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A great depression will impact everyone. The crashing stock market has likely crushed seniors who have been forced into the risky stock market over the years. Me personally, I have experience significant loss in business and revenue. I can deal with that, but I know many people who cannot. Tons of people are maxed out on debt. They cannot even withstand a slight drop in business activity or income. It doesn't take much to push many people over the edge. Crashing economies are also associated with unrest, rise in disease, many other ugly things that kill one way or another.
Don't you get it.. that is the game. When unrest starts because of it they will demand the government take my money and give it to them to solve the problem.
4 or 5 weeks is unheard of to shutter businesses or not get paid. Insanity.
Oh and how unfair for all the people who still DO have to work while the people pushing this crisis get time off and money back.
hussman, I don't like this hard-stop shut down any more than you do.
That said, I'm not willing to risk the lives of other Americans, even one, for financial gain or convenience. It's not even a consideration to me. (Please know, I'm not saying you would either.)
I have some neighbors who are elderly, pushing up against 70. They adopted their granddaughter because her parents are drug-addicted, bottom-dwelling losers and MIA. If those good and decent people get Covid and die, granddaughter got nothin'. There's no other family to take her in and care for her and love her. She needs them.
We'll get through this anxiety-provoking and difficult time.
Inch by inch, life's a cinch; yard by yard, life is hard.
Let's all just inch along, together.
Look, I hear you. I have elderly parents, elderly and unhealthy in laws, elderly and sick neighbors. I don't want them to catch this and die suffering. It's a real, dangerous disease.
But 18 months until a vaccine....you think we will get through the summer without serious civil unrest in major cities? You think teenagers in housing projects in NYC, Chicago, etc are going to stay inside all day and night? What happens if one city runs short on food? Shutting the economy down to the point of a contraction far beyond that of the great depression is a very serious thing not to be spoken about in platitudes only. Someone needs to do actual cost benefit analysis of A) shutting down the economy and causing a severe depression. b) isolating only those at high risk while providing services they need after, say, building up the hospital capacity to deal with this situation on a long term basis.
I'm not quite sure what putting people on respirators or not has to do with destroying the economy.
Let's put it this way: If you had the virus and started have serious problems breathing, would you want to be put on a respirator if the opportunity to do so was afforded you?
I bet you would.
That's why you don't allow decisions on a society level be based on an individual need.
It has everything to do with the economy because the entire premise of shutting down the economy is to keep the number going to the hospital within the capacity of the hospitals.
I am not saying quarantine people when they have the virus (since they don't necessarily know they have the virus). I am saying quarantine people who have an underlying health condition (since they know they have that), along with the older group, and let everyone else get back to work.
The young and/or healthy group (healthy meaning don't have an underlying condition) would not be allowed to interact with the quarantined group - the people who are the ones who could die if they get the virus.
The advantage of this approach? We would not destroy the economy, create an entirely new class of poverty-stricken Americans, and then have to grapple with the added costs that poverty causes society.
Are you suggesting quarantine everybody with an underlying health condition, regardless of whether they have the virus or not???
Given the large percentage of the population with some underlying health issue, that would result in a hunkering-down portion of the population little different than what we're seeing now.
It's all illogical. If there's respirators available then they will be utilized. Instead of shutting down the economy, make more respirators. Tanking the economy will just make it worse for everyone.
Btw, it is ventilators, not respirators. Ventilators force oxygen into the lungs through a tube down the throat.
You can't just make more, not quickly anyway. Current manufacturers have ramped up production. But they are limited by the equipment they already have to make the machines. It could take months to build new manufacturing facilities. And the whole world needs more vents.
That is certainly a huge part of it. This virus mostly affects the elderly and infirm...you only feel it's worth it if you are in that target group and or want to protect those in that target group. At some point, we may have to decide to return to work and let the chips fall where they may....many believe most will end up with the virus anyway.
And we can still encourage people in the target group to avoid contact until this thing works its way through, probably by summer. Everyone else - back to work!
Don't you get it.. that is the game. When unrest starts because of it they will demand the government take my money and give it to them to solve the problem.
4 or 5 weeks is unheard of to shutter businesses or not get paid. Insanity.
Oh and how unfair for all the people who still DO have to work while the people pushing this crisis get time off and money back.
That is certainly a huge part of it. This virus mostly affects the elderly and infirm...you only feel it's worth it if you are in that target group and or want to protect those in that target group. At some point, we may have to decide to return to work and let the chips fall where they may....many believe most will end up with the virus anyway.
Plenty of less wealthy countries have taken stronger actions than us, just because it will impact elderly and those that are compromised isn't a good excuse to allow the spread to continue. Still many unknowns to a virus we have never seen and it does spread very rapidly and may cause permanent damage to even younger people that have recovered.
There also has to be an acceptance of how many elderly aren't protecting themselves. Friends talk of parents going to church daily -- I go to the grocery store and there are plenty of elderly walking around at all hours.
No this is really being pushed by the young people who are (1) hysterical and (2) don't want to work.
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