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With numbers like that, nearly everyone in the states knows someone impacted. The optimist in me hopes to see people demand universal healthcare, social housing

• michaelborromeo 6y ago
  The pandemic is being used by both parties to push their agenda. Your pessimism is another persons optimistic outcome.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    I'm not sure how more disease, death, and long-term health conditions is someone else's optimistic outcome, but it seems to be inevitable.
    • save_ferris 6y ago
      It’s not that more disease and death is desired by one side, rather there’s political momentum behind not believing that it’s as severe as it’s being reported. We no longer live in a world with shared truths, and this is the most remarkable manifestation of this new reality.
      • pjc50 6y ago
        I'm reminded of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize. It's difficult to report even a very high number of deaths in a saturated disinformation environment.
        • commandlinefan 6y ago
          > the 1932 Pulitzer Prize Ok, I googled it and I still don't get it... are you talking about the cartoon?
          • pjc50 6y ago
            https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty Duranty got the prize for being one of a very small number of Western journalists allowed into Stalin's Soviet Union, and writing about a visit to Ukraine. He made no mention of the mass famine ongoing at the time, the Holomodor. Wikipedia lists the death toll as "3 to 12 million", because it was a totalitarian state and real measurement was impossible. So the answer to "is it possible for millions to die and it simply not be reported at the time" is "yes".
    • michaelborromeo 6y ago
      Being allowed to return to work or a business you run, being able to pay rent, feed your family, etc. These are positive outcomes of lockdowns being lifted. The danger in looking at this as a binary “opening kills people” is that you miss the trade offs and in doing so you miss the other nuanced policy options that sit in between complete lockdown and no lockdown.
      • pjc50 6y ago
        It's possible that "looser lockdown with mandatory masks" might work - it seems to have done so in Eastern Europe and some of the South Asian countries. But for some reason that doesn't seem to be on the agenda in the US or UK?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • vorpalhex 6y ago
    Pandemics, emergencies, and tragedies are usually what gives us the best indication of what our politicians actually want. For some strange reason, it's not usually the will of the people...
• deweller 6y ago
  The optimistic in me believes that as restrictions are lifted workers will soon find a way to return to work safely and effectively which will stimulate the economy and create demand for more jobs. The pessimist in me believes that social benefits will incentivize potential workers to stay home and not spend money which will slow down economic recovery.
  • newhotelowner 6y ago
    > social benefits will incentivize potential workers to stay home What kind of social benefits?
  • pbourke 6y ago
    When these workers return to work, will they have customers? Especially for those in travel, hospitality, events, personal services, etc.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Probably. Personal services seem to have rebounded fine in places that allowed them to reopen. The businesses I'm most worried about are small random shops that depend on foot traffic, and restaurants if they aren't allowed to ramp to fuller capacity soon. Some kinds of travel businesses will of course not be opening in the near future.
• Spooky23 6y ago
  The numbers are probably low given the massive backlogs in several states. Look for a few revisions.
• vorpalhex 6y ago
  The issue isn't the demand. Everyone agrees across the isle that treating every ill would generally be great. The issue is who will pay, how will care be given equally, and how will the level of care be maintained or increase? You can't just claim your car is now an airplane and drive off a cliff. Nor will just attaching wings grant you the power of flight. You can alter a car into a functioning plane, but what do you have to sacrifice in order to make that work?
  • eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    > The issue isn't the demand. Everyone agrees across the isle that treating every ill would generally be great. The issue is who will pay, how will care be given equally, and how will the level of care be maintained or increase? Canada and Germany seem to be managing just fine, and I pick those two examples because they have vastly different health-care systems.
  • HarryHirsch 6y ago
    When you cut spare capacity to the bone, sudden demand spikes become a problem.
  • Pfhreak 6y ago
    Raise my taxes by 10-15% (by increasing the tax rate at the upper brackets) and put that money towards taking care of people who aren't employed. Yes, my plans for buying a second home will be delayed, but I think I'd rather live somewhere where everyone was taken care of.
    • vorpalhex 6y ago
      Yeah so that's an option to increase taxes and that does solve how we fund it. We would need to increase taxes more than that, and we probably need to increase middle class taxes to do it. We also would probably have to pay doctors less, which means we'll have created some loan issues. Again, we could pay those, but the money has to come from somewhere, so we'd be taxing the middle class to pay for medical loans for doctors, while also taxing them to pay the doctors. That doesn't necessarily solve equality of care. Do we pay hospitals equally? Based on patients treated? Based on what is treated? Is getting treated for cancer in Beaumont, Texas the same as being treated for cancer in Cambridge? What about hospitals with poor outcomes - especially if those hospitals mainly serve minority populations? This is an extremely complicated issue with a lot of side effects and at the end of the day you're going to treat one group or another unfairly to resolve it - and the group that is likely going to get the short end of the stick is the middle class who provides the bulk of tax revenue.
• klmadfejno 6y ago
  Probably not. This stuff isn't randomly distributed. Many people will not see anyone in their close network suffer from this. Many others will see almost everyone in their network suffer from this.
  • wpietri 6y ago
    Exactly. I know a few people affected, but not nearly the correct proportion. Most of the people I know, like me, have jobs that can be done remotely. That's unsurprising given how many of our social connections come through work. Especially for those of us who live somewhere other than where we grew up.
  • IkmoIkmo 6y ago
    Yeah I've noticed this as well. For me, it's zero. For a colleague of mine, 6 friends/family died. What I'm very curious about is the impact of super-spreader events. There's some indication that say 10% of activities are responsible for 90% of the infections, e.g. a football stadium, a concert etc. What I wonder is, what does the distribution look like? 1% of activities cause 90% of cases, or 30/70? And then, what happens to the R0 / infection rate, if you can ban/restrict those high-impact activities in particular? Does the coronavirus then start to mimic the impact of a much more benign issue such as the flu? Or would the effect be minimal, and does that mean that a second wave around august and follow-up lockdown is basically guaranteed? That to me is what everything is banking on, with a vaccine 9-18 months away, markets will be butchered if we get a second wave+lockdown. If that doesn't happen, then unemployment figures / markets will probably recover relatively quickly given the relatively decent economic fundamentals going into this crisis, and the unprecedented government / central bank support packages.
• throwaway55554 6y ago
  > The optimist in me hopes to see people demand universal healthcare, social housing, food benefits, and more so that everyone at least has a baseline level of stability. I doubt this will happen because one half believes this is all a hoax perpetrated by the other half.
• jariel 6y ago
  There's a big problem with the statement and that is 'free stuff' vs. 'actual productivity' - it kind of implies a misunderstanding that I think is at the root of so many instinctive reactions to calamity. First, socialization and central planning at that scale is essentially communism, so start with that. Second, if almost nobody is working, then 'stuff' doesn't get made, and you can't feed or house many people for long. We know from history, that even if people could work, the government isn't really good at organizing a lot of that kind of activity. If we want 'food' for people there is no way around the fact we must have people doing all the various bits of work that get food to our plates: farms, delivery, processing, grocery, transport. And that system depends on everything else. Of course, we need more than food - housing etc. depends on so much as well. So the answer cannot be 'print money' because that literally doesn't do anything. The answer has to be something along the lines of: 'how do we get back to work safely'? There might be some long term opportunities with housing and healthcare, but there are already so many things screwed up there, that basic regulatory changes could yield massive opportunities long before even the argument for socialization begins. Outrageous hospital billing, odd zoning, bad labour laws etc.. So much low-hanging fruit.
  • generalpass 6y ago
    > And that system depends on everything else. This is the bit nobody gets. Imagine how expensive gurney casters will cost when there like 100 million fewer casters being produced every year.
  • xamuel 6y ago
    People seem to implicitly think the world works like in a video game: as if NPCs have unlimited supplies of hardcoded goods available at a fixed price. In an MMO, if you printed enough gold, every single player could buy a whole houseload of healing potions. That's not how the real world works, though. You can't eat cash, nor are there machines that magically turn cash into food.
  • Pfhreak 6y ago
    Turns out that even if you cover people's basic food and shelter, they still are interested in producing stuff -- whether that's art, software, or widgets, many folks still take pride in doing work. They may not work 40 hours, but I guarantee you people would still be working. Edit: Also, providing social housing, universal health care, and basic food assistance isn't communism. France isn't a communist country, and yet they have access to those things. It's not a boolean flip between capitalism and communism -- we can have elements of both and tune it to what we'd like.
• TallGuyShort 6y ago
  People don't always oppose larger social programs just because they want to screw people over. They sometimes oppose the programs because they think they do more harm than good. Generally speaking, not a lot of people are going to change their political opinions in a crisis. There's a lot of confirmation bias going around right now, although some people may pivot and argue for whatever would benefit / did benefit / would have benefited them personally.
  • jgwil2 6y ago
    Can you provide some data backing the assertion that not a lot of people change their political opinions in a crisis? Genuinely interested. In any case, in our system not a lot of people have to change their minds; just a few moderate voters in swing states could be enough.
  • Pfhreak 6y ago
    I mean, there are 20 million recently unemployed people who are probably wondering, "What are the safety nets like elsewhere? Why aren't we more like <country x>?" They've just lost their healthcare. How can they not look at the rest of the world and say "Maybe they are onto something, not tying health care to employment..."
    • TallGuyShort 6y ago
      Yeah they've also been paying taxes for years when they were working, and are now wondering how the CDC could be so incompetent as to send out contaminated tests, and why we're fighting foreign wars but also talking about mandatory service for veterans because of this crisis, and why we dropped $2 trillion on debt and pretend money and for every dollar that went to the people you're talking about the country was 3 more dollars in debt. The people who were concerned about this before aren't going immediately to think, "Let's give this administration more authority over my healthcare decisions! We should set a precedent that they can make it illegal for me to work and then botch my unemployment claims!" Let me guess: you already supported larger safety nets before this crisis.
• krgraver 6y ago
  I think there's a perfect storm brewing for v1 of UBI to happen. Andrew Yang put it on the radar, COVID is further straining people living paycheck to paycheck, and we'll have massive unemployment going into a general election.
• boopk 6y ago
  I know more people affected than unaffected. I can easily count 15-20 people who were laid of or furloughed -- including myself.
• hkai 6y ago
  Sorry, how do you propose to pay for healthcare and food if nobody's working? Ask for aid from other countries or some other solution?