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ITT also will be lots of people blaming this economic impact solely on the social isolation measures, ignoring the fact that a pandemic ravaging unchecked throu

• anewhope 7y ago
  We could be donating plasma instead of sitting at home. Probably better plasma than ventilators.
  • ethbro 7y ago
    Do you mean convalescent plasma?
  • CydeWeys 7y ago
    I'm trying to donate plasma. Unfortunately, that's very much a 1-at-a-time kind of thing and doesn't scale well. We also don't know how effective it actually is.
• ashtonkem 7y ago
  Demand started dropping before official shut-down orders arrived, as risk-conscious citizens cut down on high risk activities before officially ordered to do so.
  • asdf21 7y ago
    As someone who runs a restaurant in the Bay Area, that's not really accurate. We were busy right up until the shut-down.
    • ashtonkem 7y ago
      San Francisco shut down incredibly early compared to most of the US, especially compared to their case load. By the time SF shut down they had 50 cases, while NYC waited until they had 10,000 cases to shut down. That probably is why the shut down and lack of demand line up so closely for businesses in the Bay Area.
      • CydeWeys 7y ago
        And that's also unfortunately why the death rate is so unconscionably high here in NY: our leaders failed us and shut down way too late.
        • legolas2412 7y ago
          And that is why I find it hilarious to see everybody fawning over governer Cuomo now.
          • ashtonkem 7y ago
            It’s still unclear to me whether Cuomo dropped the ball, or whether he was hindered by De Blasio. Either way, Inslee and Breed deserve more credit. Preventing a crisis is superior to responding effectively after its started.
            • hilbertseries 7y ago
              No, De Blasio wanted to issue a shelter in place order on March 17 and Cuomo said absolutely not. Then eventually Cuomo comes around and they start a shelter in place on March 22nd.
            • CydeWeys 7y ago
              They both dropped the ball big time. de Blasio went to the gym on literally the last day before those kinds of businesses were shuttered. He kept waffling on shuttering the schools and waited way too late. He only started taking things seriously when the heads of his department of health threatened to resign if he didn't take more action. See e.g.: https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/politics/new-york-city/coronavirus-de-blasios-katrina.html https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/politics/new-york-ci... They both started off as a complete joke on this. Cuomo has at least since been improving, but de Blasio remains a complete joke. He's incapable of so much as even closing some empty streets (or some lanes on streets) to give pedestrians more space to spread out. Other cities have been doing this to great success, but de Blasio has only ever understood things from the perspective of being behind a windshield.
    • karthikb 7y ago
      https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry Scroll down and click "city" instead of country. SF bookings on OpenTable were consistently down starting the last week of February. Your restaurant might have had different performance for a number of reasons.
    • icedistilled 7y ago
      As A san francisco resident, I got take out a couple times but I would not have considered eating sit down in the couple weeks prior to the formal orders. I was, however, marveling at how many people were still eating sit down. They would have nearly all vanished once the hospitals started filling up had there been no formal order. And then it would have lasted longer.
      • ashtonkem 7y ago
        LA resident here; while I’m not a dining out kind of person, I pulled back from the gym 2 weeks before I was officially ordered to stay in. I also skipped a former colleague’s leaving town party for the same reason.
        • CydeWeys 7y ago
          There were a few activities I did in the last week before I stayed home that definitely felt unsafe, and were the last time I did those things (in advance of official shutdowns). I went to the gym and it felt unsafe, I saw a play on Broadway and felt unsafe, and ran on the East River and felt unsafe, and then we settled in to not go anywhere anymore the next week (still a week prior to the official orders), but by then I'd already caught it. My first symptoms appeared on March 16th, meaning I'd most likely gotten it within the past week, and NYC didn't shut everything down until the 23rd, when I was already at the peak of the illness. So I would have needed to have stopped doing things several weeks prior to the government actually getting off its ass and acting in order to be safe, but I didn't have the understanding of how widely in the community it was already spreading at that point, or how severely we were under-testing. As a city we were unbelievably late to act, and the over 10,000 dead in NYC alone (with ~750 more every day) are a testament to that. It's the peak of absurdity to imagine the city somehow going on as normal under this unbelievable toll if only we weren't being told to shelter in place, when the only street noise you can hear a lot of the time is ambulance sirens.
          • sizzle 7y ago
            Hope you are doing better, if you don't mind me asking, how were the worst of the symptoms and did you recover completely? any breathing complications? any tips you felt helped you fight it off, assuming you didn't get hit with with the full force of the virus. Wishing you a speedy recovery fellow HN reader friend.
    • Supermancho 7y ago
      In Seattle, people were dining out at about 80% until the official shut down of businesses. Things like IHOP and Denny's were still fully packed, but more niche were often sparse.
• ShorsHammer 7y ago
  > ignoring the fact that a pandemic ravaging unchecked through the entire population would be having an even worse effect Isn't that entirely hypothetical though? Find it hard to take such statements seriously when the experience worldwide is so widely varied. The evidence is clear that lockdowns have caused this economic impact, how can anyone actually make accurate estimates of the alternative?
  • icedchai 7y ago
    Weeks before the official lock down, coworkers were already changing behavior. Going out to dinner less, stocking up on food, buying extra supplies, etc. Not everyone was doing this, but it was not uncommon. This was weeks before the first case hit the area. I think a lock down of sorts would've happened eventually, no matter what. Once restrictions are relaxed, a large percentage of people are still going to be very, very cautious. I will not board a plane or sit in a movie theater any time soon.
  • NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    Come on man (or woman ;-)). That's a silly, obviously incorrect statement. Not shutting down would have lead to many many more cases. Look at Louisiana. Secondly, the only hope of not shutting down is having widespread testing and tracking of limited cases. The US doesn't have that either.
  • wwweston 7y ago
    You can get pretty far with a decent model when it comes to counterfactuals. We moved the economic impact earlier to trade down health impacts. In order for there to not be some similar level of impacts, we either have to imagine a scenario where the disease was many times more benign than it has demonstrably been in some places, or where people ignore news as things get sufficiently dire and continue business as usual rather than dramatically adjusting behavior from normal circumstances. And both those things have to be true in order for the latter not to make a terrifying contribution, which would also make dire economic impacts: dead or damaged people are much harder to get back into the demand side of the economy than housebound or unemployed people. If you're thinking of worldwide counterfactuals, and know of any society that has a story involving staying broadly open that didn't use effective mass testing and contact tracing early, then specifics would be an interesting contribution.
• deleted 7y ago
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• coleifer 7y ago
  >a pandemic ravaging unchecked through the entire population would be having an even worse effect That's not a fact. That's your opinion.
  • CydeWeys 7y ago
    Not just my opinion. That of economists too, e.g.: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-vs-the-economy https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835571843/episode-991-lives-v...
  • amylene 7y ago
    The other side of the argument is also just an opinion. What’s your point? The way I read it is that we have no reason to think the economic drop would be less severe if we didn’t have a shutdown. This is because people dying could hurt the economy just as much, if not more. It is assuming facts not in evidence to suggest the economy would be better off with more deaths but less of a lockdown.
• abacadaba 7y ago
  To be fair, if it went on unchecked, after the massive and tragic loss of life/health, it would be over in weeks instead of years. Not that I'm volunteering to go into the 'herd immunity' group.
  • surbas 7y ago
    Over? You are assuming immunity... also like 2% of the population would of died min... that’s 600k+
    • aaaronic 7y ago
      I think you mean 140 million, right?
      • eggsmediumrare 7y ago
        They mean US.
    • abacadaba 7y ago
      Well possibly many more than that, since we would have run out of hospital beds and oxygen tanks etc. But in the fall we'd be able to football games again.* And yes assuming immunity, which seems likely to be the case for most people, even if not permanent. *assuming survival
    • CydeWeys 7y ago
      You're off by a factor of ten; assuming 2%, that would be 6 million Americans dead, not 600k. The death rate isn't likely to be that high (even without medical treatment), but if even a million Americans die, that's a cost of $10T to the economy right there. You can easily why see shutting things down to prevent all those deaths is worth it.
      • erik_seaberg 7y ago
        We didn't do this to benefit the economy, and it didn't. Losing 0.3% of the population (and maybe my mom) is a tragedy for the families but would not cost the economy $10T (that's half of GDP!) We did it because risking 30M pneumonia victims was unthinkable, even before we count the extra heart attack/assault/cancer victims while the hospitals collapse.
• manfredo 7y ago
  Right, but the economic impact is largely determined by the protective measures taken. It's entirely fair to conclude that less restrictive measures could have led to substantially less economic loss for relatively little in terms of health impact. Some countries, like Sweden, are not nearly aggressive in social isolation as others. Time will tell whether this was the right approach.
  • nullc 7y ago
    Your comment is inconsistent. "It's entirely fair to conclude" does not mesh with "Time will tell whether this was the right approach". If the same protective effects could have been achieved with a less disruptive move, then your conclusion would be justifiable. It is not, however, at all appropriate to jump to that conclusion yet-- time has not told. It will probably be years before good conclusions can be drawn from this due to the difficulty of correcting for starting conditions and intrinsic factors. Sweden is a relatively insular, already 'socially distant' community. It appears infections there started with fewer parties later. So it would take considerable analysis using data that doesn't exist yet (including the eventual outcome in Sweden) to draw any conclusions about what might have happened had their approach been applied to, say, NYC. Within the US-- a more comparable population-- there are many locations where the response was weaker and so far the results don't look especially good. Ultimately the fact remains that the majority of the economic "losses" we have now are hallucinatory. When a building is bombed it is physically destroyed and the labor and most of the materials that went into building it are irretrievably lost. The people inside are killed and cannot be productive in the future. In our current crisis, our losses are primarily losses of confidence (sure, there are some cases of agricultural goods spoiling). The people our response have saved but left without work are still alive and can go back to work when the crisis is over, particularly if we act to make sure they're protected in ways other than their health. Even if we cared exclusively about the economic consequences of this event it would be extremely foolish to favor the increase destruction of productive human lives in order to optimize for short term market confidence.
    • manfredo 7y ago
      > "It's entirely fair to conclude" does not mesh with "Time will tell whether this was the right approach". It doesn't mesh because you're omitting, "...could have led to substantially less economic loss". It won't be years before good conclusions can be drawn. Some states are already reporting that cases have already gone past their peak. Most countries that had outbreaks in March are seeing rates of cases going down. We'll probably be able to have a good idea of the scope of this pandemic by the end of summer. The economic harm is not hallucinatory. What is hallucinatory about 3 million people out of work in the span of a few weeks? You write that these people can go back to work when the crisis is over, but that is not true. If your employer goes out of business, or has too few customers to sustain as many employees, people are going to have to find new jobs. You also write about the loss of productivity in terms of the people who died due to the virus. That is something to account for, but the bulk of the virus' victims are not of working age. Whether or not you're comfortable with valuing human live does not alter the fact that we put value on life all the time. Whether it's deciding insurance payouts, worker's compensation, or healthcare spending we're constantly expressing the value of lives in dollar terms. Current predictions put the economic impact per life saved by social distancing at ~$190 million. Even if we assume that social distancing is only responsible for half the economic downturn, we're still talking about nearly $100M per death averted. Saying that this is excessive, and concluding that restrictions were excessive is entirely fair. How much money would a state funded healthcare system spend on its worst case patients? A lot less than $100 million.
• ajross 7y ago
  In point of fact, they're pretty much the same thing. A population being ravaged by an unchecked pandemic is, needless to say, not likely to continue packing restaurants and theaters every weekend. Social isolation happens to have been (responsibly!) instituted as a matter of public policy, but it was going to happen via fear at some point anyway. The economics doesn't care, really.
• austhrow743 7y ago
  There are countries that didn't lockdown who haven't been smacked hard by it. Most cases undetected. Vast majority of people hit hard by it are the sickly elderly, people largely already out of the economic game. This would have barely been an economic blip if not for the lockdowns.