4 ms·

If you care about the economy, the best thing we (the US) can do is follow the lead of other countries that have gotten this under control with evidence-based m

If you care about the economy, the best thing we (the US) can do is follow the lead of other countries that have gotten this under control with evidence-based measures, and push the government to provide support to those in need, so the economy can bounce back quickly, rather than sliding into depression.

jacquesm 6y ago
You currently do not have a government that will be swayed by evidence.
- bezmenov 6y ago
  Yes, we’d be much better off with the currently sidelined government that has suggested the evidence should be ignored as long as you’re protesting civil rights.
  - NationalPark 6y ago
    People were pretty worried about this, but so far there isn't any evidence that protests caused spikes in case numbers. Obviously there's a lot about the virus we don't know or can't fully explain, but the prevailing explanation is that the combination of widespread mask usage by protesters, quarantining by would-be protesters who know they've been exposed, and being primarily outdoors prevented transmission.
    - leereeves 6y ago
      Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. PolitiFact tried to examine claims from the LA mayor and health director that: "it’s highly likely given the increased numbers that we’re seeing that some of this is in fact people who may have been in a crowded situation at one of the protests where there was spread." They concluded: > there’s not enough data to draw any definitive conclusions ... > Medical experts say the protests likely contributed somewhat, but so did family gatherings [and] the reopening of businesses https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jul/21/how-much-did-protests-contribute-las-covid-19-surg/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jul/21/how-much-did-...
    - bezmenov 6y ago
      Actually, the handful of half-competent governments who have handled the pandemic the best disagree: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-13/forced-isolation-may-be-the-only-way-to-stop-resurgence-of-virus https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-13/forced-is...
- cmurf 6y ago
  It isn't only the government, it's a significant minority of the population nationally; and at a local level it can approach significant majority. A Marion County Florida Sheriff ordered that staff and visitors to his office cannot wear masks. That order is uncivilized behavior. The state governor should have removed him from power. People speeding on roads get sanctioned more, for being less of a menace to society. At least the kooks who wear masks to have Zoom conference calls aren't subjecting anyone to risk their health or life.
  - solaceb 6y ago
    You've touched on exactly what worries me most about the Trump era. Somehow, unnecessary combativeness and flamboyant disagreement has come to be valued in and of itself. As if somehow anyone wins by acting childishly.
    - HumblyTossed 6y ago
      > As if somehow anyone wins by acting childishly. Certain people apparently do.
    - cmurf 6y ago
      Some appreciate it. Some find it too tedious to bother pushing back on it. Meltdown on aisle 5! Toddler requires, and has gone, Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      It's conservative virtue signalling.
  - isabelc 6y ago
    This is missing context. Marion County, specifically Ocala, has a very high crime rate, one of the worst in US. The sheriff is not allowing masked people to enter because of safety concerns due to the current hate/distrust people are showing towards police. He doesn't want to guess if the next masked person who enters the station is a visitor or assailant.
schemy 6y ago
New Zealand has just had to quarantine 1/3 of their population, again, because of 4 cases. Until the virus is contained everywhere you will yo-yo between closing everything and opening it. Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years. The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?
- latchkey 6y ago
  After 100 days clean and zero deaths, Vietnam just discovered a few cases from some Chinese who had snuck into the country illegally. Those have now grown into many more cases... and deaths. NZ is seeing what has just happened in VN only days before and acting on it because they know what will happen if they don't.
- thu2111 6y ago
  They didn't "have" to do that and most places aren't yoyoing around, they're over it already and bumping along the noise floor of cases. NZ leadership has chosen this illogical and self-destructive path because they don't understand risk or data or, apparently, economics.
  - schemy 6y ago
    >They didn't "have" to do that and most places aren't yoyoing around Most places aren't anywhere near zero cases a day. Both Australia and New Zealand were and have had to go back to higher lockdowns because there were breaches.
makomk 6y ago
Evidence from other countries suggests that there is no way of getting this under control and returning to normal, and it wouldn't save the economy anyway. Europe is seeing a resurgence of cases, previous success story South Korea is stuck unable to reopen without a similar resurgence and with no path to eliminating the disease, even the latest remaining success stories Vietnam and New Zealand discovered the hard way that their belief they'd eradicated the disease was an illusion after it had spread unimpeded. And even countries which have managed to dodge much of the direct economic damage have suffered a huge amount of indirect damage from the entire rest of the world shutting down. Edit: I can't reply due to rate limiting, but you can't just dismiss the resurgences of cases in Europe because the absolute number of cases is small now - this is exponential growth with a rather alarming exponent, and that always starts out small until it isn't. Remember, it takes the same amount of time to go from say 1 to 2 cases per 10k as from 15 to 30.
- gibrown 6y ago
  The “resurgence of cases” in these other countries are less than 1 per 10k. Florida has been having 30-40 per 10k. It isn’t binary. All economies will take a hit. But if the US was doing 30x better then the economy would be better. And if there is any seasonality at all the Fall could get quite a lot worse and make the economy worse than it already is.
  - leereeves 6y ago
    > if the US was doing 30x better then the economy would be better. As a counterexample to that claim, the Euro zone GDP fell 12.1% in the second quarter. That's an annualized rate of 40%, even worse than the widely reported annualized drop of 33% in the US. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/euro-zone-gdp-q2-2020-as-coronavirus-crisis-hits.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/euro-zone-gdp-q2-2020-as-cor...
    - gibrown 6y ago
      US decreased 9.5%. The difference seems fairly marginal and could be affected just by timing of when the virus started. Germany though bought something with that. The interesting question will be what Q3 and Q4 looks like.
blhack 6y ago
I'm sorry but this is just poorly informed. The US is projected to be either near the top, or at the very worst right in the middle, of projections for GDP growth to finish out 2020. There is a sliding scale here, of course. If we locked everybody in their houses, we could get the covid numbers to 0, but it would also completely destroy our economy, and obviously would result in substantial loss of life due to the effects of poverty. What the US has done instead is to take a hit on covid in service of economics. So far it seems to be working (with regards to GDP, I mean.)

jacquesm 6y ago

You currently do not have a government that will be swayed by evidence.

bezmenov 6y ago
Yes, we’d be much better off with the currently sidelined government that has suggested the evidence should be ignored as long as you’re protesting civil rights.
- NationalPark 6y ago
  People were pretty worried about this, but so far there isn't any evidence that protests caused spikes in case numbers. Obviously there's a lot about the virus we don't know or can't fully explain, but the prevailing explanation is that the combination of widespread mask usage by protesters, quarantining by would-be protesters who know they've been exposed, and being primarily outdoors prevented transmission.
  - leereeves 6y ago
    Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. PolitiFact tried to examine claims from the LA mayor and health director that: "it’s highly likely given the increased numbers that we’re seeing that some of this is in fact people who may have been in a crowded situation at one of the protests where there was spread." They concluded: > there’s not enough data to draw any definitive conclusions ... > Medical experts say the protests likely contributed somewhat, but so did family gatherings [and] the reopening of businesses https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jul/21/how-much-did-protests-contribute-las-covid-19-surg/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jul/21/how-much-did-...
  - bezmenov 6y ago
    Actually, the handful of half-competent governments who have handled the pandemic the best disagree: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-13/forced-isolation-may-be-the-only-way-to-stop-resurgence-of-virus https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-13/forced-is...
cmurf 6y ago
It isn't only the government, it's a significant minority of the population nationally; and at a local level it can approach significant majority. A Marion County Florida Sheriff ordered that staff and visitors to his office cannot wear masks. That order is uncivilized behavior. The state governor should have removed him from power. People speeding on roads get sanctioned more, for being less of a menace to society. At least the kooks who wear masks to have Zoom conference calls aren't subjecting anyone to risk their health or life.
- solaceb 6y ago
  You've touched on exactly what worries me most about the Trump era. Somehow, unnecessary combativeness and flamboyant disagreement has come to be valued in and of itself. As if somehow anyone wins by acting childishly.
  - HumblyTossed 6y ago
    > As if somehow anyone wins by acting childishly. Certain people apparently do.
  - cmurf 6y ago
    Some appreciate it. Some find it too tedious to bother pushing back on it. Meltdown on aisle 5! Toddler requires, and has gone, Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    It's conservative virtue signalling.
- isabelc 6y ago
  This is missing context. Marion County, specifically Ocala, has a very high crime rate, one of the worst in US. The sheriff is not allowing masked people to enter because of safety concerns due to the current hate/distrust people are showing towards police. He doesn't want to guess if the next masked person who enters the station is a visitor or assailant.

schemy 6y ago

New Zealand has just had to quarantine 1/3 of their population, again, because of 4 cases. Until the virus is contained everywhere you will yo-yo between closing everything and opening it. Unless we build a wall around every developing country this will be going on for years. The economy can bounce back from one quarantine, can it bounce back from 12?

latchkey 6y ago
After 100 days clean and zero deaths, Vietnam just discovered a few cases from some Chinese who had snuck into the country illegally. Those have now grown into many more cases... and deaths. NZ is seeing what has just happened in VN only days before and acting on it because they know what will happen if they don't.
thu2111 6y ago
They didn't "have" to do that and most places aren't yoyoing around, they're over it already and bumping along the noise floor of cases. NZ leadership has chosen this illogical and self-destructive path because they don't understand risk or data or, apparently, economics.
- schemy 6y ago
  >They didn't "have" to do that and most places aren't yoyoing around Most places aren't anywhere near zero cases a day. Both Australia and New Zealand were and have had to go back to higher lockdowns because there were breaches.

makomk 6y ago

Evidence from other countries suggests that there is no way of getting this under control and returning to normal, and it wouldn't save the economy anyway. Europe is seeing a resurgence of cases, previous success story South Korea is stuck unable to reopen without a similar resurgence and with no path to eliminating the disease, even the latest remaining success stories Vietnam and New Zealand discovered the hard way that their belief they'd eradicated the disease was an illusion after it had spread unimpeded. And even countries which have managed to dodge much of the direct economic damage have suffered a huge amount of indirect damage from the entire rest of the world shutting down. Edit: I can't reply due to rate limiting, but you can't just dismiss the resurgences of cases in Europe because the absolute number of cases is small now - this is exponential growth with a rather alarming exponent, and that always starts out small until it isn't. Remember, it takes the same amount of time to go from say 1 to 2 cases per 10k as from 15 to 30.

gibrown 6y ago
The “resurgence of cases” in these other countries are less than 1 per 10k. Florida has been having 30-40 per 10k. It isn’t binary. All economies will take a hit. But if the US was doing 30x better then the economy would be better. And if there is any seasonality at all the Fall could get quite a lot worse and make the economy worse than it already is.
- leereeves 6y ago
  > if the US was doing 30x better then the economy would be better. As a counterexample to that claim, the Euro zone GDP fell 12.1% in the second quarter. That's an annualized rate of 40%, even worse than the widely reported annualized drop of 33% in the US. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/euro-zone-gdp-q2-2020-as-coronavirus-crisis-hits.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/31/euro-zone-gdp-q2-2020-as-cor...
  - gibrown 6y ago
    US decreased 9.5%. The difference seems fairly marginal and could be affected just by timing of when the virus started. Germany though bought something with that. The interesting question will be what Q3 and Q4 looks like.

blhack 6y ago

I'm sorry but this is just poorly informed. The US is projected to be either near the top, or at the very worst right in the middle, of projections for GDP growth to finish out 2020. There is a sliding scale here, of course. If we locked everybody in their houses, we could get the covid numbers to 0, but it would also completely destroy our economy, and obviously would result in substantial loss of life due to the effects of poverty. What the US has done instead is to take a hit on covid in service of economics. So far it seems to be working (with regards to GDP, I mean.)