bay fan said:
Buck, with deaths piling up it will be very hard to resume business as usual until this is managed. My personal opinion is it will be managed more quickly with less loss of life and economically if we crack down now.
The worst thing that can happen is a half assed approach either way.
I know you're being impacted psychologically by someone with no "identified" comorbidities that you know dying, but step back and address points logically.
Why would this possibly ever take 3 months of "crack down" to solve? And for most of the country, where are the deaths "piling up"? What do the next 3 months look like for the unemployed and furloughed.
In the end, Middle-aged people will take their relatively low risk of the virus killing them vs. the economic certainty of starvation, eviction, etc. if they can't work. If you don't let them work, they will take what they need.
You can suspend eviction for now, but they'll still fall behind. You can delay credit card processing. You can try to send out cash, but it won't put a dent on it.
You can't be locked down for 3 months. You can't.
This isn't about the stock market, it's about cash flow for about 70% of our society. I've yet to hear any economic recovery plan or argument that would work in that scenario. I'm waiting for someone to do it, and I'll listen. I really will. I don't want all this death, either, but we can't make emotional decisions.
This is the right short term approach, but you'll start to see serious degradation of society when May rent is due if people aren't back at work.
My goal would be to have things start to come back online by mid April. Call April 20th as a target date within my business before we have to consider layoffs. We're weathering the storm right now using WFH, but we need clients to keep the cash flow.
