Friday, March 20, 2020

Needed: the reopening plan. Fast.

A trillion bucks is a lot of money. The costs of shutting down the economy are larger. California's GDP is essentially zero at the moment. US GDP was about $22 trillion per year before the virus hit, almost $2 trillion per month.

Shutting everything down and staying home for a few weeks is a sledgehammer. OK, our leaders have to hit a virus with a sledgehammer when they have nothing else up their sleeve. But it cannot last. Businesses will close, people will lose jobs, the economy will not be there to start up again.

Needed fast: a plan to open up the economy again in a virus-safe way.  Every business should be (and likely is) working hard to figure out how to operate in a virus-safe way. Federal state and local government need to be working 24 hours a day during the next few weeks to promulgate virus-safe practices. Not because they are particularly good at it, but because they are the ones shutting things down, and their permission is needed to reopen, fully or partly. People also will want the confidence to know that businesses they patronize are compliant. You've got two weeks -- figure out what combination of personal distancing, self-isolation, testing, cleaning, etc. will allow each kind of business to reopen, at least partially.

The option to force everyone to stay home and close all "non-essential" business for three or six months is simply not viable, at least for a disease something short of the bubonic plague. The option to wait two or three weeks and then start thinking about what it takes to allow, say, the local dry cleaner to reopen, which will take another month or so, is simply not viable.

Take two weeks. Find out who has it and who doesn't. Test test test. Isolate, put out the embers. And reopen. Slowly, cautiously, partly. But reopen.

I have kept public health and economics separate, but they no longer are. Shutting down the economy is a public health measure. The costs of this measure are astronomical -- at least a trillion dollars per month. As yourself what the government could have done with a trillion dollars to nip this in the bud. Please, next time, be ready. Massive testing, identifying cases, contact tracing, isolating areas with known cases, early and hard might have cost a lot of money and disruption. Even 100 billion dollars now looks like a very small sledgehammer.

49 comments:

  1. There is a very delicate issue relating to cost-benefit here, and I'm wondering who (if anyone) will be first to broach it, and how: namely, what is the statistical value of life *for the marginal COVID fatality*? This group is evidently much older and has a much higher incidence of severe comorbidity than the population at large. Suppose our interventions saved one million such lives: what value should we put on that in a cost-benefit analysis?

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    1. As in all "cost/benefit" analyses, there has to be an Evaluator-judge of the relative costs and benefits indicated. So the human judgment here is made by Politicians, and they weigh social costs in terms of how many votes a choice may persuade favorably. This is not "objective science" but a distorted Pigou model.
      So, Politicians know Old Folk decide elections, and Old Folk vote regularly. Is it any surprise the "cost/benefit" choice seems to be to play to the crowds, show "action and courage." Shut down the world so we can all get off and go home to the land of unicorns.


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    2. There was a Republican Senator who brought this up yesterday (can't find the story right now) and he was labeled a terrible human being. So don't count on someone else being the next to take a fall for making this very valid point.

      I don't see why quarantines are being mandated for all. If the hospitalization/death rate for those under 50 with no other conditions is low, why not let all of us continue to be productive and provide goods and services to the economy while advocating self quarantine for those who we know have high chance of bad outcomes? Sure there will be younger people who get sick and need hospitalization, but if this is about preventing stress on the medical system, there's an easy answer for how to prevent MOST hospitalizations.

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    3. My thoughts exactly. Suppose there are no further deaths but the end game totally destroys the economy. What good have we done? Triage, triage triage. But keep the economy from going moribund. And don’t expect politicians to pull the trigger. We already see some of them making money off of the shutdowns.

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    4. I don't think such utilitarian measures are necessary or adequate. We should err on the side of the sort of nation we want to be, and that is a free one. At a certain point, we need to be free to make decisions about how much risk we will incur. Hard timelines, as opposed to utilitarian calculations, represent a better way to achieve this.

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    5. The utilitarian calculation maximizes the number of lives saved, or, well, the number of life years saved.

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    6. 1 million lives = $8 trillion = 4 months shutdown

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  2. Simulations show that the death toll from the virus could be reduced from 2.2 million to 1.1 million with social distancing. Saving 1.1 million lives has an actuarial worth about 10 trillion dollars, so closing the country up for a few months sounds completely worth it.

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    1. I support social distancing, but voluntary. Tell those who come too close to back off; nod instead of touching, even elbows.
      The marginal 1.1 million have chosen to go there and take loved ones with them. Sad to say, but this Government by Decree will hurt us much more than 1 million deaths among elderly loved ones.
      (and I am in the victim classification)

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    2. It is interesting to reflect the crisis is centered in the fixed-obligation payments most businesses must make: rent, bank loans, et al. There is minimal hope for sufficient forbearance to tide this over.

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    3. And what will we do for an economy when it is over?

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    4. No way there will 1.1 million deaths, no way. My bet is 10,000 or less

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    5. Your numbers grossly exaggerate the death rate of this disease. Show me any study that came to your numbers and I will ask how they accounted for asymptomatic people and those with mild symptoms that see no reason (or are unable) to get tested. There’s no way existing data incorporates the untold numbers not reported.

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    6. Go to scholar.google.com, type in Coronavirus, limit the papers to those published in 2020 and you will quickly find papers with the distribution of cases so far. 5% require ventilation to stay alive and maybe fight off the disease. Without ventilation, death is certain.

      Without fairly draconian measures cases can easily rise by 1000x in one month. Just look at Italy. I looked at the numbers 3 days ago, 1000x in one month, but that was from a low base of 3. I just checked the numbers today (yesterday's WHO situation report). 50% up in the last 3 days, maybe their new policies are having an effect, maybe not yet, But if this latest trend continues Italy will be up 1.5^10 in another month = 60x, or around 3M cases, and another month - everyone.

      To conclude anything different you have to believe covid19 is not highly infectious. Or that 5% of cases don’t require ventilation to survive. (Maybe in another month with lots more cases it might turn out that on average only 3% need ventilation, or it might be 7%, it’s early days). Or be unable to do maths, but this is an economics blog. Surely maths is the strong point or commenters here.

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    7. 5% of reported cases - that’s the point.

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    8. We can buy a lot of ventilators with the money the economy is losing.

      Heck, we can even build multiple manufacturing facilities to build them or convert existing facilities quickly with virtually unlimited funding for such tasks. Certainly, we can build all the ventilators we need for less than one months GDP.

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    9. Rmk1595

      "5% of reported cases - that’s the point."

      Everyone knows it’s not an accurate number, you have to make your case for some other number. S. Korea and Taiwan have done very exhaustive follow up and testing, in part because they experienced SARS and built some infrastructure.

      Just saying.. it’s way lower.. isn’t an argument. What is your realistic case, of the requirements for ventilation, based on the data of case severity from Taiwan and SK?

      Right now the death rate from Italy is 9%. Cases are under-reported. Deaths haven’t all happened yet. And when there are no ventilators available the actual death rate will increase.

      Skepticism is good. But you have to present some alternative hypothesis which is supported by available data.

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  3. In 1957-58 the Asian flu spread through the United States. About 116,000 people died. No one stopped anything, commerce went on as usual. Herd immunity was obtained and the virus disappeared.

    Let us say that we lose $9 trillion of GDP in the next three years due to government ukases regarding COVID-19. Let us say we save 90,000 lives.

    That is about $100 million per life.

    I hope I am overestimating lost GDP, but the recovery from the 2008 Great Financial Crisis suggests that recovery is a long-term proposition.

    Will more than 90,000 lives be saved? Tough call. As soon as the lock down ends will not the virus again infect the population?

    John Cochrane hopes for measures that allow full commerce to resume, which somehow suppress the virus. I do too, but I think this is an impossibility.

    Then we have the spectacle of government, through ukase, preventing people from working. So who then pays the rent, medical insurance, groceries, car payments? And can owners of apartment buildings then meet their mortgages? Restaurant owners might as well commit mass suicide already.

    And after destroying livelihoods, what do we offer these people, but debt bondage? More loans?

    The only solution is to go back to work. Hysteria has prevented that solution. The next solution is to print a lot of money and give it to people. We can hope this does not cause too much inflation, and it may spread around the cost of this insanity somewhat evenly.

    I won't be surprised if we see nearly universal rent strikes along the West Coast which may spread nationally.

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    1. Mr. Cole. Spot on with printing money. Increasing unemployment results in less tax revenue. Borrow at higher rates and monetize then default.

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    2. Benjamin,

      "Let’s say we save 90,000 lives"

      Why pick that random number?

      If everything carries on as normal, most of the population will get it, in a fairly short space of time. At least 5% of cases require ICU care or die. There are about 50k ICU places total in the US.

      So roughly 10M-15M deaths.

      How is the maths looking now?

      I 100% agree with John's article by the way. Economic collapse will be worse than the worst case death rates from Covid19 so everyone outside medicine should have their full attention on how to get everyone back to work while keeping the famous R0 number (average number of people each person infects) well under 1.

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    3. Your math is looking ridiculous. 90,000 is a high estimate. We're at about 250 now and a cure is approved and readily available. Most of the population will not get it even with no precautions. A couple percent of those who got it would end up in icu if a cure was not present and available. We've got almost two weeks to prepare and then everyone should be back to work.

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    4. 90,000 is a low estimate: "The expert consensus is to expect about 200,000 deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19 this year, but the uncertainty around that number is also huge: There’s an 80 percent chance the final number will be between 19,000 and 1.2 million, according to these estimates."

      https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/infectious-disease-experts-dont-know-how-bad-the-coronavirus-is-going-to-get-either/

      It's worth noting that the most pessimistic of these experts on the number of documented infections was the most accurate. And several of the more optimistic predictions for the number of deaths in the country are no longer plausible. So we should expect that the median expert prediction of number of deaths would be much higher given what we've seen over the last ten days.

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  4. A very timely article by Stanford professor Dr John P. A. Ioannidis was published Tuesday in STAT. The article is titled "A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data". The article is eight pages long and includes thirteen endnotes in the form of external links (URLs).

    https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

    For those who are concerned that government is creating negative externalities as it attempts to mitigate the progression of the epidemic, Prof. Ioannidis provides perspective on the possible scope and scale of the impact of those mitigation efforts on the general population. His observations and concerns mirror the remarks that appear in your blog above.

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    1. Yes, I've posted Ioannidis's paper in a number of fora. Ioannidis is best known for his work examining many thousands of medical research papers, which found, from memory, that in about two-thirds, the conclusions were not supported by the data and that the studies could not be replicated. In short, medical science papers (and, from other work, papers in many fields) were often not reliable and not fit for use in developing policy. Ioannidis argues that we don't have a basis for the extreme anti-corona virus policies adopted in haste by many countries, and that they may cause severe damage for no purpose. (I've posted this blog post with it.)

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    2. A strong reply here:.

      https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/18/we-know-enough-now-to-act-decisively-against-covid-19/

      Michael

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    3. Yes, I read Dr. Marc Lipsitch's article immediately after reading Dr. John Ioannidis's article. Drs. Lipsitch and Ioannidis differ only over the question of immediacy of response. On all other matters, as Dr. Lipsitch notes in his article, they are in concordance.

      The economic effects are becoming evident very quickly. The hotel industry is facing a very serious cash flow interruption. Occupancy rates have plummeted and now stand at 5% to 10%, with zero bookings for the seasonally high demand summer months. An article from CBC provides a general sense of the industry's problem.
      https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-s-hotel-industry-hammered-by-covid-19-1.5505693

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  5. What really worries me now is what happens when the next virus shows up somewhere? If it proves to have a case fatality rate higher than the ordinary flu, the market would tank almost 30% almost instantly, in the expectation that we'll see a replay of the current chaos. Can we really try to shut down the global economy each time a new virus appears? Seems a bit insane, no?

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  6. Terrific blog post topic! Now I'm going to lay on the brutal truth about our situation. State government created a $#!@ storm by panicking and closing things down before they knew much of anything about this CCP flu. Now that they have got the population out on the ledge they had better stsrt promulgating ANY $#!& plan that gives the population even a fig leaf reason to get off the ledge. We cannot afford this kind of hysterical lockdown and it has to end ASAP.

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  7. John your words "without a budget blowout" are uninformed. The size of the deficit is irrelevant. You can not provide a legitimate reason why a deficit of, say, $2 trillion would harm the economy - relative to, say, a deficit of $1 trillion. Thanks.

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    1. Since government debts are never repaid, just rolled over into new debt (or passed on to 3rd parties), the real fiscal burden of the new debt to finance the transfers and spending is going to be determined by the interest rate, which needs to be paid continually - forever.

      As has been pointed out, woe betide the Federal tax capacity when the mandatory debt service has to be paid. More financing through borrowing, Ponzi style?

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    2. Higher interest rate would just mean the private sector has more interest income - which is fine if the economy is below capacity.
      If you are worried about the debt, then simply pay it off.
      This entails debiting a Treasury holder's security account and crediting the Treasury holder's bank account. No taxpayers are involved. This occurs nearly every day as securities mature. So just don't rollover. As QE demonstrated, this operation is not inflationary as it just an exchange of an interest bearing dollar (the Treasury security) for a non-interest bearing dollar (the bank deposit). Net- no new dollars.
      This exercise demonstrates the debt is a non-issue. Make sense? Thanks.

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    3. In 1941, to fight a war, the deficit was 35% of GDP. That's the equivalent of $8 trillion today. And guess what?. This "debt" created huge saving for the private sector, forming the foundation of the post-war boom when this money was spent. Remember, since all spending = all income - when the government spends more than it earns, the private sector earns more than it spends - i.e. saves. To go back to the point, and I hope John is listening, the point is not to worry about the "budget" during such times as these (or anytime if the economy is below capacity). It is irresponsible. John - you have some influence. I have none. Beg you to consider. Thank you.

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    4. "This exercise demonstrates the debt is a non-issue. Make sense? Thanks." You're just moving words around. If government debt were a "non-issue" taxes would not be necessary, hyperinflation would not be a risk, etc. Wealth would be created simply by printed money and expanding credit rather than by producing goods and services and exchanging those, via media of exchange, for other goods and services. Magic would prevail. But there is no magic. Wrecking the economy causes wreckage of the economy.

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    5. Thanks for comment. Yes, wealth has nothing to do with money. Our wealth as a nation is a function of the investment and productivity which increases goods and services. What does this have to do with the debt? The debt is just an interest bearing dollar sitting in private sector security accounts. The original point was asking how does higher debt impede economic growth and prosperity? So far I've seen no specific response to the question. Thanks.

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  8. Like Odysseus, we find ourselves caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Let's hope we avoid Charybdis.

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  9. It should have been aggressive test-trace-isolate everywhere, shutdown small areas if local clusters become unmanageable and leave the rest of the country business as usual. Now we are just choosing between bad choices.

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    1. there's no way to know who has it w/o testing EVERYONE now (Iceland did that) and it would've cost far less ... but govt. has stopped listening to science. Population mixing pandemic progression is a well developed science and experts knew about it. These experts are mathematicians and not just traditional health science ones.

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  10. Here are my thoughts. I am not an Economist, but think it could be something to work from, maybe you can improve it? NOTE the plan is 1/2 way down the rest is stuff you probably already know.

    My Open Letter to Congress on Medium
    "How You REALLY Help the American People During the CoronaVirus Crisis."

    https://medium.com/@schachin/an-open-letter-to-congress-how-you-really-help-the-american-people-during-the-coronavirus-crisis-a59d92dc2416?sk=d2ec66fc8cbe63fa89d3a06a4932fda2

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  11. Well, here's my reality check for what it is worth.

    In the end, we all run small businesses. We take in revenue, allocate funds for costs, and tend to spend the rest, unless you're a disciplined saver.

    We need relief now without all the red tape. Individuals, like businesses, have rents due and debt servicing. Eating is also a good thing. The direct cash payments to individuals would help cover these expenses, and they're not going away. It's that or we enact a supreme form of forbearance until the mess has stabilized. Have to freeze draconian enforcement of contractual obligations. Direct cash payments keeps these contracts largely intact. Yes, it's a fiscal bazooka, but if we're talking about preserving business capital, then we also have to talk about helping the human capital and presence that makes business work. Show me a business with no customers and no employees.

    C/B analysis is fine and all but not when the house is on fire. We have an inferno brewing. We don't have time to screw around with red tape and bureaucracy.

    As for the future, why not force businesses to buy this pandemic insurance, hmm? We force drivers to have car insurance in the event of an unforseen accident. Manage the fund responsibly so if there is another pandemic, there's resources for businesses to maintain expenses, including payroll for employees. Layoffs are scary in my mind because it's part of the alternating, insidious current of deflation. Having access to emergency funds is the name of the game. If we require banks to have higher capital requirements, why can't we have an affordable version of pandemic insurance businesses pay into?

    First things, first, however: contain in the virus and inject cash to maintain contractual obligations. There's a flow of money in the economy (not speaking about velocity) and the trick is to get in the way of it so it finds its way to other economic agents. That only really happens if there's faith in the system and the other party. Right now, that's slowing down - rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic isn't helpful, which I see Congress doing. They need to stop screwing around.

    Companies who used debt irresponsibly should be treated differently, as we don't want a moral hazard problem. Sure, give them loans, but freeze dividend payments and suspend stock buyback programs until the debt is paid off. That's a harder sell for criticial infrastructure, like transportation, which allows human capital mobility. We need that to not go under or we completely reorganize the economy for remote work. Not going to happen in the long term. Service jobs can't be done with a smartphone- try emptying the trash with an app.

    So, yeah, I have anxities, but they will pass. Unless there's more stupidity and hand-wringing.

    Best,
    M

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    1. "If we require banks to have higher capital requirements, why can't we have an affordable version of pandemic insurance businesses pay into?"

      Two reasons. The first is that pandemic insurance wouldn't be cheap: as a general rule only disasters uncorrelated to the broader market can be insured at low cost, and pandemics are highly correlated events. That isn't to say your idea is bad overall, just that the "affordable" part is probably unrealistic.

      The second thing to know is that there is a long history of economic panics in recorded history, and most have two salient features: [a] unique trigger not seen in prior crises, which [b] led to a failure of banks or bank-like entities. So while it's always tempting to solve for [a], it's typically far more efficient to solve for [b] instead.

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    2. Hey Anonymous,

      Well, it may not be affordable, depending on who you ask. I don't think we can ask small businesses with small margins to buy the full sticker price - but maybe we can ask to contribute a little, and that will help at least a little bit. If these larger companies are borrowing funds to do stock buybacks, and then wonder why they're in trouble, well, lessons learned. We help them out and then we implement something so that the next time we don't have this kind of mess that requires a massive, coordinated response from fiscal and monetary architects. While it may be hard to see the future, we know that patterns do repeat. At least with this way, we have some cash on hand, that's grown in a fund, versus having to print up a bunch of money and add to the deficit. 2T isn't cheap to borrow even with 0% interest.

      I agree we need to have a plan that adjusts to a new reality of pandemics being a regular thing. This may force a large reorganization of physical and human capital for the economy at large. This has happened before, going from an agrarian society to an industrial one. We need a way for the economy to function, one that mitigates health risks to others in the event something like this unfolds. Public health and the economy in a way are two sides of the same coin - and, there can be a nasty feedback loop if there is disruption in either, which we are seeing unfold in real time. Yeah, it's scary right now, but life will either eventually return to normal or there will be a new normal.

      Thanks for your reply, whoever you may be. Enjoyed reading your reply.

      Best,
      M

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    3. Thanks for the response.

      And you make a fair point regarding the benefits of profitable businesses setting more cash aside to handle future disasters. I fear I took the term "insurance" in your first post far more literally than you meant it :)

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  12. If only someone had warned Trump in January of the potential dangers of the virus so that he could have taken effective steps to slow the spread and mitigate the damage. But in January it was just a "hoax."

    It seems to me that the government has acted the way a highly levered hedge fund does: take huge risks chasing nickels (like saving the cost of having a pandemic response plan in place) and counting on nothing bad happening or that you can respond in time if it starts to go bad. Now the government is facing huge "margin" calls.

    Some people are pointing to the American mobilization of resources in the second world war. To which the answer is they started immediately and it still took years to fully mobilize. The United States fought and won the Battle of Midway with equipment it had going into the war.

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  14. So far you have emphasized the idea of stopping the economy temporarily and then "unfreezing" it later. But indeed there will probably also need to be some significant changes in production patterns. When demand changes, how quickly can supply respond? There are reasons for both optimism and pessimism. This article gave me some hope:
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-retool-operations-to-assist-in-coronavirus-fight-11584637831

    It seems to me that a lot of economic activity is not dependent on close human contact. We can adapt to keep things going in a relatively safe way. Technology obviously helps us a lot here. Some industries will of course suffer (tourism, airlines, cruise ships, restaurants, live entertainment, etc).
    I don't see why it should be that hard to make, say, a typical manufacturing plant safe. Basically one needs to adopt the hygiene practices of a microchip factory. But this will require a quite massive increase in the production of protective clothing, masks, etc. As you and others have said, it would help a lot if the government did some serious elimination of red tape. The administration talks a good talk, but it is hard to be very optimistic. We do things like this (local, but still):
    https://nypost.com/2020/03/17/nyc-has-issued-275k-in-fines-for-coronavirus-related-price-gouging/

    One significant issue is school closures, especially for professionals with (young) children. Given that many service sector jobs (e.g. restaurant waiters) are now looking for work, perhaps some of them will find (temporary) employment as nannies.

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  15. California and New York shut down because they have massive homeless populations and governors who want to be president. If it gets loose into the homeless, they'll be picking up 100+ bodies a day off the streets of NY, SF and LA each. If your state has that kind of social catastrophe, there's no way you can get elected president.

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  16. People die every day. People die of the flu in far larger numbers every year, and the elderly are just as susceptible. We don't shut down the economy during flu season. Life comes with risk, and we have done an amazing job minimizing the risks through modern medicine, but this is very much an over-reaction. It got traction in the media, and because of the sensationalization of the story, people who really need essentials (my 80 year old mother) can't get them.

    Viral hepatitis kills 1.3 million people a year, and it's on the rise, increasing 22% since the year 2000.

    The point is you can't stop civilization because people die. You take precautions, eat well, keep healthy, and practice hygiene.

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  17. We have to transition to a pandemic economy by replacing high transmission risk exchanges with low transmission risk exchanges. It's not enough to just close businesses and events. If we see 20% unemployment, the toll will be intolerable and the policy will lose support. Therefore, we need to encourage business activities that don't spread disease too much. In other words, we have to find a way to let human society function without infecting and killing millions of people. I can think of a couple of ways we might be able to do this. Just brainstorming here.

    -Surgical masks: Masks don't necessarily prevent you from getting sick, but they do lower the chances that you'll infect other people (see link https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3591312/) Additionally, they're relatively cheap and we already know how to make them. If we can manage to ramp up production 100x, we can legally require everyone to wear them in public spaces.

    -Ban public handshakes, hugs, and kisses. Gentlemen should bow. Ladies should curtsy.

    -Create a national cleaning core: Hire laid off waiters and bartenders to regularly disinfect businesses, factories, and public spaces. Training people to properly clean surfaces has got to be a lot quicker than training more medical workers.

    -Universal Free Delivery: The government can cover the delivery costs of businesses.

    -Subsidize public and private package delivery.

    -Require business to regularly screen workers for symptoms (probably using temperature). People who show any symptoms would be sent home.

    -Monthly payments to people over 60 who agree to stay home.

    Any other ideas?

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  18. At least you're not (yet) in complete lockdown, as we're having to endure in NZ. The disruption is unbelievable, and yet a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that to be justified on a cost-benefit basis it would have to stave off far more deaths (by an order of magnitude) than even the most hysterical are predicting.

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