Some companies (especially forward-thinking tech companies we care about on this forum) shifted to remote work quickly. Others fought tooth & nail. There are a

Some companies (especially forward-thinking tech companies we care about on this forum) shifted to remote work quickly. Others fought tooth & nail. There are a lot of stories of companies abusing the rules about essential worker status to get office workers to come in. Government regulations have been an important part of the response to the virus. I think this is to be expected according to mainstream economics. The risk to the public is an externality and many companies will ignore it without government intervention. To the extent that the US response is failing, it’s largely due to insufficient government regulation (although some of it also includes dumb own-goals by our government that are orthogonal from a liberty-regulation axis).