Corona Virus - The case against re-opening the country by Easter!
So I was reading an article today and have watched several of President Donald Trump's press briefings this week and it looks like Trump is getting desperate to get people back onto working ASAP and I think it is a TERRIBLE idea!
A news article relating the same.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/business/economy-recession-coronavirus-trump-easter/index.html
I will state why I think this will be a terrible idea.
1> We are still early into this. Things will get bad before they start to get better.
I personally think we haven't reached the bad stage yet. NY is reporting a lot of cases only because they have been testing a LOT more than other states and also because of their population density. In Virginia, they JUST opened the first drive through testing facility a couple of days back which indicate how early we still are in this pandemic.
2> Hospital infrastructure.
The Javits center in NY is still not fully open to all the new patients that will bring more demand for hospitals and hospital beds. Many states have stated that once this starts growing in full flow, they donot have the capacity needed to handle the inflow of patients. We are still not there yet!
3> Learn from the UK
When most of the world was preparing for quarantining themselves and trying to contain the virus, the geniuses out in the United Kingdom were thinking how to develop herd immunity to fight this virus without focusing on social distancing. Result, high profile people like Prince Charles have caught the virus! Now they're taking a step back and started enforcing curfews and social distancing rules. Guess you shouldn't be a smart ass when you're dealing with a massive pandemic which is in the scale of the novel Corona Virus.
4> Don't think short term!
Trump's worry (and rightly so) is that America needs to keep running in order to function as the America that the world knows it today is very very legit. America will crumble and fall to it's feet if it doesn't run for a long time. BUT if you start running the country too early without figuring out a logical solution to this problem, America risks an even bigger problem that it will crumble forever.
America shouldn't think about the short term. Economies are going to be hit, markets will fall, people will lose money, maybe a lot of money but it is ABSOLUTELY necessary that the isolation laws should be in place till a very tangible solution is found with the problem at hand, especially a problem which is growing exponentially not linearly!
I hope the policy makers keep all this in mind before making any hasty decisions of sending people back to work.
My 2 cents!