demand spike, but businesses and people's balance sheets could be partially paused.
>. 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.
You can easily find the person who is holding rather than distributing the money. In fact, you looked at them in the mirror this morning.
I am voluntarily (10% family-preservation, 90% community service) staying in my house. I’m now “hoarding” (to use your hyperbolic term) all the money that would normally go to fuel, eating out, and entertainment.
The restaurant, movie theater, and gas station owner would, circumstances permitting, surely prefer to be able to serve me and I likewise.
Why don’t I just mail checks to people that I’d normally buy from? Because I don’t know what my own economic future looks like. Will I have a job in 6 months? What will my retirement savings look like then? Plus, I can’t just send the money where it would have gone and also send it to the people who are now selling me more at-home food or new goods/services that I need to be productive at home.
I’m fortunate to work as a W-2 office worker/spreadsheet miner, at least for now. If I were a bar, movie theater, or auto repair shop owner or worker, I’d be in a lot worse shape.
This is not a Bezos, Gates, Musk driven problem. This is driven by the inability of the consumer to consume normally.
If they remain open. That might be about a coin-flip on average at this point.
As a moral issue, we are choosing to continue to pay our every-other-week house cleaner to not clean our house. Everyone else is getting paid iff they provide current goods/services. We have our own financial survival to look out for until more is clear about the economic outlook.
I don't know what to say.. Do you want your local food and bars to remain in business? If so you have to prepay. If you buy a gift card you are basically insuring them against default. I am sure they will factor in some loyalty reward.
Restaurants and bars close and change ownership all of the time.
I mean this is what unemployment and governments are for. To insure losses in the extreme. We should have policies and procedures where a 2-4 week or month lockdown doesn’t destroy you financially. That gives the economy and people time to adjust.
But again, follow the money. Where is that exact dollar that would have gone to that business had there not been any coronavirus?
The economy is a circular river system. If it stops one day, there is going to be areas of drought in places, as well as huge reservoirs protected by dams. Money does not disappear, it only moves. You lose money on stocks, someone else on the other side of the world made money with their short position.
Perhaps that dollar is held up in some whale's cash account after they closed their positions. You would tax that whale for that cash, and redistribute it to the working class to afford food and shelter.
In any recession, the big stall is capital being too skiddish to pay for labor, resulting in lowered consumer spending, justifying less demand for labor, and creating a worsened financial crisis due to even lower consumer spending levels. If you are able to keep the working class afloat, you can conceivably keep consumer spending afloat, and therefore keep the economy afloat, even if capital is fearful.
The economy is the collective action of people producing the goods and services that you and I consume - food, haircuts, medicine, video games. Money is a claim on some portion of that stuff that has been or will be produced. Redistributing money is not going to suddenly make us productive again when most people are only leaving their house once a week to stock up on groceries.
If the business is providing no services or products, then it cannot afford to pay its employees. This is because the economy is built around mutually beneficial exchange, which only happens when people can work.
Example: I go to a clothing store and give them an amount of money that I value less than the clothes they give me in exchange. We are both better off because we have made that mutually-beneficial exchange. If the exchange doesn't happen because the store is closed, then there is no revenue (let alone profit) to divvy up.
The only way to simulate that transaction in a way that gives money to employees is to literally take it from customers who receive nothing in return.
What I'm saying is there is still money even if it's not currently circulating. In your example, you go to the store and it's closed, the money remains in your pocket; it still exists.
My solution would be to tax you redistribute that money from your pocket to the people who need food and shelter, the same people who stimulate consumer spending, because you are unable to currently do that yourself due to shelter in place orders and/or perceptions of the state of the economy.
You are not acknowledging the core economic problem which is that the productive capacity of the economy is going to be destroyed if this doesn’t end soon.
What you are describing is essentially how to ration the dwindling supplies of goods during the epidemic.
Enacting arbitrary taxes where the government simply appropriates funds from entities that have it and gives it to those who don’t is unfair, dangerous, and will undermine trust in the rule of law. It will be ripe for abuse and predatory behavior. It is also a system that loses the critical information market mechanisms provide, instead replacing with “command” based allocation which is a dangerous precedent.
The way to achieve what you propose that is not at odds with civil society is for the government to “print” new money, and distribute it through moderately means based criteria.
The US has unlimited capacity to increase its money base as a sovereign entity. Normally this is done through the Fed buying bonds from the treasury. The treasury has the authority to create money directly if they choose.
This has the effect of devaluing the currency as a whole. By distributing the new currency ti citizens that need it, it is effectively a transfer of wealth that is distributed throughout the economy in a decentralized and proportional way.
It is only necessary to target those who need help, opposed to harder problem created when the need to target who can “afford” to sacrifice their savings is added.
This doesn’t address the problem of productivity lost, but it allows what productive output there is to be more fairly rationed.
It also less subject to being the legal and political nightmare your suggestion entails.
Where is all the stuff that we use in our day to day lives going to come from while the economy is 'paused'? Who is going to make the food, distribute the food, sell the food, drive the trucks, etc?
There are two sides of our society; production and consumption. If we aren't producing, how are we continuing to consume?
Well, there's inventory of various essential goods in a variety of places, and all the essential services you note, as well as power, plumbing, etc.
Instead of going to a restaurant, I make a sandwich, instead of buying a new shirt, etc. GDP has indeed dropped, and some people have no cash flow (fixable), but I'm not seeing physical (excluding the abstraction of the banking system) reasons why this can't be sustained for months if necessary.
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.
Focusing on positive or negative is the wrong focus, we need to test for immunity. Those who are immune can contract the virus again in a year, but will do so without symptoms, according to older studies for similar viruses.
And most importantly, those with immunity can go on to lead a normal life and participate in the economy.
People can be contagious before symptoms. And that’s also a very different strategy than testing everyone before they go into work each day. You’ll miss the vast majority of people if you just test people with symptoms.
Neither country took the middle ground compared to where the US was when we finally started reacting.
South Korea has been aggressively testing, contact chasing, and quarantining from day 1. Look at their number of tests per capita compared to ours.
China did indeed shut down the entire economy for months for provinces containing 900M people iirc. In barely hit provinces they have teams of thousands of people doing aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine.
The number of new cases in South Korea has started to increase again, and they keep getting new clusters unlinked to any known cases: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-southko... I suspect that they're going to have to give up on the tracing and testing approach in the next few weeks.
Stopping every transmission isn’t necessary. We just need some way to drive R < 1.
China’s approach (lots of temperature taking, testing everyone with a fever) might not eradicate the disease here, but it could keep it manageable until a vaccine is deployed.
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.
New Yorker here. From what I see through my window, my fellow New Yorkers still don’t “get it”. I see clusters of people hanging out and families going for leisurely walks. If this keeps up the number of infections - and deaths - will only increase.
Last week my brother suggested instead of working from home I work from a Starbucks.
I feel like people don’t understand how serious this is and it’s really bothering me.
Something that amused me the other day was was an NPR reporter saying, "I went to the park yesterday and I was surprised at all the people just out in the park" as if they didn't also make the choice to go to the park.
I feel this. Every time I go out (to the park) I’m amazed at how many people are out. I start thinking about how we’re doomed, because people obviously aren’t taking this seriously. I mean, they’re at the park instead of huddled in their apartment!
I'm more sanguine. I live on a busy Brooklyn street which is normally packed with people shoulder to shoulder during the day, and I will see maybe 5-10 people on the block at what should be the busiest time. I think it's like a 90%-95% reduction which is certainly substantial enough to quench the spread enough to reduce the shock hospitals are receiving.
Doing my part (I have asthma), I haven't left the apartment since Sunday :^)
But for how long? The stricter the quarantine the longer we have to quarantine to reduce spread. That's the problem. Best estimate is we can reduce daily interactions by 70%, for the next 12-18 months.
The exponential function is a terrifying beast. Any alternatives we don't know now are irrelevant. There is a reason why NYC is bracing for impact: a tsunami of new cases are about to slam into the healthcare system.
Usually Hacker News middlebrow skepticism is just in poor taste. On this topic, it is foolish and farcical. One of our doctor friends is already telling us that her hospital is under stress and she's not in one of the hardest hit states.
I did not say eliminate the shock. I said reduce the shock. Epidemiological reports support the hypothesis that this level of social distancing is effective to reduce r. When exponential functions are involved, even small improvements pay off big in the long run.
You obviously don't have young kids. Leaving your apartment and taking them for a walk is the bare minimum to the whole family not going crazy during something like this. You can't just sit at home and chill like a single adult can.
Nowhere have you seen numbers that remotely approach 1-3%.
You’ve seen the critical, largely elderly population get tested and from that you get that number that’s freaking people out.
Stop spreading panic. With those kinds of numbers China alone would have 10M+ dead. In Japan, Singapore, surrounding nations more millions dead.
Use a bit more common sense. We know we haven’t tested enough in the US, yet we don’t have bodies piling up on the street. You don’t have families of 4 where 2 suddenly die. This has been going on for greater than 3 months now.
Stop spreading fear. The only thing to fear is the terrible consequences of those stuck inside the fear bubble
America has 42% obesity rate and a huge population with diabetes and heart issues, the numbers for 30-60 year olds might end up looking a lot worse than in Asia and Europe.
That it impacted the kids and 20-30 yo cohort the way it impacts the 70+ yo.
Also those co-morbidities like high blood pressure have the all important age distinction missing. So yeah if you’re 70 and have high blood pressure it’s worse.
It’s perverse to stop world for some low rate CFR for the elderly. The world is made for the young. We shouldn’t destroy it for the elderly.
Also actuarial tables for a 75 year old is extremely haunting. People magically forget that a sick 75 year old doesn’t have much time left to live in the first place.
When the hospitals are full of covid victims, all demographics will suffer, as you will not be able to receive care for your non-covid related ailment.
The 1-3% is an average among all age groups. You clearly have not looked at the data. For example, in Italy the CFR is somewhere around 14% for elderly. Everyone else is lower such that the nominal death rate, being an average among all groups,.has been consistently running around 8%.
Obviously when this matures that rate will go lower because the denominator will grow but the denominator that people care about is the one we have now: who is sick enough to need a test because if I get sick, and thus become part of that denominator, the current rate gives me a good picture of my chances. Was the parent comment slightly hyperbolic, maybe. But you are way underselling the seriousness of this disease and the rationality of being scared of it.
Holy cow. Notice how everyone literally says “there’s not enough testing” but yet you’re able to rationalize the CFR as valid.
What you see going to the hospital and getting tested CLEARLY is the most critical number of cases. It’s possible that for every person tested, there are 100 or more that are asymptomatic. Run some numbers on this “highly contagious” disease.
Another point why we are in a fear bubble is that everyone parrots the same fear gospel and there’s very few dissenters.
WHO assistant director general & epidemiologist Bruce Aylward's investigation in China found that there wasn't a significant 'iceberg.' There's other supporting data elsewhere. I find these three paragraphs easy to digest:
--
"
In Guangdong province, for example, there were 320,000 tests done in people coming to fever clinics, outpatient clinics. And at the peak of the outbreak, 0.47 percent of those tests were positive. People keep saying [the cases are the] tip of the iceberg. But we couldn’t find that. We found there’s a lot of people who are cases, a lot of close contacts — but not a lot of asymptomatic circulation of this virus in the bigger population. And that’s different from flu. In flu, you’ll find this virus right through the child population, right through blood samples of 20 to 40 percent of the population.
If you didn’t find the “iceberg” of mild cases in China, what does it say about how deadly the virus is — the case fatality rate?
It says you’re probably not way off. The average case fatality rate is 3.8 percent in China, but a lot of that is driven by the early epidemic in Wuhan where numbers were higher. If you look outside of Hubei province [where Wuhan is], the case fatality rate is just under 1 percent now. I would not quote that as the number. That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying.
"
There can be a wide range of assumption. Anywhere from "all the people we know about are all that are infected" to "everyone else in the world is already infected".
Regardless, the death tolls kind of speak for themselves. What's more, the increase in death toll too. In Italy alone there are over 4000 dead, with a few hundred more a day now. Italy has a population of 60 million. Extrapolating even the current death count in Italy to the rest of the world, and that's 400k deaths. All indications are that it'll be higher than that uncontrolled.
Maybe people are overreacting. But in this case isn't it better to error on the side of caution? Otherwise by the time we realize we're wrong and millions are dying, what do we do then?
I’ll give you a couple reasons why Italy is the mess it is:
1. Significantly older population
2. Shitty healthcare
For context many years ago, the state of Ohio in the US had more MRI machines than all of Canada combined. It’s very possible that due to budget constraints and other things, they have terrible health infrastructure.
Why do we believe that all nations are equal? I can take a look at the Olympics and notice that isn’t the case. Italians make better cars as compared to the French. So maybe they have terrible elderly healthcare? That seems more likely than “super disease kills only Italians and now comes after Americans”
I already answered this in a sister comment. There are at least 3 candidates (Chloroquine , Remdesivir, Favipiravir ) and they are all unlikely to work.
Follow the article and read the summary, remdesivir was already trialed on a patient in Seattle: "The patient had visited Wuhan, returned to Seattle, began displaying symptoms, and was hospitalized on symptom day 3. By symptom day 8 X-ray showed clear lower respiratory tract viral pneumonia (diagnostic ‘ground glass’) and supplemental oxygen was started. Patient worsened, and intravenous antibiotics were started day 9. Patient worsened (proving viral pneumonia), so attending physicians consulted with FDA then had Gilead rush the experimental drug by air, with intravenous treatment starting day 10. Patient improved in 24 hours, was saved, and has since been discharged"
Importantly, "It did, however, show efficacy against SARS and MERS in vitro" So the drug is promising. Not saying it's a silver bullet but definitely promising.
Vaccines are at least a year away. In order of most to least likely to work:
1. Chloroquine is hepotoxic and since cytokine storms is already one of the way covid19 leads to death there is a lot of question whether chloroquine can actually help (in terms of aggregate effect on CFR).
2. Remdesivir didn't work for ebola (original target) and there is no reason to think it would work for covid19.
3. Favipiravir shows activity against many viruses (SARS-CoV-2 included), but doesn't actually reduce mortality for other viral illnesses (unknown for convid19).
Key to understand, many things show activity with the virus but don't actually improve the disease progression.
If there are 100 or more asymptomatic and untested cases per tested case, then the disease is very highly contagious, given the timeframe we're looking at.
As a counterpoint, Illinois just ordered residents to shelter-in-place after closing schools and restaurants a week ago and our new cases of COVID-19 aren't accelerating upward as of today. This model also predicts far fewer deaths with shelter-in-place rules: https://covidactnow.org/state/IL
As governor Pritzker said: "I fully recognize I am choosing between saving people's lives and saving people's livelihoods, but ultimately you can't have a livelihood if you don't have a life."
I more or less agree with a temporary shut down however I see the quote all the time, and it is a stupid statement, because you equally can not have a life with out a livelihood
This the the doctors delima, that does not factor in quality of life in to the "life" equation, life with no quality is not much of a life.
Further I have big problems with the Governer or the government making that choice, it should not be the government choice of my livelihood over my life, in either direction. No only is it shocking how fast people willing toss the economy aside and expect government checks to save them, it is also shocking how fast people simply toss aside all civil liberties.
I generally agree. That said, we tried the personal responsibility route, and then the bars packed up for St. Patrick's day and the airports ended up becoming giant petri dishes - literally overnight. And then many, many, many people decided that "don't panic" meant somewhere between clear all the shelves at every store and ignore the problem until it goes away.
I don't envy the local governments trying to contain this with almost no data and no help or direction from the federal government.
Well I am equally not sure why it is federal governments responsibility to help and direct
In our system of government the State Governments are suppose to be the most powerful, not the federal government
it is a Union of States after all.
The fact that in the last 100 years or so we continually have centralized more and more power into the hands of the federal government is a huge issue, but instead of recognizing that issue people seeming want to put more and more power federally and continue to strip their local governments of power
The smaller the unit of power the faster it can react to local changes. In situations like this it SHOULD be local government leading the charge not a slow monolithic federal government
That's fair, but this is exactly the sort of issue that needs to be orchestrated at a higher level. If Illinois handles this perectly somehow, but the surrounding states do not, then Illinois' efforts will be wasted and overcome by the neighbors. There's no way this sort of problem will be resolved without the entire country being on the same page for the solution. That's exactly the sort of thing the federal government is good for.
If this was done from the start then we could have recovered from it much easier. We should have never waited when we saw this was the road every other country was clearly going down and they handling the situation better than the US before the shut downs.
The problem will be how long the shelter in place can be maintained; as long as you have folks coming in infected from other states, once the mass quarantine is lifted, outbreaks will flare up.
This only ends with a vaccine and enough people recovered after infection we arrive near enough herd immunity. Until then this will have to burn through populations. Regardless, I can appreciate and support Pritzker’s response, and efforts to “flatten the curve”. It’s an unfortunate situation with no clear path to success.
I agree with your first paragraph. On the second, I would think a moderately successful therapeutic protocol would go a long way to quickly getting us out of the houses. A vaccine is too long a time away to count on; there won’t be an economy left by then.
We don’t have a vaccine for the common cold, not for lack of trying. AFAIK we’ve never made a vaccine for a coronavirus. This isn’t the time to be relying on silver bullets.
In Michigan (where I live and so am paying attention), there were 80 positive tests reported as of Wednesday and there are now 549 positive tests reported.
The cases from 2 weeks ago are seeking medical care.
I'm slightly optimistic, testing has ramped up the last few days with a large spike instead of an unimaginable one, and we will get a clearer picture as they start broadening the criteria.
I don't think the options are have a lockdown vs have a functioning economy and a bunch of sick people. Once hospitals start overflowing with this, you're not going to have a functioning economy anyway.
If hospitals can get the supplies they need, and testing and health department capacity is there to do contact tracing, the lockdowns can loosen, and our economy can start back up. Bonus points if the warmer weather in the coming months helps fight the virus.
>Once hospitals start overflowing with this, you're not going to have a functioning economy anyway.
Is this true though? I'm not trying to be insensitive, but according to reports, ~15% of the infected need hospitalization, and the distribution of those people are mostly over 60[0]. Is having these people hospitalized on a large scale more detrimental to the economy than shutting everything down? Serious question.
If they're all sick at the same time hospitals can't help them or anyone else. Then routine emergencies for everyone became fatal or life altering events.
Yes, it would. King County WA (where I live) has around 2 million people. Assuming half of that get infected and 15% require hospitalization. That's 150k people flooding the hospitals. That is way WAY above what the hospitals can handle. And I'm not only talking about beds and ventilators. Think about road accidents or coronaries which happen at a known steady pace when it's business as usual. These cases require ambulances and quick response times which cannot be met anymore because the system is overloaded with covid-19 patients. What do you do? Turn the 60+ patients away?
Ok, so hospitals are going to be a mess, which causes all sorts of extra problems (routine issues become really bad, etc).
But also, if there's enough people sick enough to overwhelm the hospitals, your average workplace is going to have a bunch of people out sick, and that's going to be an issue. Plus, like everybody who is well is going to be out for the funerals of the old people.
Part of the reason my kid's school shut down before they were compelled to was that they were having trouble with staffing, because staff were sick or in the vulnerable groups. No school means less workers for other jobs too.
The vast majority of people with COVID do not end up at the hospital. So it is absolute fact that we are sacrificing the economy in order to save, relatively speaking, a select few.
If this continues for more than a few weeks - 50% of American business dies. 50% of America is unemployed. Contagion from massive defaults and write-offs spreads throughout the entire economy. Money printing at a rate heretofore unimaginable and probably hyperinflation to follow.
It is no less than committing hari-kari in a moral panic. Hopefully we will wake up from the fever dream before it’s too late.
“Flatten the curve” is a terrible lie. The extent and duration of the measures required would bankrupt 95% of the country.
ICUs being overrun is actually an argument for getting the COVID cases out of the way quickly, not dragging it out over, say, 24 months.
If you can get your head around the scale involved, if 80% of people are going to be infected and 14% of those are going to need serious treatment (doubtful, but the same assumption the “flatten” exercise is based on), there is actually no way to keep COVID cases “at or below” ICU capacity. They will absolutely take 100% of capacity and beyond for more than a year, if you drag it out.
The longer you have COVID cases overwhelming your system, the longer you have non-COVID routine emergencies getting untreated.
Either you can contain it in a few weeks or you have to let it burn through. There is no “slow smolder” scenario I can see that leaves society intact.
I stand by every comment I’ve made. None of which included personal attacks. Most of which included citations.
Your personal attack is entirely inappropriate. I suggest perhaps it’s you that should take a break from the discussion.
As we can see just looking at how different countries have responded, there is a wide spectrum of responses, and countries have been successful getting R0 below 1 with different approaches other than total shutdown.
Even the Imperial College report notes that there are no easy choices here;
> We do not consider the ethical or economic implications of either strategy here, except to note that there is no easy policy decision to be made. Suppression, while successful to date in China and South Korea, carries with it enormous social and economic costs which may themselves have significant impact on health and well-being in the short and longer-term.
It’s crucial to note that there cannot be population health without economic health. It is not a choice between shutting down to save lives versus keeping the economy running and costing lives.
Computational Biologist Francois Balloux (Director of UGI at UCL) raises the point;
> The covid-19 pandemic is not just an epidemiological problem. It is a ‘Global Health’ problem, that can only be tackled with an integrated and global approach. For example, there is no such thing as a choice between managing the pandemic vs. protecting the economy. (11/12)
> Health and the economy are closely linked. The correlation between per-capita GDP and health (life expectancy) is essentially perfect. If the covid-19 pandemic leads to a global economy collapse, many more lives will be lost than covid-19 would ever be able to claim. (12/12)
Yes, my attack is personal, in the sense that it’s aimed directly at you and your reckless disregard for people’s lives. You’re spreading dangerous and false ideas in the face of a global pandemic, ideas that will cost tens of millions of lives if people take them seriously. There’s no reason anyone should listen to you, since you have no expertise, you’ve been wrong about everything all along, and you continue to disagree with the experts, as you have all along.
But like you said, you stand by every statement you’ve made.
Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of how wrong the other person is or you feel they are. You owe this community better if you're posting here, particularly now, when stress, fear, and anger are at higher than normal levels, and nobody knows exactly what is happening.
Edit: unfortunately, it turns out that you've been doing this so much that I've banned your account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659159). Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.
I stand with the experts that I’ve been citing. You should log off if you can’t maintain civil discourse.
You couldn’t be more wrong with your accusations, and I will continue to lend my perspective to this debate with a slant toward long-term macroeconomic thinking that I believe is essential in managing a global health crisis, and saving the most lives long-term.
Except the experts have disagreed with you from the start. You think we’re shutting down countries all over the globe against the advice of public health officials? Or even economists?
I have no doubt you can produce a “citation” of someone that agrees with you, especially if you twist their words to support your point. But you’re not seeking the truth, you made up your mind a long time, which is why the vast majority of experts disagree with you.
And I have zero doubt that you lack the shame and introspection to stop posting now, about something you know nothing about and have been wrong about all along. You should be ashamed though, you’re part of a movement costing lives. And I won’t be “civil” while you do so.
“one sick per household and they infect the whole house“
This happened repeatedly in China; in fact, the nature of a lockdown sort of encourages this. But an infected household of 5 ppl is significantly easier to contain than 1 infected person going on to infect 4 people from 4 different walks of life.
I got my groceries from people wearing masks. Everybody in the store kept 6 feet distance.
I've been working from home for 2 weeks and will continue to do so for at least 3 more. Company wide mandate.
Almost every business other than groceries/other essentials (where some are surprisingly "essential", granted) are closed so people have no reason to break quarantine except to perform essential tasks. So overall, I'd say we are doing exactly what we need to be doing. Hopefully the rest of the country follows suit
So let's cancel any sort of response, as you propose. What do the next two weeks, two months, etc. look like? I think it's the human condition to least try, but I can entertain the reality that some Americans just aren't for social distancing and of that segment, some will become superspreaders.
I wouldn't say it's lethal, at least not for everyone. The last report from Italy has stats on 2000 deaths. No deaths under age of 30 and only a few under 50, all with pre-existing health conditions. Women's median age close to 84. Men's 80. And vast majority of deaths are people with multiple pre-existing health conditions.
It could be because the application of medical care is skewed towards the young, such that they survive and those older or with less chance of surviving die.
If you can reduce the demand on hospital services, then you might have enough resources to treat those high mortality cases, and under those circumstances they may survive.
Not enough, all the simulations show we’d need to basically reduce our number of interactions a day by 75% and double the number of ventilators by 100% to “stay under the curve” that’s if we didn’t have a huge number of celebrations and people in lines, etc.
Projections are 500k dead by June. Maybe with the precautions we can slow the millions dead by the end of the year. It remains to be seen.
You have a point. We should have been aggressively testing at the start. Imagine if we had thrown the same amount of effort and money into initial testing as we are economic relief now. We'd still be open for business! But our leadership failed. So, now we have to lock down, but we should be doing it 100%. Hard core. Lock down. This weak half measure of "recommended guidelines" and leaving it up to local governments to adopt them is undermining the entire effort. It's tanking the economy AND not going to work. Let's swallow the damn pill and get it over with! Why is our leadership intent on dragging this out as long as possible? We should have been in hardcore, national lock down mode last Monday.
We'll come around, once it's too late. "Americans will always do the right thing — after exhausting all the alternatives."
> We don’t actually know how lethal, but it appears 1%-3%, but without widespread testing we wouldn’t know.
That’s the fatality rate within a functioning medical system. It’s safe to assume that if the virus is uncontrolled the rate will be substantially higher.
Well we can look at Italy for example. Also America has a lot of obese people, which are supposedly at a high risk, so it’s possible we see a higher fatality rate. I personally don’t think so just trying to answer your question
Meneghini and Gram Pedersen of University of Padova just extended the standard “SIR” epidemiology model with quarantine and it has the nice property of being able to estimate the infections from the observables.
Preprint on Researchgate: “ Quantifying undetected COVID-19 cases and effects of containment measures in Italy”
Sure, but if what you say is accurate, it wouldn't matter. Once people started dying by the thousand, even if they're all old, governments would be forced to lock stuff down. And even if they didn't, the economy would be hosed.
Even if you take an extremely high estimate of the currently infected in the US, you're probably in the low 100s of thousands of people, approx <0.1% of the country. So to say it's "likely too late" is just crazy - 99.9% of the country is not yet infected.
More can definitely be done with enforcing quarantine. In LA, meat is still prepared and served openly on the side of the road, so long as you have a relatively trivial permit. Even though the state is 'locked down,' you are still free to venture out at your leisure. Technically bars are supposed to be closed, but there is a pervasive speakeasy culture that hasn't slowed down.
The most vulnerable groups, the working class that pack like sardines in public transit every day, either continue work or are laid off. Tenement conditions still exist in Los Angeles, with multiple families cramming into a 1br apartment.
Quarantine is really only affecting the knowledge workers who make up a minority of the population, and who interact with a sliver of the population to begin with. Effective quarantine would include protections for the working class, but there isn't any political will.
I'm legitimately fearful of hitting the breaking point. Maybe some would call it overblown, or hysteria, but this is a city that endured three days of looting after a verdict, requiring the national guard to stabilize the situation. Men with rifles used to take positions on the roof of my grocery store. This isn't ancient history, unfortunately, it's who we are when pushed past our limits with nothing left to lose.
"All this to say: I think we are losing our economy and I think probably this isn’t effective."
Fixed this for you.
(Additional comment: I will counter with I'm really amazed how quickly people threw away the economy in an effort to reduce lost lives. Normally, I expect people to be much more mercurial)
Masks and gloves are ineffective for people who don't know how to use them -- wearing a mask? Great. Now you just felt hot and pulled the mask down onto your chin. Congratulations, the outside of the mask is no longer sterile. You're wearing gloves? Fabulous. Now you're out shopping pushing a cart and you just scratched your nose with your gloves. Cart handle is now contaminated or visa versa and gloves didn't change anything. PPE is only effective under very controlled environments, and the general population doesn't understand this.
The economy will recover, especially since EVERY country is taking a hit, I don't think it will take very long for the capitalist engine to roar back to life. That's the beauty about capitalism -- you're turning the ingenuity of humans loose to be productive. As humans we're great at figuring out how to be productive.
There is a shortage of masks and other PPE because people think that way. There is a cost because if everyone were to wear masks, there is not enough supply for healthcare professionals who could actually benefit from them.
The percentage of effectiveness isn't really measurable if the standard isn't followed. You're assuming its 50%, but it very well could be 0% because your equipment is just as contaminated as your hands. So you have not helped yourself, AND you have decreased supply of essential equipment from someone who ACTUALLY needs it. That's a big fail.
I agree that we shouldn't be taking the supply away from the professionals while there's a shortage, but your statement was that they were ineffective in the hands of laymen, and I don't think that's true.
I'm not assuming that they are 50% effective either, I pulled the 50% number out of my ass, but so is your 0%, and I find it hard to imagine a physical reality where me keeping a 6 feet distance to an infected person decreases my infection probability significantly more than that person wearing a mask. Anecdotally, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, where wearing masks is quite commonplace all seem to be doing better in transmission rate than the Western world, and all that without killing their economies. And considering that we're producing around 2 billion disposable plastic bottles a day, I'd currently bet money that we should be able to ramp up the supply of cheap masks for a sum that's a lot less than that of halting 50% of the Western economy for several months. Obviously, it can't happen in a day, but I'm not really seeing anyone try, except for perhaps Trump after his recent epiphany that Corona is not a Democrats' hoax. I'm willing to be dissuaded by someone who's actually thought it through, but sadly I haven't seen any such analyses.
I'm not an expert on infection control, but I work closely with people who either work in the infection control department of a hospital, or are running their own infection prevention and control consultancy. They live and breathe this, and I am only repeating almost verbatim what they have explained to me. I'm pretty sure they have "thought this through".
So believe what you want, but I'm gonna go with the experts on this, not someone who's only support is his own conjecture lol. They're not even the only ones saying this. Go Google some reputable sources yourself and stop guessing.
Your dismissive tone is uncalled for and not appreciated. Here's a systematic review that cites several studies that find face masks show a statistically significant effect in protection against influenza:
If your collaborators can point you to peer-reviewed studies that rebut these results, or to a serious current analysis that shows the impossibility (or estimates the price and time frame) of ramping up PPE production, please post it.
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.
All of the things you're saying are the direct result of the market incentives created by low interest rates. Companies borrowed money and used it to buy their own shares for the same reason everybody was borrowing money to buy shares with it -- it's what people do when it's cheap to borrow money.
If your competitors are all borrowing money at low interest, you do the same or you're not competitive.
The problem is we lowered interest rates in response to the housing crisis and then left them there. Because doing so inflated (really reinflated) such a ginormous credit bubble that it would take more than an entire market cycle for real economic growth to catch up to it, and (absent printing money) you can only raise interest rates to the extent that borrowing demand from real economic growth exceeds the reduction in credit caused by the higher interest rates, or you cause deflation and an economic downturn.
This is also why the rate of inflation has been below historic norms since the housing crisis -- reduced to that level just by raising rates the tiny bit that they did. And now even that's gone and interest rates are at zero.
This is what the fallout of long-term low interest rates looks like. The only way out of it within our lifetimes would be mass defaults (which would cause a depression) or enough inflation to devalue the outstanding debts.
Considering that we're also now facing deflationary forces from these quarantines, maybe it's time to start printing some money. Certainly countering the deflation by encouraging even more borrowing would just be trying to dig our way out of a hole.
People are completely underestimating how much leverage and pumping there was on those companies, and how thats effecting us now. Companies dropping 75% because they might lose 3 months of revenue is not an expected outcome.
It really doesn't matter. If 20% of the economy is zeroed out because it's not safe under current conditions, the stock market will crash. Nothing you could have done beforehand, and no hobby-horse you've ridden for no matter how long, can fix that.
I disagree that nothing one could have done beforehand could fix that. The argument is not that there would not be a decline in share prices at all but the magnitude of it.
You need to have enough saved to survive 6 months w/o income is preached a lot in personal finance and somehow this is not practiced for businesses.It is understandable that cash-strapped startups can't afford to do this but the companies buying back shares to increase their stock price certainly could.
Massive publicly traded companies are not the companies that are collapsing. It's mostly small business that aren't publicly traded let alone doing buybacks.
This is an article about small businesses, which make up the backbone of the economy. It makes 0 financial sense to save up 6 months of savings for any company, big or small. This is literally a once-a-century event.
Nope. It does matter. The credit markets which deal with corporate debt could fail as a result. This will drag down the rest of the economy. The main issue is most people dont understand the contagion and risks taken on by the practices I laid out in my main post.
The fed discount window is wide open for business. But seriously, aggressive monetary policy should keep the credit markets working even if mostly by adding to fed's balance sheet.
I really think we should stop conflating bad economic decisions with the current pandemic. Yes, maybe stock buybacks are bad.
But even if they were banned, these companies wouldn't just have piles of cash reserves sitting around. To remain competitive, they would've had it invested in resources like additional personnel that would've gotten the axe either way when the belt has to be tightened.
There needs to be better financial planning and regulations - a lot of them.
But the best thing that could've helped here is better planning for national emergencies like a pandemic. Bill Gates and others have been clamoring for a long time about these dangers and we should've taken them more seriously.
Some companies are famous for their piles of cash reserves. Apple, for instance. Other companies are definitely focused on the pump at the expense of their brand, product, and long term prospects. No C level executive sheds a tear when their company folds and they are handed their golden parachute to invest at market lows.
They would unquestionably have more cash on hand though. That matters. There is also a lot of research showing that management does buy backs at exactly the wrong time. How wasteful is it in retrospect that companies did buy backs over the last two years at the peak of the market. Now they might have to sell stock to raise money at the bottom (assuming we find it soon). Mean while warren buffet was sitting on cash and building his reserves. Watch him swoop in now and just pick up businesses for pennies on the dollar.
Low interest rates are the biggest culprit in this. Low interest rates have given these CEOs to borrow money to pump their stocks. Had interest rates been higher, say 6 percent, (a) these CEOs wouldn't have borrowed money to pump their stock, and (b) many investors would not have invested 60 to 90 percent of their portfolio in stocks. Another consequence of these low interest rates is (c) the inflation of real estate in many markets. That means, the middle class (say, employees of FAANG types) have loved this gravy train. Politicians, as a class, have benefited from this: inflated equities; inflated real estate. Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, Powell and the political class (both Democrats and Republicans) have all contributed to this.
People who invested in index funds fared better than hedge funds. And there was no real price discovery thanks to Fed put; even many small hedge funds closed their shops when they couldn't beat ETFs based on indices like SPY, VOO, QQQ, etc.
Now both bonds and stocks are crashing, as the commercial paper becomes junk.
Absolutely this. Someday we need to have interest rates somewhat sticky at ~5% (or whatever the sensible figure is), and lean more on fiscal policy to control the economy. Whether there is a viable path to that point is unclear. Perhaps the money printing required to cushion the economy will spike inflation, and once we get back on our feet we hike rates to control it?
While I mostly agree with #1 and #2 - not sure what this has to do with the crises we're in.
The core of the current financial crisis is that demand has evaporated over the course of a week or two and / or businesses can't operate; both due to COVID-19. As a result many small business won't survive. By extension many people are impacted, won't make rent, won't make lease payments, won't make credit card payments.
The stock market dropping is reflecting the above reality unwinding. And yes prices were inflated, and still are (QE is trying to hold them, we'll see how long that lasts...).
Unlike the 2008 crises that had synthetic derivatives, and shitty rating agencies to blame - this isn't the case here.
Though don't get me wrong I still think there are many sketchy things that go on, and many people who need to answer for them. Let's starts with the politicians that sold their shares given insider information, followed by others who curry favor with wall st.
Businesses that rely on walk-in customers will have to go for what looks like more than a month with little to no income. Same thing with travel related industries, surely over-leveraged portfolios exacerbated the problem but there are many other factors at play.
The stock market is collapsing because the population is increasingly unable to go anywhere or do anything. As a result whole sectors of the economy are almost completely unable to function. They're predicting 25% GDP contraction and 25% unemployment which about the same as the peak of the Great Depression in 1933. And we don't know when that's going to end and it will probably take most of a year at least.
Everything is related. Imagine if the market only dropped a bit, large companies could support their employees, the credit markets wouldnt require massive trillion dollar spending. Supporting small businesses would be a walk in the park.
It's not really possible for the market to drop only a little bit in response to half the economy shutting down. Stock prices are an expectation of future cash flows, so they have to drop on news that a huge chunk of those future cash flows are cancelled.
If that 3 months risks a bankruptcy, that might be right. Long-run valuation for shareholders doesn’t matter if the bond-holders end up with the company.
I suspect this is a 12-24 month economic event, maybe longer before it fully rolls through.
You're right about the financials but wrong about the direct economic impact. It's a 3 month hit that people are accepting, with the underlying fear that it will be a year-long hit, and the sickening feeling that recovery from this will take at least 5 years.
I agree, CEOs that bought back stock should not have the option of a bailout. That was a self-enrichment strategy built upon cheap debt, and now it is time to pay the bill.
Generally speaking, Boeing and others should not be bailed out. Capital should flow to the small businesses to keep their doors open, their people employed.
I'd also argue strongly against bailing out companies that shifted their work overseas. There needs to be a price to their actions. This is a just price IMO.
No. It's because of everything in the posted presentation - 50% of companies are SMBs (in the States), and they understandably don't keep enough reserves to weather 3 months of losses.
The stock market is reflecting that the damage this will do on the economy is real, and currently unknown but expected to be pretty bad.
One could argue that the airline CEOs acted rationally and strategically—they know the airline industry’s importance to the US economy gives them great odds of a bailout if a black swan event were to occur, so there was more value to shareholders generated by stock buybacks than reserving cash for a worst-case event.
So in this case, the cash ends up with the stock owner, isn't it? What are the differences between cash in the hand of company vs cash in the hand of stock owners?
I'm not even that old and this is the 3rd black swan event in the last 2 decades: terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, financial meltdown in 2008-2009, and this 2020 global pandemic.
There were also 3 other localized outbreaks (SARS in 2003, Swine Flu in 2009, MERS in 2012) so that to me sounds like we were 3 viral mutations away from this being the 4th global pandemic in 20 years.
If we're structuring business and our economies such that they fall over or require ~1 trillion dollars for bailouts, every 4-7 years on average, then something is vastly, massively, completely, extremely wrong with our approach.
I don't care how many economics nobel prizes are racked up by theorists; or about efficient market theory and blah blah blah. These systems are failing in the real world and that's the only existence proof needed.
Running a just-in-time razor-thin-margins all-profits-reinvested-no-savings business is great in theory but apparently the wind blowing from the wrong direction destroys it all. It has the feeling of the economics/finance version of a physicist assuming a spherical car in a perfect vacuum with a point source of gravity when designing a system that has to survive actual usage.
1969, 1973, 1981, 1990, 2000, 2007 - a recession of US economy at least every 10 years, like a clockwork.
So, if you're a CEO of an airline and you're giving away 90% of your cash to shareholders instead of saving it to last few months when business declines, then it's an obvious failure of planning.
Or, more accurately, it's yet another case of "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It."
CEO salaries and bonuses are tied to performance of the stock (because they are set by board of directors, who are there to represent shareholders). So they spend the money to buy back the shares which increases the share price and their bonuses.
Failing to predict the business cycle should require retaking business school...
The big problem is that companies are focused on the quarter rather than the decade. Imagine the innovation we would have in technology if companies were willing to take a loss for years on worthy inventions, rather than only putting forward readily profitable projects.
The nature of a black swan event, what and when, is unpredictable. That one will happen is not. Any prudent leader must prepare to weather a financial downturn, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. The list goes on and preparation for one is likely the same as for all.
The point is, unprepared leaders will see their firms go out of business, but based on the number of firms that seem to never be prepared, it seems the standard incentive isn’t enough. Thus it warrants discussion on how to align leadership incentives to prepare in advance. If we had businesses that could weather 3 months of crisis, whatever the crisis without triggering a depression the entire economy would be better off. Yet here we are.
I think we're learning that while the manifestation & exact timing is unpredictable, looking at the big picture one black swan or another seems to show up with surprising regularity. 1973, 1987, 2001, 2008, 2020...
Companies should be most definitely punished for not being robust to black swans. You can't predict a particular black swan, but you can definitely predict that black swans happen regularly. There is a reason why options have the "volatility smile" -- the risk tails are fat!
I'm not sure how you got to this post after reading the OP.
Company leadership should focus on returning capital when appropriate. They should not be repurchasing shares at obviously inflated prices as a last-ditch effort to further raise share prices so they can cash out their bonuses. They should be using that money to improve the business.
Basically, leadership needs to think about long-term health, instead of making poor business decisions to improve executive bonuses.
They were repurchasing shares for years and years. If shareholders were unhappy about that, they had every opportunity to replace the board. Or if they are a minority, they can sell. If you’re not a shareholder, you’re free to mind your own business.
All debt is an alternative to raising capital by selling shares and diluting ownership. It doesn’t matter what order you do it in, and sometimes you get a good deal on a loan.
If they were taking money out of the company by buying back stocks and sucking it dry, who are the people loaning them money to do this? Your story implies they're throwing billions into these companies without expecting to get their money back.
My story does not imply that at all. Prevailing interest rates are low so investors seeking returns are willing to take increased risks, especially if the bond is still prime (so as to match their mandate). Thus the rise of BBB. At the same time, bond ratings underestimate fragility of corporate debt (what's new, history is littered with "bond ratings underestimated fragility of X"). Combined with a bunch of moral hazard on the part of people packaging everything, you have the current situation. Basically, I fundamentally blame ultra low interest rates for creating incentives, but a more proximate cause is debt financing of buybacks.
I want to see companies run well, too. Nonetheless, companies should be able to take on debt and return money to shareholders at the same time. A simple example might be moving to a new headquarters. They decide to buy a property and build an office building. They finance this with a loan or bonds, because, well, they need cash to run their company, and that's the right financial vehicle for them. At the same time, they're doing dividends or share buybacks, because their owners want them to. Another example is just, you know, buying stuff or services and getting invoiced with a later due date. That's taking on debt.
1) Pretty sure you're misinformed on this point. The hedge fund sector that has gotten attention and partial blame for this meltdown is the risk-parity segment of hedge funds. These funds target a specific range of volatility, so when the market becomes wildly volatile they are forced to reduce their overall holdings. The entire risk-parity segment of the market is at most $400bn and they are levered 2-3x on average. In the grand scheme of things, this is pennies when compared to broader money flow.
2) Stock buybacks are simply a more tax-efficient way of distributing profits to shareholders. Redistribution of profit to shareholders is a fundamental trait of capitalism, so you can't really blame the CEO for doing this. You seem to be blaming CEO's for not preparing for a black swan event. If CEO's are forced to prepare for every possible black swan event, their companies would go nowhere.
As for your last point, there appears to be a black swan event quite regularly. It seems logical to prepare for this.
Secondly, stock buy backs are often performed at horrible times simply because CEOs want to boost their own salary. This has repeatedly bitten them in the ass. This is what happens when short term gains are prioritized over long term strategy.
I can accept viewpoint only if we ALSO allow all unprepared companies to fail. This will then inform the next generation of CEOs to prepare more. If we socialize losses while privatizing gains we create wrong incentives.
I think the general sentiment is that we cannot just organically let most companies fail, so we are forced to bail out. But if we are breaking capitalism by bailing companies out, we should at least try to incetivize them to learn from mistakes rather than learn that they can do whatever when the times are good and get bailed out when the times are bad.
1) Hedge funds didn’t crash the market. There’s just no evidence for that. The market crashed because there’s enormous uncertainty and people would rather be liquid while they wait to see what happens vs losing a huge percentage of their wealth.
2) Businesses exist to make a profit for their shareholders. Yes, they should have some retained earnings as a rainy day fund, but some of these companies are losing 75-100% of their revenue (airlines, cruises) and it doesn’t make sense to try and self-insure for the most extreme tail risk ever. So they return profit to shareholders. And for various reasons, buybacks are often preferred to dividends.
Would you be this up in arms if they had never done a buyback but had been paying a regular dividend to return those profits?
Business does not have to be structured as a Corporation with limited liability. That is a privilege allowed by the sovereign power of the people through an elected government. If companies don’t behave responsibly they should lose that privilege and the owners could be held liable for debt and these kinds of mistakes personally. The fetishized obligation to shareholders and ONLY shareholders is not some holy pronouncement from on high. It was made up by a professor at University of Chicago and ran contrary to the history of business and limited liability company structures. If we, as a society, determine that such a practice is harmful based on the evidence we can and should end it.
> If companies don’t behave responsibly they should lose that privilege and the owners could be held liable for debt and these kinds of mistakes personally.
What mistakes? Is it a mistake to not keep a rainy day fund that will allow a company to weather a once-in-a-hundred-years shutdown of the entire economy? If this turns out to last a year, will you think it's a mistake that companies didn't keep a year's worth of reserves?
Especially since we're talking about SMBs here. Your local electrician, who has a staff of 3, should keep enough money saved up to pay all staff for the next year just in case?
You're saying a bunch of buzzwordy slogans kind of like "limited liability is bad" or "obligation to shareholders was invented by Friedman", but not dealing with the actual facts on the ground or the current catastrophe.
My analysis was in response to and in the context of large companies conducting stock buy backs which is in no way related to the position SMBs find themselves. So yes, those buy backs were mistakes.
In the last 20 years we have had at least 3 “once in 100 years events”, so yes, maybe corporations should be required to be more prepared for down turns as a condition of being granted the right to operate with limited liability.
These are not buzz words, I practiced law in New York and worked on the bankruptcy of American Airlines, Lehman, GM and others. I saw the conditions on the ground, the incentives management responded to; I saw $200M bonuses for traders that lost $1B, I saw how decoupled management was from the risks they engineered. There is a prevalent attitude that as long as the short term reward hits before they quit then they should do it.
Since 2008, airlines have experienced one of the most profitable periods in their history with drastically lower competition and low oil prices. What did they do with that? They wasted significant amounts of cash on buy backs. American Airlines reduces outstanding stock by 37%, thats massive. Why? Because executives are taught in business school that there is an obligation to maximize shareholder value. No such obligation exists in law and I am arguing that is really bad social policy.
Employees are going to be decimated as this unfolds, are they more responsible or in a better position to plan for these once in 100 year events?
> My analysis was in response to and in the context of large companies conducting stock buy backs which is in no way related to the position SMBs find themselves. So yes, those buy backs were mistakes.
Fair enough - I was mostly talking in the context of the article (SMBs).
And to be frank, it sounds like you're much more knowledgeable about this issue than I am, certainly in terms of actual practice.
That said, I still disagree with you and not sure why you arrived at your conclusion.
Let's put aside for a second the question of whether shareholder primacy is good social policy or not in the general case - and I agree with you here - it's not mandated by law, and even if it were, we could change that if we decide it's bad policy.
Your specific contention here is that companies are using buybacks to prop up their share price, and thus are reducing their reserves. And that they should keep more reserves around.
So firstly - tax structure aside, I've never understood why anyone treats buybacks differently than dividend payments. It's just a way of giving money back to shareholders. Do you agree with that or not?
Secondly, how much reserves should a company actually keep? If this situation/recession drags on for a year, will you be saying that it's bad that companies didn't keep a year's worth of reserves? Two years?
I think that's both an unrealistic demand, and a supremely inefficient one. No company could've, nor should've, had to predict this kind of disaster happening, and been prepared for it. I'm generally a libertarian, but this is exactly the reason we have governments - this kind of crisis should be prevent by the government - both in terms of preventing a pandemic in the first place, and in terms of fixing the economy once we're in this situation.
In other words, I don't see any good way to change the market to incentivize companies to keep tons of cash lying around as a rainy day fund - and I don't think it would make sense for so many companies to hoard so much money. Much better to have them return the money to shareholders, to go invest in new companies.
> It was made up by a professor at University of Chicago and ran contrary to the history of business and limited liability company structures
Who is this guy? Also where can I learn more about this and related topics. I’ve taken an interest to learning about our economic system in my free time and would love it if someone could point me to some good resources/podcasts/whatever.
The amazing thing is when you compare this with the history of corporate structures. For much of history after the joint stock ventures were created in the 1600s they were extraordinary one time grants from the king and only for very very risky ventures. Basically they were used to induce businesses that wouldn’t exist but were vital for society. In exchange there was an express charter that laid out the obligations of the firm. There were expectations on how the company would act in society. There were obligations to employees, bond holders, the community etc.
I don't know how you do your financial planning, but when I invest my money, I expect to see a return. I expect most folks do. Everything else falls out of that.
> when I invest my money, I expect to see a return
If that return is at the cost of the stability and welfare of society at large then sorry, but no. No-one "deserves" a return and nothing happens in a vacuum. Larger society comes first, full stop. Seems this is a lesson we humans forget, and need to collectively and painfully relearn, every few decades.
Dividends that leave the business effectively insolvent in an emergency or financial downturn are irresponsible and should be disallowed. It should be remembered that direct stock by backs were illegal until recently as they were seen as a violation of insider trading and presented conflicts of interest. Further stock based compensation for executives is also relatively new. So we now have a situation that the incentives are clearly aligned for executives to pump stock prices to boost their own compensation through a previously illegal means of stock buy backs. Just look at the ratio of dividends to stock by backs in the last few years. You will see the result of those incentives.
By and large most publicly traded companies are not insolvent right now and don't look to be in the near future. For the most part, all that's happened is their stock price is down, some are double-checking if they have sufficient liquidity to weather the pandemic and how long they have, some have drawn on their revolvers, started hiring advisors to rethink capital structure, and some very few are thinking about restructuring.
Wasn't buybacks banned for a longtime in the century? Perhaps you consider this to be socialism and that's why it was unbanned, but given the perverse incentives politicians seemed to have had for the past few decades, I don't see an unbiased argument why it was in the interest of the public to unban stock buyback.
Clearly the past year has proven why it should have stayed banned.
Should dividends be banned? Would you be equally upset if these companies paid out their profits in dividends?
Or maybe you’re suggesting we should have liquidity requirements for all businesses like we do for banks? That’s actually not the worst idea in a world where we’re going to be bailing companies out. If you want a bailout, you have to have a rainy day fund to make it less likely you’ll need one.
Dividends are fundamentally different than stock buy backs. They are the distribution of profit to owners of a business. No nonpublic information involved. No misaligned incentives.
Yes, liquidity requirements and add personal liability for executives if their firm goes through bankruptcy, or restructuring. Goldman Sachs was a partnership until the 90s with each banker personally liable for the firms debts. They took risk much more seriously then.
No they are not. They reduce the amount of equity and raise the stock price but unless the share holder sells there is no real gain. That’s not to say buy backs don’t convey possible value but it’s not accurate to say they are the distribution of profit any more than if the company bought stock of another company (like yahoo buying alibaba stock) or a piece of equipment. In all cases the company has value reflected on its balance sheet. There is no true net gain.
You have made dozens of posts repeating this argument. It’s just mathematically inaccurate. Modulo taxes, in liquid markets, existing shareholders are compensated identically with share buybacks and with reinvested dividends.
If you wouldn’t have chosen to reinvest your dividends, you can sell a fraction of your shares to achieve the same effect.
You may think there are social or cultural reasons why one return of capital is preferable to another (I can’t tell, you haven’t made any of those arguments as far as I can see), but mathematically, a return of capital is cash in existing shareholder hands, and there’s no difference between the two approaches.
Share buybacks have an impact on taxes paid, but we have a system where people are encouraged to minimize taxes, so you’d need to make an argument about tax rates for that to make sense.
It’s true that changing the number of shares for the same size pot of money has an impact on share based compensation schemes, but that’s an argument about not liking share based compensation.
I am not arguing they are mathematically identical. I am highlighting some of the meaningful differences. Stock buy backs make stock prices go up. Dividends do not. Stock buybacks have timing risk dividends do not.
If an executive is paid in stock, and has compensation tied to stock price then there is an incentive to conduct stock buy backs and not issue dividends. Further, declaring a dividend sets future expectations of performance that management is hesitant to be tied to as missing dividend payments lowers stock prices.
My point is that these incentives causes management to spend more company resources on buy backs than they would on dividends because there is a personal benefit. This harms stockholders because they lose the option to use the dividend. Not every investor wants to reinvest, some want to use the dividend. So no, they are not equivalent as you say. There are meaningful practical considerations that make dividends better for shareholders and buy backs better for managers.
This response is not productive in moving discourse forward. If you have something constructive to add then do so without ignoring the bulk of my arguments while only focusing on one element and interpreting it in the weakest possible way. To that point of course dividends affect stock price to some extent. So does almost everything, paying off debt would, buying new equipment. But for the sake of simplicity and conciseness I made a generalization. I look forward to a reasoned debate. These are important issues for leaders of companies and society at large.
> If an executive is paid in stock, and has compensation tied to stock price then there is an incentive to conduct stock buy backs and not issue dividends.
You're touching on agency costs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_cost), which is a broader issue than stock buybacks. Management can always game their actions to favor their self-interest (compensation) over shareholder interests. They can also choose to invest in projects that will make the company look good in the short-term at the expense of long-term profits to shareholders, because management can always just stick around for a few year before shit hits the fan. See, e.g. what Jack Welch did to GE https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/ge-ceo-feud-welch-vs-imm...
My point is the fact that share buybacks are yet another avenue for management to mismanage a company for their own benefit doesn't make them bad per se, or worse than stock dividends. Investors should evaluate share buybacks on a case-by-case basis to assess whether they believe
The solution is improved corporate governance predicated on having an top-tier Board of Director structure with a significant share of independent directors vs. an entrenched BoD. That's why ESG is an increasingly relevant theme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental%2C_social_and_co...
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.
Much has changed since Friedman was in vogue. The application of such economic theories has left a solid portion of Americans in the dust. Fully free markets are a great idea when houses cost 2x median annual income, a single family income can support a spouse and ~2 children, etc.
That is the question -- it might legitimately be harder to adjust marginal tax rates than to add an income limit, even if the outcomes would be identical either way.
Helicopter money won't help businesses in the service industry where people literally can't spend their newfound helicopter dollars. With the incompetence of the SBA I'm not sure what a total solution would look like, but helicopter money can only be part of a larger plan if we want to save America's small businesses.
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
> First, we pause all fixed financial obligations, which are what’s crushing our economy right now. Right now, we’re in a crunch: people can’t work, and so they can’t make payments on mortgages and rents.
Totally agree, it is insane that some families are under the threat of eviction because they live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford to pay rent now. Same for small businesses who cannot afford to pay rent.
I'm sure some landlords will do the right thing, but we can't trust all landlords to do the right thing. Something has to be done at the federal level, and it's now or never.
It isn't about landlords doing the "right thing". Landlords have debt to pay, generally aren't sitting on mountains of free cash, and foreclosure of the property you are renting is functionally similar to eviction.
This is why the article discusses "pausing" these types of payments for everyone from the average person to fortune 500s. If the Landlords are in a similar position (i.e. their "rent" and other debt payments are paused as well), then they have the power to pause rent payments for their residents.
Keyword: all. That includes landlords' financial obligation to their landlords. And their landlords. And their landlords. And their landlords. Ad infinitum.
It is pausing a lot of revenue, but it's also pausing the need for that revenue.
It's also not pausing all revenue. If I order something from Amazon, everyone gets revenue. And if Google decides not to furlough employees but get a 3-month lead in R&D, it's not pausing employee revenue.
> We should pause the payment terms on all contracts by 90 days (and more later if needed). This plan, in effect, extends the Fed’s zero percent interest bailout to everyone and not just the banks.
This sounds like a very interesting solution. Although from a technical point of view, it seems impossible to implement.
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.
Previous commenter has nailed it directly: opportunists see a mountain of money heading out from government to the public and they want to insert themselves in the middle and grab a big chunk of it.
I mean, these businesses file tax returns and the government has an address and even a bank account on file for them. Government could... write them a check. I've just provided all the value Womply provides in getting money to small businesses, pay me.
No, that's not the goal. We aren't trying to monetize this. We are trying to be good corporate citizens and to help our customers, the country, and our market. We have unique data, expertise, and resources so we feel obligated to help out.
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.
Part of the benefit of living in America is the fact America will put it's citizens first, no? I fail to see how putting the rest of the world before our own countrymen could at all work. To many, that would be viewed as betraying countrymen if we didn't handle it here first. I'd even posit that an America that's contained and controlled COVID-19 is better for the world than one that's not.
I'm _not_ saying we shouldn't help the rest of the world. That's the very next thing. I'm saying, let's make sure we're not drowning before trying to help others not drown.
This is a really weird line of reasoning because I don't think it even holds in the case of a broader unity.
I'll drop into this more, because we might not be connecting on what layers we're talking about. I'm talking about immediate medical survival. If by "resources" you're talking about financial/economic support, then I could very much agree with an "everyone right away" approach.
I see the immediate health layer as subject to physical limitation, the economic layer subject to informational limitation. If by resources you mean money, then yes, I very much agree.
I guess, subtly, my point was less about making suggestions about how to proceed, and more about just imagining how the small businesses (mentioned in the article) will do if/when the rest of the world is in disarray.
Sure, I have no gripe with the author(s) of the article, but reading it makes me feel like they just don't get the big picture.
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.
Commercial landlords are likely thinking about it. the solution is to figure out who else rents from the same landlord/other small businesses in proximity, team up in solidarity and demand a rent freeze. The alternative is owning capital in either a ghost town or Bartertown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max_Beyond_Thunderdome).
For the skeptical, think back to the Occupy movement of around 2011, which mostly took over public space. With so much private space sitting empty, the outcome would be very very different this time.
“Freeze rent” as in not increasing the monthly payment?
Waive late fees as in, expect to be paid for all months back rent in the first place?
Gosh, that’s cute. Small businesses forced to shut down aren’t going to be gritting their teeth and paying back rent when the government decides they’re allowed to re-open.
I would guess most businesses forced to close at least 6 weeks will be write-offs. Walk away from the debt and start again if you can / dare. Unless someone else (govt) is picking up the tab.
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.
I worked with commercial loans and SBA stuff is difficult to get simply because it's hedged on risk. If you need an SBA loan to expand being a landlord and you have a year experience, yeah you might get it. If you just bought a new business and you have no experience with it, you may get denied.
They look for essentially a business plan that has been thoroughly thought out. It sucked for us because we had to report EVERY DAY someone missed their payment until it was paid. The SBA gives a decent rate for what it risks, but they are an unmovable force. You cannot explain to the the situation or what. Follow the terms to a t or get yanked.
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!
I am not sure you're going to successfully nationalize all commercial property, but temporarily freezing interest on debt & suspending payments is interesting to ponder. For example, most mortgages are held by the Fed, so they have the ability to do that. Similarly for t-bills. I'm sure a real economist can tell me why it wouldn't work, of course. But in general, rent must be collected because debt must be paid, so if debt were frozen then rents actually could be deferred.
I wonder if the hit from freezing debt is less than the gain from having the vast majority of the working economy get a de facto 2x raise. Lots of people are rent burdened which only hurts an economy driven by consumer spending.
I think that model assumes everyone goes right back to 'normal' as soon as lockdown is lifted. China and South Korea are both using regulations and surveillance to try to keep r0 below 1 while out of lockdown.
Most countries can't survive months let alone years on lockdown. Most people can't work remotely, so in extended lockdown people lose their jobs and small businesses fold.
It's worth to take a look at Karl Marx again. I'm not referring to any existed entities, but the model of pure capitalism is so problematic as he pointed out.
The usual reason against shutdown is because people have mouths to feed, mortgages to pay. But seriously, most of the products and services people are selling not really important or even any useful - that's why people have to advertise them so hard - it's not as straightforward as advertising cars, houses, and Coke. But those jobs are very important to those individual employees because it's their only source of income if their business were shut down, they wouldn't have roofs over their heads.
So the capital is the way to let people claim their part of the economy. It's so vulnerable that it's not even doomsday yet and people start to lose their source of income, and even without shutting down things. If we're going to shut down non-mandatory industries, people from those industries would get broke immediately - it's so deeply coupled so effective measures could not be taken.
In a perfect world, less than 10% of people working, or everyone working one day per week could feed everyone effectively. As automation goes on, the percent could keep shrinking. As a comparison, at the end of the day of a capitalist world, most of the "meaningful" jobs would done by very few persons because of the automation, and the rest of the world can only earn money at their mercy by doing "barely meaningful" jobs. Other than that, those who can't even get "barely meaningful" jobs have to working hard on futuristic versions of TikTok trying to become superstars - it's their only way of claiming their part of the economy.
Furthermore, the well-connected people get tested first as Trump suggested (or naturally happens in the US) is also a capitalist way of doing things. If we take Asian countries as an example, the testing kit is soon promoted as strategic resource mostly instructed by the government, which should eventually come from health care institutions, they have ideas to allocate those test kits in order to make maximum use of it, instead of blindly testing people back and forth.
If Karl Marx is not for you, it's always worth taking a look at Singapore where they did most things correctly most of the time. It's perfectly balanced in economics, politics and many, many other aspects (Though usually bashed by Western media as an authoritarian country). People can afford to buy houses, education is excellent and at a reasonable price, eating outside is cheap and easy, health care is affordable, and people are relatively free. Everything is carefully planned and designed by the government.
As a comparison, at a first glance, Hong Kong seems to be similar to Singapore to those people who haven't been there, but Hong Kong is a more western-style democratic society compared to its neighbors (at before 97 if you protest). But the rent is out of control, things are messier, there's no specific plan for things.
Again, I'm not evangelizing communism but those problems Karl pointed out have been overlooked largely nowadays.
Edit. Thanks to the wonders of HC I can’t reply to you so I have edited this post. The declaration of war is symbolic in one way, but it captures what needs to be done. The entire economy needs to be swung around to getting this pandemic under control as quickly as possible.
Once war is declared we can start conscripting people to do the things that need to be done like enforce curfews, do door to door testing, build hospitals, keep people fed, etc, etc.
We are going to end up at this point anyway, so we might as well do it now and save lives and the economy.
So the sarcastic response to that is: What does that even mean?
What I tried and failed to get at in my other comment is that massive resources are already being marshaled to produce more tests and find treatments and find a vaccine and so on. Federal leadership appears to be…poor, but that isn't stopping people from stepping forward.
So when you step past the slogan, what does Congress write in their declaration?
Traditionally it implies sacrifice, on both the individual and collective levels, to achieve a larger goal or to fight an existential threat. But American civilians haven't really been called upon to sacrifice anything in wartime since WWII.
It won't be long before there's no one left alive who remembers mandatory rationing, price and wage controls, and production mandates.
The slides by themselves do not speak a compelling narrative to me, so I think I’m missing something fundamental or not understanding.
Small businesses (all, businesses) will suffer quite badly, but if your company cannot continue operating because its shut/slowed down for 2 weeks then it’s likely that your business was running on a knifes edge and /any/ shock would have killed it.
Arguing that many people have done this is not just cause to bail them out (speaking from a purely logical non-empathetic position)
EDIT: ok. Our entire economy is built with no buffers in place and people here seem to have no issue with that. From a personal finance perspective I ensure that I live beneath my means and have capacity for a couple of months lost revenue. (Shit happens) and I’m not “well paid”.
" then it’s likely that your business was running on a knifes edge and /any/ shock would have killed it."
Welcome to... life? This is how America or even the world works. Most people live on knife's edge. One missed paycheck? Homelessness just got its greasy hands on you. Two missed paychecks? Go pack what you have left... Most business are not any different, especially those run by regular people.
In my family we have a quite successful business in the sense that the person running it, has quite a fancy lifestyle and can afford it. But you have to realize that most business have terrible margins. Our family business has maybe a margin of 10%. That means, for every 10.000$ you take home before taxes every month, your business has running expenses of about 100.000$ per month. Now restaurants are all closed... Nobody will buy your stuff anymore, but your employess still need to get paid. So now you have those 100.000$ monthly costs and not a single dime coming in... There is no reasonable expectation to save this much buffer.
In short, even business that run extremely well, will die within A MONTH, if all expenses continue and no income is generated. This is why I think what they are doing for this petty virus is quite insane. They are destroying the middle class for some "theoretical" projection that might not even play out the way they think. What is guaranteed though is that businesses will die in troves and the economy and middle class with it.
>They are destroying the middle class for some "theoretical" projection that might not even play out the way they think. What is guaranteed though is that businesses will die in troves and the economy and middle class with it.
Look at the age of the people making the decisions. If you were 60+, unhealthy, and had the option of minimising your own risk of catching the disease by stopping the economy, you sure you wouldn't take it, regardless of the long term damage it would do to the country?
The greatest outcome differentiator we have control over right now is whether or not a person can get adequate care or not. It seems like that can make a difference in the realm of points; big boy points.
Our top political leadership would not be left wanting for medical care if they needed it. Pelosi and McConnell are both in for keeping congress together in DC vs running and hiding at home. "Going down with the ship" so to speak.
Top marks for your cynicism. Low marks for the focus of it.
> but if your company cannot continue operating because its shut/slowed down for 2 weeks then it’s likely that your business was running on a knifes edge and /any/ shock would have killed it.
Nearly all businesses in reasonably competitive markets have thin margins. You buy a widget and sell it for 30% more, but then most of that 30% goes to rent and utilities and salaries etc. Your actual net profit margin is more like 2%.
The result is that most businesses do fail if they're hit with any kind of major shock. Which happens all the time. It's supposed to. Mistakes have consequences. A business failing here and there is reasonable and expected.
But it's a completely different kind of problem when it happens to everybody all at once.
This is like saying, if you are in credit card debt and not prepared for a disaster, you are on your own. While this is true, this logic simply doesn't work in aggregate because the status quo is millions of people are in debt. Similarly, most small businesses operate with very little operating cash flow, and that is simply how our economy operates.
i dont think that s fair. in an efficient market, profit margins are slim for the benefit of the consumer, which means businesses are not super profitable and need to invest continuously.
I can't access the article at the moment. I tried. I'm on my phone. It didn't open for me.
I'm not sure I care.
The world is suddenly embracing a lot of practices I've pursued for years because of my medical condition. I've spent a lot of years trying to develop alternate mental models and an alternate lifestyle to avoid germs so I can stay off all the drugs doctors think I should take.
I run r/GigWorks and r/ClothingStartups. Neither has much traction.
I have long wanted to actively foster the development of small independent business. The founding fathers of the US believed small business and entrepreneurship was critical to a healthy democracy. You can't speak your mind or vote your heart if you have to live in terror of being fired for it and unable to get a new job.
I can run my big fat mouth as much as I do in part because I work for an online writing service. If everyone absolutely hated me on every forum and in the small town where I live, I can keep earning an income anonymously online through the writing service.
I am only one person. I've long been a loser and social outcast. As such, I've been failing to get traction.
But you are all invited to check out GigWorks and ClothingStartups and try to be part of the solution.
The old guard never goes quietly. They go kicking and screaming. Things usually don't really change until a bunch of people die.
We've been here before. We survived as a species.
I think the most important question right now is "What kind of future would you like to see rise from the ashes?"
Answer that question and then actually do it. Don't just leave it as a mental exercise.
For me, that means continuing to try to find ways to foster small and micro business success via the Internet to give stability to a top heavy economy that is sucking the air out of the room politically for reasons foreseen by our founding fathers.
This comment breaks the site guidelines and you've done that elsewhere recently too. Would you please review
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here?
Apologies. I've been trying to combat tension and anxiety in my household regarding COVID-19 and I guess I lost my patience reacted poorly to negativity online. Will reign it in and think more before posting, if at all.
I’m honestly looking forward to a new economy served by large corporations. Large companies are more consistent in their user experience across multiple locations, and are better buyers of tech. They are always looking for new ways to automate their operations and frequently turn to tech companies to solve their problems at scale.
So in a way, it’s good for the valley if more of the economy becomes more corporate.
A lot of people won’t like this. I personally really enjoy some of the local restaurants in my area. The uniqueness of their food and aesthetic is something you can’t get anywhere else. Even close approximations aren’t the same.
So, with loss of small business, we lose access to certain unique perspectives of how those kinds of businesses should be run. We lose the character that those businesses add to our cities and towns. Furthermore, there is an economic cost to the loss of those businesses for our cities and towns.
If it’s better for tech, it doesn’t mean that it’s better for humanity.
People often romanticize the "mom & pop" places, but there's a reason that most consumer-facing companies are very large, and those reasons were enumerated by the OP.
Also, there's a good deal of selection bias going on. If you had a successful business, why wouldn't you look to expand it to multiple locations? Running a single store makes your business vulnerable and usually requires a lot of time.
I’m not sure I agree with the diversity argument. That argument is based on the biological principle of natural selection. However, an economy isn’t a biological system: its a man-made system that is designed and run by an intelligence, actually many intelligent agents working together.
Biology is not designed or run by any intelligent agent that we know of. When people apply the diversity argument to non-biological systems, it makes me think they are actually and really arguing for intelligent design of biology.
My argument is a nature centric one, indifferent of biology. Biology is nature through carbon based life forms.
My argument still holds, if you over centralize or lack diversity (not in the social science race or sex based sense) then you’ll run into issues. Examples include Russian central governance, as opposed to more independent localized governance and sustainability. Another is non diverse economic production, for example many middle eastern countries.
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.