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Hopefully this will shutdown all the "if you want to talk about the economy you want people to die" rhetoric i keep seeing all over the place. The economy is h

• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It's not as simple as that either. There was no option for COVID-19 to not cause problems like these, unless every nation cooperated to pretend the virus doesn't exist and sweep the deaths under the rug. As it is HoReCa sector was going to have very tough times with or without a lockdown, most of the demand for eating out would've evaporated anyway, and to the extent they didn't, you'd have that many more temporary closures as infected people were traced back to various venues. Consider also that meat processing plants weren't going through shutdowns due to being non-essential, but because they had actual outbreaks on-site. Economics isn't Wall Street, and we've learned it's impossible to do a clean split between essential and non-essential businesses, as the connections upstream in the supply chain are convoluted and non-obvious (and often enough, companies themselves don't have visibility into their own chains). But that doesn't mean we would be better off pretending the pandemic isn't happening, and just enduring the cost in lives.
  • syshum 6y ago
    >> Consider also that meat processing plants weren't going through shutdowns due to being non-essential, but because they had actual outbreaks on-site. Yes but much of this could have been mitigated by an actual mitigation plan not this failed policy of "stay at home" and attempting to arbitrarily define essential and non-essential. You know things like Mask wearing that was advised against by the government and "The Experts"™ we are all suppose to surrender our lives to >>we've learned it's impossible to do a clean split between essential and non-essential businesses That is because every business is essential to the people that own, work, and consume goods / sevices from those business. The idea that the government is the best entity to to choose what is and is not essential is just asinine on its face >>But that doesn't mean we would be better off pretending the pandemic isn't happening the number of people saying that is statically 0, sure you have some nut cases that CNN and MSNBC love to parade out on the nightly news as an example of the "average person" that is agaist the lock down orders, but in reality there are more people like me that are using logic and reason to see through the emotional panic and fear that is at the core of the lock down orders to see how irrational and ineffective they really are. We are also advocating for actual mitigation that is proportional to the risk that this virus poses based on actual data, and revision of those plans as new data comes in In Feb and march based on the data at that time the lockdowns made sense. As we have learned more about how it spreads, who is at risk, what can be done to mitigate the spread and about 100 other things complete shutdowns make less and less sense outside of a few high dense area's of population.
    • carapace 6y ago
      It's like an invisible fire. If you can't see the fire the best you can do is isolate the flammable materials from each other. Once we can see the fire we can be more sophisticated in how we fight it.