Good. Aggressive steps like this are the only way we'll get a handle on what's happening. The alternative is exponential runaway and complete disaster.
Another Seattle resident here... I wonder if we're only a few days away from a Hubei/Italy-style lockdown where you can't go outside except for groceries and pharmaceuticals. Is there precedent for that in American history?
No precedent for it, and a lot of Supreme Court precedent against it. Nonetheless, as an also Seattle resident, it has dramatically changed the city through voluntary behavior of the population. This has been an incredibly destructive blow to everyone in the formerly thriving restaurant and bar industry in the city.
Citation? My understanding is that quarantine powers are well established in law. This isn’t the first epidemic.
Furthermore, the lockdown of the Boston area after the marathon bombings is a very clear and recent precedent relating to a different public safety emergency.
Worse comes to worst, I suspect we’ll see MRAPs on the streets first and any legal fallout, later.
> No precedent for it, and a lot of Supreme Court precedent against it
Could you cite some of that precedent? When I did my research around quarantines, the things I found said that precedent was very thin. What precedent there was typically was extremely deferential to government responses during emergencies and pandemic outbreaks.
I didn't find any SCOTUS cases myself, so I would be very curious to read the SCOTUS precedent against it.
The precedent you are looking for is about the legal principles that limit the extent to which the government can prevent free travel, not quarantine per se. Quarantine must conform to that precedent, being one of many examples where the government may restrict travel. The No Fly List is a modern example of a government policy that violates free travel and has consistently suffered under judicial scrutiny -- it is insufficient for the government to deem someone a threat to public safety to deprive them of fundamental rights. You can no more violate rights because someone "might be a terrorist" than you can violate their rights because someone "might have COVID-19" absent strong and specific evidence. There is much more latitude to limit what people do than where they go or what they say.
Americans have a strong Constitutional right to free movement within the country. As with free speech, suspending that right for an individual requires either due process or specific imminent threat to public safety to withstand judicial scrutiny. That is the calculus. A good test would be "can the government suspend free speech" in this scenario, as similar legal constraints will apply to free travel. That the specific case involves disease quarantine doesn't matter that much, as the Constitution makes no such exception. I don't follow freedom of travel case law closely, I am only aware that loads of it exists and that it is extremely biased in favor of the individual right.
As a related point, in the US most quarantine authority resides with the States, not the Federal government. If the States don't enforce it, there is little the Federal government can do.
> The precedent you are looking for is about the legal principles that limit the extent to which the government can prevent free travel, not quarantine per se. Quarantine must conform to that precedent
As you noted, the highest level of judicial scrutiny for constitutionally protected rights (like the freedom of speech) is strict scrutiny.
That doesn't mean the government is unable to restrict those rights, but it generally means that the Government's regulations must meet the following criteria:
1. is necessary to a "compelling state interest";
2. that the law is "narrowly tailored" to achieving this compelling purpose;
3. and that the law uses the "least restrictive means" to achieve the purpose.
From all the descriptions of precedent around quarantine laws that I've seen, the judiciary was extremely deferential to Government decision making during a bona-fide epidemic.
Given that, I think a reasonable travel regulation to implement a regional quarantine would easily survive such scrutiny.
1. "compelling state interest" - maintaining the public health has long been held to be a compelling state interest.
2. "narrowly tailored" - if the regional quarantine was restricted to bona-fide epidemic outbreaks, and backed up by epidemiological experts, I think the courts will accept this. I think this is the criteria that the drafting will have to be most carefully tailored around.
3. "least restricted means" - I think the Governments have been demonstrating that they have been actively trying all the other less restrictive means, and they haven't been effective.
Based on this, I find it extremely unlikely that a court would rule against a regional lockdown quarantine.
In saying there was significant precedent against it, I was hoping you had something related to epidemiological outbreaks and public health quarantines. I find the argument that the courts have generally been skeptical of travel restriction to be quite unpersuasive. I don't think courts will view this as a "typical" travel restriction, and will give local / state / federal governments a lot of leeway in responding to this kind of an outbreak.
> The C.D.C. rewrote its quarantine guidelines in 2017 and they have never been tested in court. The Supreme Court has also never dealt with an infectious disease quarantine case, [Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University Law School who specializes in public health law] said.
Freedom of travel, upon which quarantine rests, has been thoroughly adjudicated in diverse public safety contexts. It is unlikely that the court will deviate dramatically in this specific case from centuries of precedent regarding restrictions on travel relating to public safety. The CDC's guidelines may be new but not unprecedented.
The outliers where the courts allowed the kind of special reasoning being proposed here, which has happened on occasion, have almost universally enabled shameful chapters in American history e.g. Japanese internment. Courts are understandably reluctant to allow this kind of expedient violation of Constitutional rights.
“The Court’s postponement of argument sessions in light of public health concerns is not unprecedented. The Court postponed scheduled arguments for October 1918 in response to the Spanish flu epidemic. The Court also shortened its argument calendars in August 1793 and August 1798 in response to yellow fever outbreaks.”
Agreed. Wish people were more responsible and this wouldn't have to happen. Drove by the mall today and would have expected it to be a ghost town, but the parking lots were full and people were still walking and queueing close together.
Canlis (fine dining place, think Michelin) made a really interesting switch in order to keep the lights on. They shut down their restaurant and are starting a drive-thru burger stand, a bagel stand, and a meal delivery service, rather than lay off all their workers. I'm going to try their burgers tomorrow.
I'd suggest they put a couple of picnic tables out in the parking lot for take-out. Curious about other commercial operations that could satisfy the rule "... all gatherings under 50 participants are prohibited unless previously announced criteria for public health and social distancing are met"? Take-out biergarten? Silent disco?
Rules like this dont need to be enforced (or even enforceable) because by and large the community is onboard. Ie if Canlis, a Seattle institution ,was seen as looking for loopholes and risking lives it would be the end of their entire business.
I didn't mean to suggest anything nefarious. On the contrary, I'm curious as to what kinds of "fun" and "social" celebrations we can do these days while still limiting coronavirus risk.
That's really interesting! I've heard great things about Canlis but never had a special enough occasion to go, and I moved away from Seattle last year. I would have loved to try their meal delivery.
Note this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Their official website doesn't have any update yet. I suggest checking it after everyone has the official wording and duration of the announcement tomorrow.
IMO the only question now is how long it takes the rest of the country to follow suite. Here in NC our governor announced the closing of all public schools on Friday, but I've heard from several friends that in my city (Raleigh) the downtown bars and restaurants were pretty much at normal capacity this weekend. I don't think the general public is going to truly take this seriously until they're told that they have to.
Help me understand this logic... it's not OK for customers to be a few feet away from other people in the dining area of a restaurant, but it's OK for low-paid (and often undocumented) line cooks and chefs, etc, to be right next to each other, interacting, sweating and toiling away in a hot kitchen? These people are heroes if they choose to show up for work, especially since takeout orders hardly tip.
It’s more OK, because the pool of customers is constantly rotating while the pool of line cooks is mostly static. Incidental contact from picking up food is much less infectious than breathing the same air for an hour.
No, it's not the same set, and it's not limited. Employees have different shifts, days off, vacation, callouts, etc. They all still go home after work and interact with their family. And the working conditions essentially guarantee that if one person is carrying the virus, everyone in the kitchen will get it, which is certainly not true in front-of-house.
This is a government policy that essentially tells low-paid line cooks and kitchen staff they are disposable and a lower priority than all the relatively wealthy people whose meals they are preparing.
You’re looking at this through a very weird lens. Low paid line cooks and kitchen staff are the ones who most need this, because they don’t have savings or a month of food stocked - where are they going to get their own food for the duration of the shutdown? It’s absolutely true that it’s still a transmission vector, but human society can’t function with zero transmission vectors.
Yes, they need to work, but they -- and front-of-house staff -- would be far better off with restaurants that are open and functioning. Perhaps not at 100%, but they could certainly allow half-capacity or "shift seating".
I'm sorry but it's simply a very bad look, when it is mandated by the government. Nearly everyone else has the luxury of remaining isolated and avoiding exposure, except for this small segment of vulnerable and low-paid workers, whose workplace has almost zero protection, to provide the most essential human necessity -- food.
There may be a misunderstanding here. The shutdowns we're seeing in the US aren't full lockdowns - under current plans, most businesses will remain open and most people will continue to go to work. I'd agree with what you're saying if there were a full lockdown happening that arbitrarily excluded to-go restaurants, but we're just doing targeted shutdowns of the biggest transmission vectors.
Virtually all white collar workers, tech, administrative, managerial - work from home. Teachers, school admins & university workers - home. Entertainment (shows, sports, movies, concerts) - home. Apple - home.
Shitty jobs that nobody cares about except during a crisis: janitorial/sanitation - work despite the risks. Cooks/food prep - work despite the risks. Grocery store/Walmart - work despite the risks. Truckers - work despite the risks.
(Trucking isn't necessarily a shitty job but a lot of people seem gleeful that technology may render them obsolete in the near future.)
That's obviously the point -- while everyone else stays safely at home, people in those jobs must come to the site and get up close to germs, other people, and possibly the virus itself. Who do you think is going to do all this "deep cleaning and disinfecting"? The CEO?
I won't be touching delivery food or fast food (or going to any restaurants) until this is over. I feel terrible for the workers in these industries and I hope we pass some kind of mortgage/rent pause and relief to people laid off or not scheduled but stopping the spread of the virus has to be our number one priority.
We need more than mortgage and rent suspension and relief. IRS has aggregate quarterly-granular data on how much businesses in a NAICS/SIC classification has paid out in wages. But not specifically who; the accountants, payroll processors and business owners who DIY payroll have that information.
We need a simultaneous approach. IRS creates a modified 941 form. Every business who files either 941 or 944 fills out new form. It has enough information to link it already-filed 941/944. And fields for list of employees, and where their pay is usually sent.
Direct helicopter drop fiscal stimulus to employers and employees. Employers in specific NAICS/SIC coded industries closed by law get wages they would normally pay taken care of as a straight grant. Direct deposit wages to employees directed by employees, cash at SSA or similar FedGov office parking lot drive thrus for the unbanked. Statistical modeling to roughly make up tip wages. Link to landlord-submitted data or statistical data is used to model and impute an additional grant package to cover a business’ rough revenue figure. Utilities-submitted data is used to estimate a third grant package. Wages, rent and skeleton utilities are granted month by month, retroactively if necessary to stricken industries. Healthcare is emergency Medicare-for-all for impacted employees. Any remaining revenue funds required are through unsecured loans at Fed funds rate.
This gives us a chance to resume our economic footing faster to status ante quo than letting businesses go under and wait a decade for the economy and equities market to recover.
Link quarantine peer pressure to grants. Each time someone from the business steps out of quarantine orders and is caught by LEO, their grant is reduced by 30%, and everyone else in their workplace has theirs reduced by a proportion (1 / total-employees&owners), with a message saying who stepped out.
Should do similar for industries deemed strategically critical and employees must come in. Sanitation, defense, energy, emergency response, transport and delivery, etc.
Take the currency hit on this grant tsunami, and hope for a rocket ride back up starting in a couple years when the vaccine is out to make up the monetary weakness.
The relevant facts are, one, only much older people have to worry about it, and two, the cure already exists in washing yourself. This common flu is here to stay, the absolute risk to vast majority of people is extremely insignificant.
There’s nothing false about it. Fatality rate for 50 and below is a paltry 0.2%, let alone the infection rate is very low as well. The incubation period is long and symptoms for most are mild, so it’s here to stay as it’s easily spreadable. I dont understand your position!
These fatality rate estimates assume top quality medical care. And this crisis is quite simply not "here to stay"; decisive measures can definitely "flatten the curve" and perhaps even lower R0 so much that the virus stops spreading altogether, and cases start dropping towards zero.
- In the winter seasons from 2013/14 to 2016/17, an estimated average of 5,290,000 ILI cases occurred in Italy, corresponding to an incidence of 9%.
- More than 68,000 deaths attributable to flu epidemics were estimated in the study period.
People keep saying this, but if healthcare systems get overwhelmed then everyone has to worry about this "flu". Adding to that, even the strictest measures will only have visible effects in one or two weeks. We literally have no idea what the situation on the ground will look like by then, even in places like Raleigh. That's why it's entirely appropriate to act now and minimize risk.
I don’t know what makes people like you go online and post this type of incorrect and harmful advice in such a smug fashion. All I can say is you need to educate yourself.
I posted the relevant facts. Please post your relevant facts to counter them. I’ve done my research and until those core facts change my viewpoint remains.
You've posted incorrect and incomplete "facts". Many others in this thread has posted more complete data, please educate yourself and also consider those around you that are more vulnerable.
What would be a reputable source for education? I've been reading reports from the CDC and the WHO, as well as listening to microbiologists I know personally who have been studying coronaviruses for some time. I'm seeing lots of fear here, but nothing concrete. Please, educate me: what am I missing in my information feed?
Covid19 is closer to SARS than the flu, and is known to cause permanent lung, kidney, and testicle damage, even in young and healthy patients.
Even among young patients, the ICU rate is as high as 10%. A low mortality rate for young people assumes access to an ICU.
All of New York State only has about 600 unoccupied ICU beds. If the number of infections in New York breaches 6,000, the fatality rate among young people is likely to be 10-20x that of the flu.
Those are some important facts, thanks for sharing. I’d like to see the probability of healthy people getting permanent damage however. That would change my mind. Until then the extremely low fatality and infection rate for average people, as well as the incubation period being so long that it’s unrealistic to contain it, is enough for me not to worry about it.
AIUI, SARS did cause permanent damage because many people were treated with strong anti-inflammatory drugs that suppress the immune system, despite the ongoing viral infection. These will probably be used against COVID-19 as well, especially given ICU shortages. Hopefully we will gain a better understanding over time of how to properly balance the avoidance of life-threatening damage from the immune response (e.g. due to CRS) with still countering the virus effectively.
"as well as the incubation period being so long that it’s unrealistic to contain it, is enough for me not to worry about it."
Remember that low-risk people still get infected, and still infect others. The evidence is fairly conclusive at this point that you're infections even if you lack symptoms, so you can easily be putting the at-risk people in your life (or in communities around you) in significant peril by being careless and thoughtless.
Please be extremely careful with this disease. If you're not going to self-isolate or be more cautious and normal, please do not visit any at-risk people in your life
Uh well it causes bilateral interstitial pneumonia which is inflammation that causes irreversible scarring around the air sacs. If you get it you will have scarring. If you get it badly you will have bad scarring that will impact your future health. If you have an underlying health problem esp if it involves your respiratory system you are fucked. Combine all of this with thousands of your neighbors Unable to breath creates a very interesting union in the ER.
Maybe the Wikipedia article on bilateral interstitial pneumonia will change your mind?
> low fatality and infection rate for average people
Could you say how're defining "average" because right now it just sounds like "me". There's a lot of people who are non-average and have the very same right to live as the average.
Yep, I am in the unfortunate situation of being an Oregon trying to arrange public health insurance and make doctor's appointments as soon as possible for a worsening long-term digestive condition. I'm definitely concerned about being put off or crowded out of hospitals.
Nobody know where a reputable source is. It’s just a laundry list of all the ‘talking points’. I keep hearing people say this stuff, but nobody knows where it came from.
It is certainly not the message the CDC is putting out in the USA.
I've never seen studies that say anything about "permanent lung, kidney, and testicle damage, even in young and healthy patients". Where did you read this?
Even the very first COVID-19 study [1] showed that 42% of the survivors (and _all_ of the deceased) treated in the Wuhan pulmonary hospitals experienced sepsis. Sepsis [3] causes tissue death all around the body, leading to permanent decrease in the function of the affected organs. Our ways of mitigating sepsis work only for bacterial infections, which COVID-19 isn't [2].
Sepsis aside, just plain pneumonia in adults is no laughing matter: pneumonia survivors are twice as likely to die as others in their demographic, be they rich, poor, old or young [4]. See the long term effects of SARS: if you survive, your health status and exercise capacity will be impaired for a long time, potentially for the rest of your life [5].
> Sepsis was a common complication, which might be directly caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, but further research is needed to investigate the pathogenesis of sepsis in COVID-19 illness.
> 91 (48%) patients had a comorbidity, with hypertension being the most common (58 [30%] patients), followed by diabetes (36 [19%] patients) and coronary heart disease (15 [8%] patients).
>I've never seen studies that say anything about "permanent lung, kidney, and testicle damage, even in young and healthy patients". Where did you read this?
It's obviously bullshit. How would we know about "permanent" damage from a disease a few months old.
Ya know, because we humans can't regenerate organs at the drop of a hat... or at all. So if your lung tissue starts dying, that's it. The best you can hope for is permanent scarring to replace the dead tissue. Scar tissue is a poor replacement for the original by many measures.
Some organs can and others can grow in size to compensate for reduce efficiency. Plus, there's no real evidence that Covid is causing organ damage.
> if your lung tissue starts dying, that's it
That's definitely not "it". Your lungs can repair damaged tissue and the system as a whole can adapt to compensate for portions that can't be repaired. And also no real evidence that long term damage is being done.
I don't have any links handy but I've seen reports that in a few cases covid19 has indeed caused permanent lung damage after the infection subsided. Apparently it's rare but possible but don't take my word for it.
I don't think any other organs growing in size are going to compensate for reduced lung function. It's true our bodies adapt to damage but once the tissue is dead it's not coming back.
I downvoted you because I think you have some factual mistakes:
"only much older people have to worry about it"
That's false. There are a number of comorbidities that don't have anything to do with age. Immuno-compromised individuals, or individuals with pulminary conditions, are at risk regardless of their age.
Further, while the risk does go down for younger populations, only children seem to be fairly risk-free. Healthy individuals of all ages have died of this (at rates significantly higher than that of the flu).
Finally, younger people (even children) still get infected by the disease, still incubate it, and still spread it even if they have no or low symptoms. This means low-risk people can easily spread it to high-risk people without being aware of it.
"the cure already exists in washing yourself"
That's false. Handwashing is not a cure. Handwashing is a preventative measure. They are totally different things.
Once infected, handwashing will do nothing to protect you (though can still help protect others, so ill people should continue to handwash). There are no cures for COVID-19. There is no vaccine for COVID-19. There are no widespread treatments for COVID-19 (though some human trials underway). The only care we can currently provide care for people with COVID-19 is to treat the symptoms.
"This common flu is here to stay"
That's false. Coronavirus is not influenza. It is a type of coronavirus, and is closely related to SARS. The CFR of influenza is around 0.1%, while the Coronavirus is estimated to be around 1% (or higher if medical care becomes saturated).
"the absolute risk to vast majority of people is extremely insignificant."
That's unknown, but disagrees with pretty much all of the expert opinion on the topic. The infections disease expert in the US federal government (Anthony Fauci) thinks it's possible that a million people in the US will die of Coronavirus.
For people like many of us here who live highly connected lives for 15+ years, it's hard to appreciate how some people are disconnected. It can be a very peaceful lifestyle, it comes up often in conversation here. But this, they would find out...but how soon I wonder?
I have family in Raleigh, and I’m concerned that with the known Biogen cases and the lack of “social distancing” that there might be a major outbreak there
Just look at some of the comments in this very thread, calling for us to adopt the "UK model".
It's clear that some people DO NOT see this as a threat worth worrying about. Shame on them, I say. They're probably the same idiots that show up to work sick, and cough without covering their mouth around others.
A lot of people who apparently don't believe in biology, and don't have the ability to see past their own 2 feet.
The UK are focused on minimising deaths, by avoiding COVID-19 striking during next winter, when the NHS is at peak load due to winter flu. Instead, they will guide the first strike towards summer (NHS's least load), and impose measures to protect at-risk folk during that time.
I'm not sure what the the "UK model" is, but schools don't seem to be closed there (are here in Germany) and I can't find good info about mass events being banned. The best term I found for Germany's policy is "flattening the curve", while UK news seem to describe theirs as "herd immunity". Sure, there will be overlap in policy, but wouldn't call it the same model.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/12388215155... is a UK modeller explaining that there has been a misreporting of UK's plan: UK aims to flatten the curve and reduce deaths. Herd immunity "is a tragic consequence of having a virus that - based on current evidence - is unlikely to be fully controllable in long term in the UK."
It's a bit longer, but here's the Chief Medical Officer talking about the UK's response. https://youtu.be/IfJcwDaZrsA
UK is progressively adding lockdown too, per the response's plan.
As of now, I don't think there's any evidence that the immunity from having been infected in the past would last long enough to avoid another peak in winter. This thread mentions that we can assume an immunity measured in "months" if we look at other coronaviruses:
> The UK model also happens to be the Germany model
Eh ? Germany is on lock down right now, we'll be at Italy's level by the end of the week imho.
UK says: "we're all going to get sick so let's not do anything." DE says: "we're all going to get sick so let's spread it over a long time as to not overwhelm our health system." That's a huge difference.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/12388215155... is a UK modeller explaining that there has been a misreporting of UK's plan: UK aims to flatten the curve. Herd immunity "is a tragic consequence of having a virus that - based on current evidence - is unlikely to be fully controllable in long term in the UK."
It's a bit longer, but here's the Chief Medical Officer talking about the UK's response. https://youtu.be/IfJcwDaZrsA
UK is progressively adding lockdown too, per the response's plan.
NYC bars/lounges were packed Friday and Saturday. The bar staff that I follow on IG was giggly at the amount of money they were making telling people to keep coming in.
The sad thing is it were places popular with the crowds that live paycheck to paycheck most of whom cannot afford any sort of medical emergency or being under a forced quarantine.
As usual, these announcements never come with any promise or a plan of economic relief (or at least reference to plans already made) for businesses force closed, creating more panic. I don't understand why it's so hard to just say: "We will take care of the businesses affected by this policy and more details are forthcoming."
Shutting them down is the right move. Taking care of small businessowners running on thin margins - like mom/pop restaurants - is also the right move.
EDIT: Unless the government has no plans to help small businesses. Which is completely possible and probably even likely.
States' fiscal powers are nowhere near that of the federal government. They borrow at much lower rates, have more flexibility with respect to the level of debt they can take, take in far more revenue, and as a last resort print money.
There is no historical precedent for any state bailing out an industry to this extent.
In the same way that many Americans are living pay check to pay check, I think it's clearer than ever that states are doing the same thing.
People literally don't have enough money if they don't go to work, and states literally don't have enough money to pay people (or businesses) not to go to work.
Counties, cities, can issue bonds and go into debt. It might even be a good investment for everyone involved. They'd probably pay more than the federal government, seeing as short term treasuries are now 0%, and thus while not free to finance it would be almost free.
"These are very difficult decisions, but hours count here and very strong measures are necessary to slow the spread of the disease. I know there will be significant economic impacts to all our communities and we are looking at steps to help address those challenges."
Glad to see it. It's tricky, because restaurants are often marginal businesses. But I think we should create some sort of low interest loan program for small businesses, and maybe offer outright subsidies. Workers will need to get paid regardless, so that will lessen impacts on unemployment. And letting a bunch of businesses go under could substantially deepen a recession, which is bad on its own and will also reduce government revenue.
Given that the Fed cut their interest rate to 0% and that treasury bills are under 1%, credit is approximately free to governments, so a well-run small business support program could end up costing much less than doing nothing.
“Restaurants will be allowed to provide take-out and delivery services but no in-person dining will be permitted.
I live an SRO. I don't have a kitchen. I currently don't have a fridge. I have a small grill and some shelving to store stuff.
I eat a lot of takeout. I'm glad to see I can still get takeout.
But, wow. This is beginning to look pretty scary.
I was homeless for a few years. The quarantine/containment measures are turning into a really big problem for the homeless population.
I don't even know where to begin trying to talk about that. At this point, I find the whole homelessness in the US thing simply infuriating. We mostly need to solve our housing supply issue and people are wholeheartedly against that and it's just infuriating.
I will add that Little Caesar's now has a "pizza portal" where you order online, pay online and enter a code to get your pizza yourself without ever interacting with a person. I don't know how to scream this from the rooftops so everyone gets the memo, but someone should.
It's not just about getting access to services; all of those homeless services are awful for limiting disease spread. Soup kitchens are going to force people into relatively close contact.
I'm sure you mean well, but I'm poor and medically handicapped, not stupid.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my oldest son. My younger son is a carrier.
People with CF typically require up to a quarter of a million dollars in medical treatment annually. With two people in the family who have it, that's a half million dollars annually.
I've supported all three of us on well under $20k annually for like more than 8 years or something. And I can do that because we've done a metric fuckton of research and made a lot of dietary changes and gotten off all the boat loads of drugs we used to take.
So having my food supply cut into like this potentially does enormous harm to me. And I will get zero sympathy from a world that didn't give a flying fuck about me when I was homeless and has spent years telling me to my face I'm a lunatic making up the whole thing about having CF and getting well when that's not supposed to be possible.
For me, this is very scary stuff. I literally am better off not eating than eating the wrong things.
A silver lining of the past decade of horrifying shittiness is that poverty and social callousness taught me this: My condition actually benefits from semi-fasting and I can live for several days at this point on almost no food. It no longer even causes nose bleeds and fun stuff like that.
I'm a good bit stressed out and suggestions that I'm too dumb to be aware that ready to eat options exist are in no way comforting to me.
A lot of them are things I absolutely cannot eat for fear of being immediately sick and beginning to undo nearly two decades of extremely hard won, painful progress against a Dread Disease that should have already killed me and I often wish it had. This is a shitty life in a shitty world full of amazingly callous people and I'm really not happy to still be here at this point.
I’m not happy about this either, though my family doesn’t have any dietary restrictions. I’m just recounting an option that is still available, I’m not implying stupidity for anyone involved.
Domino’s is allowing no contact delivery. You pay online for the food plus any tip you want for the driver, and tell them where to leave the delivery, such as at the front door. They leave the food without any need for in person interaction.
I probably can't do that in my building. It's a secure building and I've never figured out how to get delivered food here. You need a key to enter the building.
But it's good info and thank you for posting it. I hope it helps other people.
> But, wow. This is beginning to look pretty scary.
This is the main benefit I see of having our government take these measures: making people like you realize THIS IS SERIOUS. It has "looked pretty scary" for almost two months. And no one has taken it seriously. And now we're here.
I practice extreme germ control daily. So it has nothing whatsoever to do with me not taking it seriously.
I just think I am unlikely to get coronavirus because I'm a fucking hermit who works from home and doesn't touch anything and practices germ control so my genetic disorder won't kill me.
Maybe read all my comments before making insulting assumptions about me. I've already talked about having CF in this thread.
> I live an SRO. I don't have a kitchen. I currently don't have a fridge. I have a small grill and some shelving to store stuff.
I hesitate to ask about the size of the space you have available, but in Paris it's pretty common to find one room apartments that are only 9 square meters. Typically you put a one or two top induction or electric stove (portable ones are actually very cheap and work well) above a minifridge and a hutch for dishes/spices with a sink about the size of your hands.
This is true. That doesn't make it an invitation for the entire world to grill me about the specifics of my life.
Previous opinion piece by me if people really want to know what I think about how I'm allowed to mention a thing about my life and then decline to answer invasive personal questions:
It's rather self-victimizing to refer to what has occurred here as someone "grilling" you about the specifics of your life or being invasive.
If you don't want to discuss your apartment size, then I suggest to stop listing the contents and layout. It doesn't appear to me that others have a particular interest in your living specifics.
Myself I would find none of this to be invasive, offensive, threatening, or even very personal. As someone with extended multiple illnesses I do not have a secure living situation and I'm entirely unconcerned what fairly anonymous people know or think about it.
Keep in mind that this is all subject to change on a daily basis. A serious recommendation: if you don't have it already, make sure you have at least some easy to prepare canned/dry food (i.e ramen/soup/veggies/crackers/whatever) that you can store/prepare (along with some bottled water) in the event that you are unable to get takeout for a period of time. This is a good idea in general, more so right now.
A substantial number care about the hiring supply crisis and are YIMBYs (even though my yard is currently at risk). Beyond advocacy we and many others donate to support our neighbors and additionally support the serious tax support supplied. It's not perfect and systemic changes could help a lot but it is what we do locally and as a locality, what we are able to do. I'm sure there are naysayer opinions and I'll check back to read them if someone would be so kind as to leave some. Even better would be concrete solution specifications (link to something of substance?). Not that I'll likely reply, debating on the internet seems a low value use of time.
Even better would be concrete solution specifications (link to something of substance?).
We've torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and zoned out of existence a lot of housing options that are being termed Missing Middle Housing.
The current YIMBY movement and Missing Middle Advocacy is the latest attempt to try to address this issue. New Urbanism was a previous one.
None of them get at the roots of the problem, which date to "the boys" returning home from WW2 and the birth of the modern American suburb.
In a nutshell, the vast majority of our housing financing mechanisms, tax incentives, etc etc are aimed at helping people get single family detached homes and homes today are more than twice the size they were in the 1950s while housing about one less person.
So our housing policies have caused "home inflation" in some sense. Homes are bigger and have more amenities -- or don't exist at all.
We now expect single people to rent a place designed for a nuclear family and get roommates to fill the empty bedrooms and split the rent. Then we make movies, like Single White Female, about what a nightmare it is to be forced to make ends meet by living with a total stranger and do nothing to change our policies.
I've made several stabs at trying to write about this, but none of that has gotten any traction.
You are right that posting on the internet is mostly a waste of time. But I'm medically handicapped, so it's where I spend the majority of my time, though I would prefer to actually have a life. I simply don't.
I am involved in stuff locally in my small town. I'm no one important and it may never lead to better housing here. On the upside, the local police department does hand out my fliers for homeless resources -- which is mostly websites, mostly written by me. So maybe the time I spend online isn't a total waste.
Have a great day.
Edit: Those are not intended to be "substantive" supporting links. I've studied this problem space for decades. I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I don't know of any other sources that will say exactly what I would like them to say. Sorry.
I am curious why you think that homelessness is a supply issue?
Do you currently have enough funds or collateral to purchase a modest home but there are no homes for sale in your area? Or do you mean the taxpayers should provide homes for free to the homeless?
The knock-on effects of homelessness cost society far more than free housing would. The number of homeless is not massive, and effective, high-density housing is not expensive on a governmental scale.
To say nothing of the moral imperative to care for our most vulnerable people. A wealthy country with a homeless population shames itself.
Anyone is insane if they don't 100% think that in 5 years, these shutdowns are going to be a weapon used to shut down rallies, protests, and potentially even elections that any current government doesn't feel like permitting.
I do not think that in 5 years these shutdowns are going to be a weapon to shut down rallies and protests, and I think that you are tremendously ignorant of how creeping tyranny actually works in real life instead of comic books.
The PATRIOT act was special emergency powers in response to an “unprecedented” attack on our nation requiring periodic renewal.
Here we are two decades later, with it renewed.
Per Wiki:
> Many of the act's provisions were to sunset beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. In the months preceding the sunset date, supporters of the act pushed to make its sun-setting provisions permanent, while critics sought to revise various sections to enhance civil liberty protections. In July 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a reauthorization bill with substantial changes to several of the act's sections, while the House reauthorization bill kept most of the act's original language. The two bills were then reconciled in a conference committee criticized by Senators from both the Republican and Democratic parties for ignoring civil liberty concerns.
> [...]
> Following a lack of Congressional approval, parts of the Patriot Act expired on June 1, 2015. With passing the USA Freedom Act on June 2, 2015, the expired parts were restored and renewed through 2019.
Gov. Baker has done the same today in Massachusetts. A one month ban on on-site service starting Tuesday. Any food establishment will be allowed to do delivery or take out even if they didn't previously have a license for it.
How many meals should you deliver in one delivery? In what order? Where can the food be in the car? (Is it ok to put it on the floor?) How long can the food be allowed to get cold before it's no longer ok to deliver? What are you expected to cover, insurance wise, for your delivery drivers? How is your business prepared if your delivery driver has an accident? How much do you need to contribute to vehicle maintenance? Who owns the vehicle?
Yeah, I'd say it's definitely not just 'throw food in a box' and driving it somewhere.
As much as you want, whatever order makes sense, anywhere, yes, FDA says 2 hours in the danger zone, google the rest or get a legalzoom consultation if you're unsure.
Aside, but I want to call out Miami Dade Public Schools for being the only public school system I'm aware of that has had a contingency plan in place for years:
On rare occasions it may be necessary to close a school(s) due to weather or other emergency situations. If this occurs, the district will make every effort to ensure that our students' educational opportunities continue while at home. Throughout the years, the district has compiled a comprehensive collection of online content and digital resources. The district also provides mobile devices for students to check out for home use to ensure that district students (non charter) can continue their learning without interruption.
...
The Instructional Continuity Plan (ICP) has three components: Content Delivery, Mobile Devices, and Internet Access. Content Delivery explains which resources students will use for core instruction and which materials can be used as supplemental resources to enhance core instruction. Mobile Devices provides the steps the district is taking to ensure that any student who needs a mobile device to access the instructional resources will be provided with one, upon request, for the duration of the schools' closure. ... Internet Access poses the greatest challenge to ensuring that M-DCPS students can continue their studies while at home. The district has taken steps throughout the years to assist students in getting access to the internet at home through projects such as The 1Million Project; however, partnerships with service providers is crucial to providing free or reduced-cost internet service to students should the district close in case of emergency situations.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) is continuing its efforts to provide support to students and their families during school closures, which begin tomorrow, March 16. From distance learning, to community feedings, to facilitating childcare for essential medical personnel, M-DCPS stands firm in its commitment to support the South Florida community during this time of uncertainty.
A support hotline was established for teachers, students, and parents seeking assistance with distance learning.
During school closures, students and families may pick up hot meals to go, both breakfast and lunch, between 9:00 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.
A Mental Health Services hotline will be available for students.
An Employee Assistance Program hotline will also be available.
In contrast, I am extremely disappointed in how haphazard things are going in NC. I'm particularly disappointed in the UNC system which appears to have done zero advanced planning.
I don't think this is hurricane prep. I was in Miami for Andrew. Hurricanes knock out power for weeks. Kids wouldn't be able to learn from home during that. I can't really think of another scenario where kids are stuck at home while infrastructure is all fine other than the one we currently find ourselves in.
This is going to be an economic catastrophe unless there's somehow a nationwide bailout to literally all brick and mortar businesses. I know of several local bar/restaurants that are considering shutting down for good, and a colleague near Melbourne told me of 4 that already have (I'm eastern US). Even if this all blows over in 3 months, we'll have a huge surge in homelessness and folks needing social assistance across the board.
A restaurant near me already laid off 20 and we aren't even that far into this. A lot of restaurants, bars, and gyms are operating close to the edge of insolvency as it is.
Oh and by the way the timetable on the retail apocalypse just got pushed up to this week.
This is the exact problem with rampant “capitalism” and Raeganomics. This is where we end up.
Bailouts for the rich and corporations and that’s it.
Things seem great until they don’t. And then it’s go fuck yourself. No matter how conservative you are I ask you to look in the mirror and ask yourself if this is really how you want your kids to live.
It's less about insolvency and more about having a ton of savings. The entire business model is driven by customers, and they go from netting $2k/day to losing on salaries and rent. How long do you think a successful bar could survive hemorrhaging money on a daily basis, with no hopes of when customers would be allowed to return? What bank is going to write a loan that risky to keep them afloat?
Totally agree. The bailout of the banks has started with 0% rates and massive QE, which at the end of the day while I think necessary to prevent a credit crisis will do nothing to help the real economic situation; demand is dead for a while because of the health situation.
We should consider more radical measures like temporary rent/mortgage freezes.
> The bailout of the banks has started with 0% rates and massive QE, which at the end of the day while I think necessary to prevent a credit crisis
Well, no, if you bailed out businesses and consumers directly, there also wouldn't be a credit crisis.
Structurally, though, that's fiscal stimulus, which isn't the Feds job, and good luck getting much of that through Congress, and by that I mostly mean the Senate Republican Caucus.
> We should consider more radical measures like temporary rent/mortgage freezes.
While not that particular measure, a number of states and localities have adopted or are considering eviction and/or foreclosure bans, which leaves mortgage/rent technically due but limits nonpayment consequences.
HN's culture against partisan political statements looks particularly like sticking one's head in the sand these days.
Coronavirus is not a political thing, but our (partisan) elected leaders had an enormous amount of power over how prepared we were, and their agendas shape the on-going response. It's impossible to talk accurately about the problem or solution without mentioning parties and politicians by name.
Are we going to blame politics on the Italian or other European countries’ responses too? What’s Italy’s excuse for being so unprepared? The simple fact is that partisanship is relevant: Democrats claimed travel bans were xenophobic however Taiwan issued one on Dec 31 and have very few cases. Denmark and Poland closed their borders. When Trump does it, it’s automatically “bad,” when Europe does it, it’s automatically good. That’s what we are dealing with. Trump could cure cancer and the Democrats and the media would turn it into a civil war. The US is actually doing really well with this right now, relatively speaking: look at Italy as an example. Their first case was Feb 20. The US’s first case was Jan 21. Yet Italy has a dramatically higher death rate, despite “better” healthcare.
Do you realise that you are defending someone that tried to buy a German company that is working on a vaccine to give it exclusively to the US once it was ready?
This is crazy. There is nothing any party could do to have prevented the virus from reaching the United States, aside from a complete shutdown of the borders, including for American citizens. It is too transmissible, too undetectable, etc, to prevent it. Containment is the only feasible option, and America is actually ahead of the curve. Unlike Italy and France and Europe, American states are shutting down before hospitals have yet to be overrun.
I did not say anyone could prevent the infection from reaching the US. The damage can vary wildly once it's here. Containment is not a binary outcome.
Among the tools govt has: funding science, appointing competent officials at CDC and State Dept, travel bans, quarantines, financial relief, effective messaging, targeted testing, subsidizing tests and treatment, restrictions on gatherings, anti-smoking campaigns, regulations to reduce air pollution, not telling people that it's an exaggeration or a hoax, inviting the other party to discuss a compromise on life-saving measures, acting on the CDC's recommendations, sending govt workers home, enforcing anti-gouging laws... it's a long list.
As has been discussed here and elsewhere, many of Trump's behaviors and much of the Republican agenda has pulled us in the opposite direction of where we needed to be to deal with this. In the CDC, many people are "acting" roles because Trump refuses to fill vacancies. The same is true of the State Dept.
However, no administration could have prevented it from reaching the US. Trump's closure of the Chinese border is more than almost any president would have dared done.
China? China is why we're in this mess. They were unable to contain it, which is why it's now a pandemic. Their actions to shut down society (which the US is now taking, well before our hospitals are overrun) came way way way later.
Japan, I don't know about.
South Korea is doing a good job, however it only took one rogue patient (patient 31) to go from 'well-contained' to 'nation-wide' epidemic. This is why containment measures are doomed to fail if the goal is to prevent the spread entirely. It only takes one person to screw it up.
The gap between the rates on the 30 year treasury and the 30 year mortgage increased from ~1.5% to over 3% and getting worse, before QE4 was announced (and this was already pricing in some fed action). This indicates that investors stopped buying mortgage-backed securities which would have eventually resulted in home buying activity stopping and a housing market crash. I don’t think any bailout for restaurants and bars or mortgage/rent holiday would have helped with this. I’m not saying such stimulus isn’t necessary, but it doesn’t replace fed policy.
Most likely, given that both the White House and the Speaker agree that there should be a financial package aimed at those individuals affected, this is one of those times when both banks and individuals will be given relief.
Such a bailout is feasible. During the financial crisis houses were physically built and purchased without enough people with the income to cover the loan. The difference here is that there is no underlying financial issue. People will still want to go to restaurants and bars after this is over, and it will end.
What about solvency, and the knock on effect to creditors. They can't pay the booze supplier and they go out of business etc. This could go on for months. Most businesses don't make those sweet SaaS margins. Same for airlines.
Other countries are doing loan payment, rent, and interest moratoriums, etc.
We've built everything with growth as an underlying assumption with no ability to pause things and focus on essential services for a month or two and then start back up.
Creditors can experience some of the pain that they normally inflict on others. They are not sacrosanct and are the least important parties in economic relations during an emergency. As normality is restored, they will have new opportunities during the ensuing large scale financial restructuring.
Bob’s Drywall Supply has net 60 for a delivery of drywall.
Constructor Bill now can’t pay. Bob’s Drywall is a creditor and is on the hook for a product he already shipped. Now Bob’s Drywall Supply can’t pay the company that provided him with Net 90 terms.
So Bob and Bill are now insolvent. And they fire their employees.
Suggesting that creditors somehow deserve “pain,” is just cruel. Creditors don’t “inflict pain” on people — they provide capital to people with a reasonable expectation of getting paid back. Of course I don’t care much about the Payday Lender/predatory lenders so much, but suggesting that creditors deserve some sort of payback is ridiculous. The vast majority of businesses rely on credit, without credit, you would have an economic collapse. And they aren’t the “least important” parties — they are the most important because they’re the ones providing the capital for businesses to operate.
The problem is when everybody takes a hit except the "too big to fail" banks. That's what happened in the last financial crisis, the government bailed out only the big banks by buying their toxic loans at face value. When Obama tried to also bail out individual homeowners it sparked the Tea Party backlash and he pretty much backed off on those plans.
You misremember. [1] has the video on CNBC that started the Tea Party.
“Yesterday Rick Santelli, who reports from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade the for CNBC, unleashed a rant against Obama’s newly announced housing bailout plan, intended to help some homeowners refinance mortgages and avoid foreclosure.”
Their main issue was being pro-austerity. Most of what they focused on was cutting funding for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social services. They wanted a smaller government at all costs (though curiously they never called for reducing military spending).
Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, was the group that was specifically against bailing out the banks. The Tea Party was more about not helping regular people.
I thought it was obvious I was talking about financial institutions, which are just going to have to eat it for a while, although with interest rates now at 0% that will be more manageable. I can't address every aspect of the economy in a short comment.
The company, Construction Materials Inc, that supplied Bob's Drywall Supply should accept a delay in payment. In order to ensure payment comes as quickly as possible, an order block (no new orders are accepted from Bob's) or a shipping block (orders are accepted but not shipped) or both are placed on Bob's account.
Now, of course, what of Construction Materials, Inc? Surely they buy the raw materials from someone and ...so on. Everyone does - or should do - the same: don't adjust the terms, simply accept that the past due items are past due and will be paid a bit later than normal.
Eventually it will hit a bank or large financial institution, and they ought to do the same: accept the situation and wait. It's costly when businesses go bankrupt and everyone knows that this situation is affecting everyone else and will blow over in about six weeks.
At some point it hits Joe the employee and he can’t wait 6 months to get paid because he lives paycheck to paycheck and will starve by then. Overall you are right until it comes to individuals. A dry wall supplier can close its doors for six months and their products will t go bad. Joe the employee can’t just not eat for six months. If we do this systematically we would arrive at UBI. We would also need to delay all tax collection and so forth.
That's where 0% credit comes in. It needs to take the whole chain. We shut down for 3 months. Net 60 terms become net 150. Net 90 becomes net 180. Everyone pays as planned, just up to 6 months later and with no interest.
This could help, but note that it still puts a crimp in things, because entities that extend credit (in any form) are counting on previous debts being paid in order to offer money/goods to other customers.
This applies even to the banks at the top of the chain -- at least until you get to (in the U.S.) the Fed itself, which can will money into existence if needed.
This is why the money has to go to the bottom so it can bubble up. All debts get paid off along the way. Government bails out the small business, the small business pays the distributor, they pay their creditor, etc. Investors still make money at the top.
If bubble up economics becomes a thing I want full credit.
If the 700 billion dollars for quantitative easing went to 200 million U.S. adults, that'd be $3,500 apiece. If spent at the rate of $700 a week, that'd be five weeks' worth.
There may be no underlying financial issue, but percentage wise we're going down much faster. September to Oct 2008 was a 9.5% drop (steepest month drop). Past 30 days was a 20.5% drop. Tracking s&p 500.
It doesn't even seem to be a real index on economic activity anymore either...
In my personal view 'The Market's purely reflect consumer confidence. They appear divorced from actual reality, aside from how that affects the mindset of easily panicked lemmings.
Not really. There's tons of steady demand to drive money forward. You can double or half average consumer confidence and it won't change the price of a burger or a t-shirt.
The difference in this case is that the stock market is a highly efficient process, where feedback paths are short, information is shared widely, and there is potential to make a lot of money on other's misjudgements, automatically correcting the price in the process. This means changes in confidence are almost immediately reflected in the price.
T-shirts, on the other hand, much more slowly change to match confidence, for the same reasons. If you think people collectively over- or undervalue T-shirts, it is rather hard to make money off of that mistake. In part because it implies moving physical stock, but also because they are a relatively refined product. Markets for natural resources see some of the same fluctuations as stock markets, although not to the same degree.
Thinking something is over or under valued is very different from general confidence in the economy. In daily life you're not betting on the economy, you're part of it. You work and spend even if you think the nukes are going to kill everyone. Confidence has a vastly weaker connection to demand for goods.
If people think the dollar is significantly overvalued, they'll switch to gold, bitcoin, rolls of toilet paper, or other forms of ad-hoc currency. That's what happens in countries with 1000% inflation, for example.
Stock market is a tricky gauge. People sell for all sorts of reasons even if some of it is rational. Always good to remember that the fact that there’s a sale also means there’s a buyer. Another fact is there could be large number of shares that never traded. It’s hard to dissect this information from price alone. All we know from a dip is that there’s more demand to sell than buy. That’s hardly enough information to see the full picture.
Stock prices don't really matter in the short-term, and we are lucky that the underlying financials are good, and that -- at the end of the largest bull run in history -- many of the largest companies have lots of cold hard cash. Apples hundreds of billions don't look so silly now, do they?
Oh, BTW, the floor is hard-set at zero, which they'll never get to, since -- given there is no underlying financial issue, and that demand is going to be higher than ever once we're done with this -- all these companies have intrinsic value.
I won't opine on the correct value of the stock market at the moment, but the drop in demand due to measures needed to preserve life cause a financial issue. Many/most consumer-facing businesses can't withstand a drop in demand to near zero for a period of at least several months. So those businesses, absent some sort of national bailout, will go bankrupt. Or at the very least, they will go dormant. Either way there will be layoffs, and of course the laid off employees will reduce their spending further. Even once the virus is under control, it will take time to reverse this damage.
Yes, of course, the market won't go to zero. But some firms will go under, and we don't know how severe the economic impact will be. Just because the crisis began with a natural disaster rather than a financial one doesn't mean there can't be serious financial impact.
Sure, but economic fallout from natural disasters typically recover much faster. It doesn't shock our trust in the financial system, and people are more community minded, since no person can be blamed for it. Already, we are seeing bipartisan attempts at governmental stimulus. Did you ever think you'd see Trump and Pelosi agree on government spending, because the white house was pretty quick to endorse the house's plan.
But back to pandemics. Pandemics typically result in major booms due to (a) the die off, (b) the pent-up demand, and (c) the fact that everyone still trusts the financial system. The 1918 pandemic certainly caused major GDP losses, and short-term pain, but also caused the 20s
I think you’re overlooking the cascading effect of a lot of small businesses closing doors (voluntarily or involuntarily) while this blows over — not knowing how long it will take to blow over.
Short of a bailout, that’s not going to be easy to recover from. And even a bailout won’t be enough to bring about a full recovery anytime soon.
You should only buy now if you a) suddenly have a lot of cash, AND b) can definitely take a long-term position without needing the money for 5-10 years.
Everyone else should wait for the upward trend to make sure it's not going to get much worse. You want to "predict the staircase" and not "the floor".
To put a finer point on it, a fully funded safety net is a good idea before moving money into investments. Enough to cover basic expenses for, let’s say, a year. How long exactly depends on your risk tolerance.
Not a financial advisor, standard disclaimers, etc.
Several restaurants in downtown Seattle have already closed. More will probably come over the next few weeks.
As I expect this to largely continue to be a problem through summer the tourism industry in downtown is going to be hit very hard.
The economic side of this is going to hit like a ton-of-bricks. It's going to be very painful, and we should do everything we can as a society to take care of those that are hit hardest by it.
The Alaska cruise season will likely not happen this year. The Canadian government has banned cruise ships from Canadian ports until 1 July. Legally, the foreign-flagged ships of major cruise lines must call at a foreign port between calls at US ports. All Alaska cruises call at Vancouver on their way from Seattle to Alaska.
Cruise ships were the a primordial Uber -- regulatory arbitrage to compete in an existing industry. The put a hotel on water just to avoid hotel regulations.
I'm not mourning this. They're floating luxury hotels spewing 10x more sulphur oxide than all of Europe's 260 million cars.
Ironically this economic shutdown is probably what needs to be done to save the planet. Funny how humans react when their death might come in 2 weeks and not in 20 years.
That's a report released in 2019, but the subject is 2017 emissions.
Since Jan 1 2020 all vessels are restricted to low sulphur fuel. It used to be up to 3.5% worldwide, now you're only allowed 0.50%. Near EU you were already restricted, seems that was up to 1.5%
Unfortunately, reading the article does point to some bad actions: One cruise company seems to be installing scrubbers. They basically take the SOx out of the exhaust (and then dump it somewhere). This is still really bad for the environment, though it makes it appear you abide by the IMO regulations.
In any case, SOx emissions should be drastically slower since 2020. Also, further reductions should be possible. This as 0.50 SOx fuel didn't really exist; initially the plan was to mix 3.5% and 0.10% to get to 0.50%. Ideally the IMO now restricts everyone to 0.10% as it'll probably take 10 years again before anything like that takes effect.
Protip: COBRA is almost always more expensive than a comparable plan you can buy from an exchange. Often hundreds of dollars a month more expensive if you have a family.
The only problem with getting a plan on an exchange is that you may need to satisfy a deductible again. YMMV of course.
With COBRA I believe you can also pay your premium after the month it's due. This can be advantageous because you can opt to not pay for your last month before switching to another plan if you end up not using any services from your COBRA plan that month.
I'm curious how this works in practice? Rent pays for groundskeepers, repairs and maintenance, your landlord's income, insurance, etc. Mortgages seem more straightforward. You would still owe the original amount and are likely still accruing interest.
> Let them go bankrupt or have the banks suspend mortgages.
Is this a serious comment or are you trolling?
Forget about a recession, the devastation a policy like this would cause would plunge the US into a full blown depression. Deflation and asset price collapse across the board. YEARS of stagnation.
(To me) the answer here seems clear: A direct bailout in the form of $ to consumers and some mix of direct $ and tax credits to businesses.
Yes it's like the "cancel all debts" idea. Great idea, but emm.. by the way you do realise that "money in your bank account" is technically a debt that the bank owes you, so that gets cancelled too!
Ah "cancel all debts to people not banks". Great idea, but emm. OK so the bank now doesn't have the assets on it's books, goes bankrupt can't pay you that money in your savings account.
"cancel all debts to people not banks, and let the government bail out those banks". Great Idea, but.... something something hyperinflation.
Who pays the landlords, they aren't public utilities after all. Yet, a government stimulus to landowners instead of citizens would be a bit disingenuous in my opinion.
They announced $50 billion in SBA loans (up to $2 million per business) for small and medium businesses. Interest rate is 3.75%. These kind of funds will help a lot of businesses float through:
I haven't read about the QE4 plans. How will it work?
This is just tip of the iceberg, now that this is declared national emergency, FEMA money and other sources are unlocked. Meanwhile, it's just the first week of things heating up to the point of these shut downs. Give the government time.
They have time enough to shut down businesses in a snap of their fingers. I don't think it's too much to expect at least a basic outline of a remuneration plan at the same time. I do not see why we should give them time on one issue but not the other.
Governments have more fiscal freedom to give out loans than grants. Many of the prior bailouts were also loans (at terms that no bank would offer hence the bailout bit).
Businesses should take advantage of these, and a restaurant operating in a city where operating a restaurant is illegal will not have credit available anywhere else.
Quantitative easing and most of the bailouts I can think of are in form of loans, not grants. The 9/11 airline bailout was 1/3 grants and 2/3 of it was in form of loans. Loans are the default form of bailout pretty much always. They turn into "grants" when the worst-hit businesses can't repay them, but they still allow business to continue and not bankrupt their suppliers and amployees.
At least in California, there will be guidance about evictions and the plan is to provide housing for all 108,000 homeless people. Italy has frozen many financial/property/contractual relations and it's likely that this will spread to other jurisdictions.
I'm a little surprised that commercial landlords of businesses that are affected aren't stepping up to offer rent concessions. Yes, I get they don't want to take a hit -- but they're generally in much better positions to do so than restaurants and cafés that run on less than 5% profit margins during good times.
(And, yes, I'm sure the more leftist and anti-capitalist out there will say "but are you really surprised?," and they'll absolutely have a point.)
It is your government's responsibility, local or federal I don't mind. This is why you pay taxes, to provide services to your citizens, one of which is disaster preparedness. I wouldn't be quick to put the burden onto businesses. If such a thing were mandated you would pretty quickly bankrupt a bunch of landlords who were not in the position to take it, and you would shift a bunch of property ownership to the banks, the consquences of which I am not sure of.
It isn't so much about greed but rather responsibility. Is it really a businesses responsibility to take care of citizens? Shouldn't the government be doing that, and don't you pay them to do that?
I know America is skewed a bit, having businesses provide you your healthcare probably confuses their role in society. But something is off if you feel we should turn to a commercial realtor for community support.
I don't disagree with that, to be clear -- my thought is more that everyone is in this together. There's a lot of actions only a government can practically take, and others they would probably do better than private actors even if private actors could also do it. (Health insurance being a prime example.) But none of that precludes a landlord from giving businesses (and, of course, individuals and families) a rent break without waiting for the government to compel them to do so.
definitely not just eatery. Someone I know work in retail front and interior design firm. Needless to say, they had to let go a few workers because many retail clients are putting all their projects on hold.
A lot of restaurants stay in the red for the first 3~5 years. I have a friend who just opened a brewery in Tennessee in December. They don't serve food; it's just beer, so they might be alright - but I should probably call and see how he's doing. I sure hope they've started bottling to canning.
You'd hope owners would keep a buffer of either cash or loans/credit-line to last three months, but a lot of them starting up may not have that bootstrap capital. Restaurants that have been around for years with good management can probably weather a month or two. Even the best well restaurants are going to feel the strain if we go to month three.
This time of year is the beginning of a slump past Mother's Day for restaurants too (at least in the UK). And they probably won't get much out of Mother's Day this year either.
Coming out of the Xmas period, May, June, July looming which are low turnover periods.
If you're already teetering, you're going to fail. The UK's had a lot of big chains shut down or scale back recently too, there was a big explosion in restaurants and bars about 5 years ago and the first round of losers happened over the last couple of years.
Illinois governor Pritzer announced the same about 8 hours ago starting tomorrow evening (takeout / delivery would remain open). Conveniently aligning with the closing of schools I guess. I strongly expect tomorrow will be my last day in the office for a while.
This is overall a good move if we want a chance to greatly slow the spread. However it needs to be coordinated with the rest of the country if we want to minimize the total downtime. Shutting down Washington now and having to wait weeks for Idaho to follow (where there are no reported cases) is just going to force Washington to extend theirs as long as it takes for the last state to shut down.
Right, the actual number of cases is almost certainly over 1. The parent comment just said Idaho had no reported cases which is factually incorrect. The first reported case was on Friday.
Good. Seattle resident here. Have been ordering takeout for the past two weeks and honestly don't understand the large parties I've been seeing in local pubs for the past week. I find it sad that this needs a 'proclamation' from the Governor, when basic common sense is that you need to avoid crowds.
If a country discovers the measures are too strict, it can always reduce them a little bit. The US looks like just a pair of weeks away from disaster, acting now may be enough to make that disaster brief and having the situation under control shortly after.
Similar measures were just mandated in IL. Basically, take out and delivery are your only real options. We are kinda stocked up, but we will both keep ordering in just to keep local businesses going. Our family unit is oddly priviledged during this outbreak.
Tbh, I am slowly starting to get worried as recent FED move again focuses on banks and not on small business relief.
Yes and no. Its mandate is to keep the stability of the financial system, price stability, full employment..
As you can see, bailing out businesses, as you framed it, could be helpful in avoiding full fledged system collapse, which just happens to be their mandate.
Anything the fed does affects large and perhaps medium sized businesses directly. A couple of percent lower interest rate on their line of credit matters fuck all for small business facing a total collapse in demand.
Same with SBA loans - how much paperwork will it take to owe a huge sum to the government with an uncertain business environment in a few months? A lot of small places will just close.
Fiscal stimulus is the only approach to keep these businesses afloat. Honestly at this point it might be better to skip the middle man and cut checks to individuals.
How long does this go on for? Realistically we can't just live with the world shut down (can we?) with a vaccine far off, this can't be the new normal?
This goes on until enough people gets the disease to that natural contamination is slow enough not to overwhelm the health care infrastructure.
I don't think anybody can give you any actual number. But it's not hard to test a sample of people and determine the virus rate of spread, so we will know it when it happens.
If you do it properly (flattening the curve), it takes longer than getting hit with the full-height wave.
You have to “keep your foot on the brakes” until the disease is no longer a threat. Take a look at countries where there is success - Taiwan, Mainland China outside Hubei, HK, Singapore, SK - they must keep whatever countermeasures are working for them in place to some degree or risk another wave of infections. I think the culture of wearing masks really helps, despite the public messaging to the contrary. It seems like it would be good if mask manufacturing spins up enough to totally saturate the world over the next few months, and western cultures get over themselves and start making it common to wear them in public.
My Daughter was working as a temp between jobs and the work has now been stopped, she had two second interviews planned in Sydney this week now both positions have been retracted and nobody hiring or interviewing, she has about 7 weeks of cash savings and 4 months lease on a rental. Oh and no unemployment benefit or subsidies as she is New Zealander working in Australia.
Young People at the lowest risk from this virus are going to be much worse off than just catching a fucking bad cold.
The UK's answer to the problem is starting to look a lot more sensible than total economic chaos being caused by all other methods.
Happy to be downvoted to nothing because I am so over this.
Lives and dollars are not totally different things. How many lives will be ruined by total financial destruction? How many will commit suicide in the months and years after due to financial issues?
Lives and money are not the same thing. Hard stop. I understand your point, but I just disagree with the expected outcomes here.
Realistically how much would it cost to bail out these businesses and provide a safety net to people? I imagine the numbers are less than we'd first think.
Why do you expect long term unemployment here? Unless the virus crisis lasts for a year, in a few months things will be back to normal hopefully and you can expect the economic activity to take off again.
This is either a straw man argument, or I disagree that there should be long term unemployment here. Govt programs and laws will probably be needed to provide that safety net.
I'm not saying that death rate and unemployment are unrelated (equating lives and money together). I am saying that we should prioritize lives first, and figure out the money once we stop the damage.
>> I am saying that we should prioritize lives first, and figure out the money once we stop the damage.
False dichotomy. There are plenty of economists and accountants and others who can work on the economic relief package and do so in a meaningful way while scientists and medical teams (plus politicians) handle the lifesaving operations. There is no reason they cannot run in parallel.
Uhhhhh ok. I'm not really sure why you think I said they can't run in parallel? What I am saying is that you can't prioritize money over lives and actively do things to harm the life of others.
This whole comment is about the approach to covid-19 where life goes on as normal and you don't practice social distancing at all. One argument for people that do that is that they can't take off work because their businesses are open and will fire them. I believe the businesses should be forced into social distancing and provided financial help if unable to do that. We're actively going to see this happen in the next week—it started tonight—will it be late?
Those are the questions we need to figure out as a country or even as a world. Realistically, the govt needs to provide that safety net for its citizens.
However, let's start with the decision that lives are more important than money.
There is economic activity still going on. A complete economic collapse is different than what I'd expect to see.
A relevant question is "how much would this cost?", to which I have no clue. If we're talking billions of dollars, that's essentially a write-off amount at the federal level.
This is a straw man argument. Nobody proposes shutting down essential parts of the economy, such as food production or basic infrastructure. I think we are going to survive just fine without new iPhones or SV startups for a few weeks.
People work their whole lives to make the value we measure in dollars. We humans have been dying for millenia for lack of the material wealth we have now. Having materials/dollars/whatever you want to call it is clearly worth lives because people spend vast portions of their precious lives getting it. If anything, valuing 1 more year of working life at 80 over ten years over 10years of working in your 20s would be silly.
I'm not saying that people don't need material wealth to survive in our society. I think that wealth can come from somewhere other than packing a petri dish bar with patrons who want to drink. For example, we're realistically looking at govt intervention at some point.
It starts with a concerted decision that lives are more important than money. If we can't get onboard with that, then there will always be people that put their well-being over others.
I predict a 1% chance of that happening in the US. The 1% is due to the possibility that so many people are affected that they overthrow the government.
Even if we accept your premise, how many dollars in economic activity will be destroyed by the deaths of enormous numbers of working age people because the hospitals were overloaded and they couldn't get the critical care they needed?
I know this is horrible, but likely not too many. In Italy they are currently kicking people over 60 out of the hospitals to make way for the younger people who are more likely to survive with medical treatment.
Hospital beds are a different story, but not what is important for COVID, which needs ICU beds. Hospital beds are much easier to deploy anywhere (and with the emergency measures taken federally, will see a huge increase due to waived FDA requirements for inspection). An ICU is much more involved, and requires ventilators, specialty beds, special equipment, etc. Much more difficult to deploy suddenly in response to sudden upticks.
If a lot of people die, a lot of economic value will be literally put into the ground: funerals, handling of estates, coffins. That's not long-term productive value. At best it reshuffles money in an optimal-blind way.
Except "working age people" are pretty much not impacted by this. The massive death rates are for people with existing preconditions: heart disease, lung problems, etc. There have been no deaths with children.
Practically speaking, the only thing a "working page person" (<60) could do is unknowingly spread the virus to someone else.
Sorry, I wish that were true. A non-trivial number of people under 60 year old also end up seriously ill and require critical care. In Wuhan half of all patients admitted to the ICU were age 25-49 ( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... ).
For these younger people their prospects are good if they receive that care. An overloaded health system may be unable to provide that care to everyone who won't survive without it, including some younger people.
A tremendous number of working people also have preconditions which are implicated for covid19 including hypertension and obesity.
If you are a younger person and carelessly get an avoidable infection and end up in an overloaded hospital needing intensive care, your life may well be saved due to being triaged ahead of an older person with worse prospects. But in that case your life would be saved at the expense of someone else's. ... someone else who's infection might also be due to your spreading. I wouldn't be okay with that, and I hope you're not either. So I hope your glib attitude doesn't mean that you're not taking avoidable risks.
In the US there hasn't yet been clearly established ethical guidance to direct triaging like that. Your local hospital may assign ICU care first come first served... if so mortality rates there for younger people won't look so good.
We will not value the lives of people with money over those that do not. Financial loss is _not_ the loss of life. Our lives are literally the only thing we have in this universe.
That's no what my comment said. The people who will be hit the hardest are those with little money and little employment protections. People working casual in these restaurants will be left with no job and no support.
Governments at all levels, companies and non-profits can (and I don't doubt will) help mitigate the financial hit in the months and years ahead. The California state government has for example promised to keep paying teachers and school staff. [1] Many tech companies for example are continuing to pay maintenance staff despite office closures. [2] NBA players have donated to arena staff affected by cancellations. [3]
But there is nothing anyone can do to bring back our loved ones.
If there is total financial destruction at the level of people losing their homes, not being able to eat, having their utilities cut off etc. it will be entirely due to policy choices that prioritise maintaining the current economic system and protecting the interests of the wealthy for the duration of the crisis over ensuring that everyone can survive with a basic, indeed decent, standard of life. By this I mean having their basic needs of nutrition, shelter, heat etc. met. For many (and I'm writing from the UK) this would actually be an improvement over the current situation.
Globally we are the richest society in history by a profoundly long way, we have enough resources to get through this crisis. There is no reason that anyone should lose their home, or starve, or be left without power. But we have to acknowledge that, just as in situations such as WWII, normal economic life and the interests of capital / shareholders / the wealthy have to take a back seat to ensuring that, as far as possible, everyone can maintain a decent standard of life.
Wow that twitter thread linked was a wild ride. They really are doing a huge experiment in the middle of a world-wide pandemic. I'll be really interested to see how it all works out.
What is the "UK's answer" that's different than every other country with similar rates has done? Authorities have already denied the whole "herd immunity" meme is any sort of active policy in the UK.
Now that there is a growing backlash, the UK authorities are rejecting that they ever were trying to achieve "herd immunity” by allowing 60-80% of the “low-risk” population to be exposed to SARS-CoV-2.
However, the article you link to does not differ in its details from what authorities such John Edmunds a professor Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said 2 days ago [0] and Ian Donald Professor Emeritus from University of Liverpool wrote the same day [1]
These authorities are backpedalling in the face of deserved widespread criticism. But rather than changing the course of UK policy, they are only disavowing the phrase “herd immunity”.
That still doesn’t answer what they are doing differently than everyone else. Seems like a whole lot of politics I’m not invested in.
I guess people want far more aggressive policies but the same could be said of the majority of places. Italy and Spain are very much the exception in western countries and they are facing a higher scale. Here in Canada the federal gov has done absolutely nothing besides increased spending and repeating critiques of other countries for being too aggressive, meanwhile our prime minister is in isolation and Quebec just announced major bans of restaurants and bars, while also critiquing the prime minister for doing nothing. The current policy sounds more in line with WHO and the wider health system recommendations.
Even the US has faced significant backlash for their border policies from these same countries (our health minister has repeatedly claimed it has no scientific basis to close borders to places like China).
It’s hard to tell what people want vs just opportunistically critiquing politicians. I’m more curious from a practical healthcare perspective what they are expecting vs what’s actually being done. Border bans (can they do that w/o parliament)? Shutting down gatherings? Directly influence the health administration to test more? Better airport screening?
> Young People at the lowest risk from this virus are going to be much worse off than just catching a fucking bad cold.
It's not a "fucking bad cold" for young people.
- Over 50% of ICU patients in Netherlands from COVID-19 are under 50. [1]
- Over 50% of ICU patients in France are under 60. [2]
- Over 40% of patients requiring hospitalization in China were under 50. [3]
Young people are not invincible. The fact that they can use up a significant chunk of already scarce medical resources suggests that we really shouldn't be sending that message and encouraging young people to not give a sh*t about the epidemic.
Those numbers measure the wrong thing. The proportion of young people in care means nothing without knowing also the proportion of young people infected.
Even if the number of young infected is much larger, it still means a significant number of young people need hospital treatment. A cold basically never needs hospital treatment. So it may not be deadly for the young but it's certainly not a bad cold.
From a purely economic perspective, you might be right. However the cost is blood. The mortality rate goes from about 1% to above 3%, since the UK’s hospitals will quickly be overrun.
The cost will be at least the delta 1.3 million preventable deaths. This doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of folks left with pulmonary fibrosis, which has a 3-5 year life expectancy.
I have lived in the US for 20 years now - I am a millennial. I am originally from Peru. When all of this started I thought the US was going to handle it. We all were going to rally together and take care of each other. We would exercise social isolation and hold this virus off. The rate the trend is going should be scary for anyone (at least the people reading hacker news). I am surprised of people thinking this won't affect them. If widespread and out of control, it will affect everyone.
Funny enough that my country of birth, Peru, just declared a national emergency and declared quarantine for everyone in the country. Peru is a democratic country - at least for the last 20 years - but it had to enact this to stop the virus from spreading. It's a bold move, it's not a popular one, but it's the right one imho.
We should be doing the same, our current leader is - unfortunately - a coward who will always be afraid of taking a risk. It's on us then, as responsible citizens to make sure we don't go out unless we really need to for a while - at least that we can control. Just my two cents.
Would love to hear more on this. Official wording is something like “there have been no documented cases of transmission through food or food packaging” however it seems impossible to actually trace transmission anyway.
Pan fried apples are quite good and not hard to do. A little nutmeg and cinnamon. A sprinkle of brown sugar. Maybe a dash of cooking oil.
Yum-my.
Also, you can go looking for historical dishes. Early Americans had recipes that were heavy on things like cabbage and apples together because it might be all you had left in the cellar towards the end of winter.
Fully-cooked food (~160 degree F temp) is sanitary as of the time it's done cooking. For takeout food, the lowest risk is items with relatively little post-processing after being cooked - Thai food, for example, where the cook basically dumps it from a wok into a container.
The worst case is probably dishes where many people interact with raw ingredients to create a high-touch item. Compared to physical contact with people, it's still considered a relatively small transmission risk, but in relative terms, it's higher than something that's boxed up right after it's cooked.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadFull disclosure: I live in Seattle.
It's a strong recommendation without enforcement. This however could change in the coming days and weeks.
Source: https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/15/...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/seattle-are...
There is very little precedent I could find, however baltimore did impose a curfew in 2015 for a short period of time.
Furthermore, the lockdown of the Boston area after the marathon bombings is a very clear and recent precedent relating to a different public safety emergency.
Worse comes to worst, I suspect we’ll see MRAPs on the streets first and any legal fallout, later.
Could you cite some of that precedent? When I did my research around quarantines, the things I found said that precedent was very thin. What precedent there was typically was extremely deferential to government responses during emergencies and pandemic outbreaks.
I didn't find any SCOTUS cases myself, so I would be very curious to read the SCOTUS precedent against it.
Americans have a strong Constitutional right to free movement within the country. As with free speech, suspending that right for an individual requires either due process or specific imminent threat to public safety to withstand judicial scrutiny. That is the calculus. A good test would be "can the government suspend free speech" in this scenario, as similar legal constraints will apply to free travel. That the specific case involves disease quarantine doesn't matter that much, as the Constitution makes no such exception. I don't follow freedom of travel case law closely, I am only aware that loads of it exists and that it is extremely biased in favor of the individual right.
As a related point, in the US most quarantine authority resides with the States, not the Federal government. If the States don't enforce it, there is little the Federal government can do.
As you noted, the highest level of judicial scrutiny for constitutionally protected rights (like the freedom of speech) is strict scrutiny.
That doesn't mean the government is unable to restrict those rights, but it generally means that the Government's regulations must meet the following criteria:
1. is necessary to a "compelling state interest"; 2. that the law is "narrowly tailored" to achieving this compelling purpose; 3. and that the law uses the "least restrictive means" to achieve the purpose.
From all the descriptions of precedent around quarantine laws that I've seen, the judiciary was extremely deferential to Government decision making during a bona-fide epidemic.
Given that, I think a reasonable travel regulation to implement a regional quarantine would easily survive such scrutiny.
1. "compelling state interest" - maintaining the public health has long been held to be a compelling state interest. 2. "narrowly tailored" - if the regional quarantine was restricted to bona-fide epidemic outbreaks, and backed up by epidemiological experts, I think the courts will accept this. I think this is the criteria that the drafting will have to be most carefully tailored around. 3. "least restricted means" - I think the Governments have been demonstrating that they have been actively trying all the other less restrictive means, and they haven't been effective.
Based on this, I find it extremely unlikely that a court would rule against a regional lockdown quarantine.
In saying there was significant precedent against it, I was hoping you had something related to epidemiological outbreaks and public health quarantines. I find the argument that the courts have generally been skeptical of travel restriction to be quite unpersuasive. I don't think courts will view this as a "typical" travel restriction, and will give local / state / federal governments a lot of leeway in responding to this kind of an outbreak.
> The C.D.C. rewrote its quarantine guidelines in 2017 and they have never been tested in court. The Supreme Court has also never dealt with an infectious disease quarantine case, [Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University Law School who specializes in public health law] said.
The outliers where the courts allowed the kind of special reasoning being proposed here, which has happened on occasion, have almost universally enabled shameful chapters in American history e.g. Japanese internment. Courts are understandably reluctant to allow this kind of expedient violation of Constitutional rights.
“The Court’s postponement of argument sessions in light of public health concerns is not unprecedented. The Court postponed scheduled arguments for October 1918 in response to the Spanish flu epidemic. The Court also shortened its argument calendars in August 1793 and August 1798 in response to yellow fever outbreaks.”
But, if the US is ~11 days behind Italy in terms of infection rate, then we can expect a lockdown by ... Friday, March 20.
Good Lord.
Why, though? The whole point is to stop people gathering in public places.
> Curious about other commercial operations that could satisfy the rule
Again, why? These rules weren't put into place as a challenge for entrepreneurs.
A food truck with a couple of outdoor tables has got to be lower risk than a full-service bar/restaurant, while still giving us human companionship.
They got called to war. We are called to sit on our couches. We can do this.
Note this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
http://sakuracon.org/
This is a government policy that essentially tells low-paid line cooks and kitchen staff they are disposable and a lower priority than all the relatively wealthy people whose meals they are preparing.
I'm sorry but it's simply a very bad look, when it is mandated by the government. Nearly everyone else has the luxury of remaining isolated and avoiding exposure, except for this small segment of vulnerable and low-paid workers, whose workplace has almost zero protection, to provide the most essential human necessity -- food.
Virtually all white collar workers, tech, administrative, managerial - work from home. Teachers, school admins & university workers - home. Entertainment (shows, sports, movies, concerts) - home. Apple - home.
Shitty jobs that nobody cares about except during a crisis: janitorial/sanitation - work despite the risks. Cooks/food prep - work despite the risks. Grocery store/Walmart - work despite the risks. Truckers - work despite the risks.
(Trucking isn't necessarily a shitty job but a lot of people seem gleeful that technology may render them obsolete in the near future.)
I won't be touching delivery food or fast food (or going to any restaurants) until this is over. I feel terrible for the workers in these industries and I hope we pass some kind of mortgage/rent pause and relief to people laid off or not scheduled but stopping the spread of the virus has to be our number one priority.
We need a simultaneous approach. IRS creates a modified 941 form. Every business who files either 941 or 944 fills out new form. It has enough information to link it already-filed 941/944. And fields for list of employees, and where their pay is usually sent.
Direct helicopter drop fiscal stimulus to employers and employees. Employers in specific NAICS/SIC coded industries closed by law get wages they would normally pay taken care of as a straight grant. Direct deposit wages to employees directed by employees, cash at SSA or similar FedGov office parking lot drive thrus for the unbanked. Statistical modeling to roughly make up tip wages. Link to landlord-submitted data or statistical data is used to model and impute an additional grant package to cover a business’ rough revenue figure. Utilities-submitted data is used to estimate a third grant package. Wages, rent and skeleton utilities are granted month by month, retroactively if necessary to stricken industries. Healthcare is emergency Medicare-for-all for impacted employees. Any remaining revenue funds required are through unsecured loans at Fed funds rate.
This gives us a chance to resume our economic footing faster to status ante quo than letting businesses go under and wait a decade for the economy and equities market to recover.
Link quarantine peer pressure to grants. Each time someone from the business steps out of quarantine orders and is caught by LEO, their grant is reduced by 30%, and everyone else in their workplace has theirs reduced by a proportion (1 / total-employees&owners), with a message saying who stepped out.
Should do similar for industries deemed strategically critical and employees must come in. Sanitation, defense, energy, emergency response, transport and delivery, etc.
Take the currency hit on this grant tsunami, and hope for a rocket ride back up starting in a couple years when the vaccine is out to make up the monetary weakness.
These fatality rate estimates assume top quality medical care. And this crisis is quite simply not "here to stay"; decisive measures can definitely "flatten the curve" and perhaps even lower R0 so much that the virus stops spreading altogether, and cases start dropping towards zero.
Assuming no medical treatment because the medical system is already full? I doubt it.
Actually many of the statements from your post were absolutely false.
"Fatality rate for 50 and below is a paltry 0.2%"
For a typical seasonal influenza, the fatality rate for that age bracket is around 0.01%, so this is much more lethal to those people than the flue.
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-flu-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...
Highlights
- In the winter seasons from 2013/14 to 2016/17, an estimated average of 5,290,000 ILI cases occurred in Italy, corresponding to an incidence of 9%. - More than 68,000 deaths attributable to flu epidemics were estimated in the study period.
Even among young patients, the ICU rate is as high as 10%. A low mortality rate for young people assumes access to an ICU.
All of New York State only has about 600 unoccupied ICU beds. If the number of infections in New York breaches 6,000, the fatality rate among young people is likely to be 10-20x that of the flu.
Young people need to worry about Covid19/SARS2
Remember that low-risk people still get infected, and still infect others. The evidence is fairly conclusive at this point that you're infections even if you lack symptoms, so you can easily be putting the at-risk people in your life (or in communities around you) in significant peril by being careless and thoughtless.
Please be extremely careful with this disease. If you're not going to self-isolate or be more cautious and normal, please do not visit any at-risk people in your life
Maybe the Wikipedia article on bilateral interstitial pneumonia will change your mind?
Could you say how're defining "average" because right now it just sounds like "me". There's a lot of people who are non-average and have the very same right to live as the average.
It is certainly not the message the CDC is putting out in the USA.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/summ...
The Seattle Times ‘Fact sheet’ is also singing a different tune.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/facts-about...
"young patients, the ICU rate is as high as 10%."
Any links?
Sepsis aside, just plain pneumonia in adults is no laughing matter: pneumonia survivors are twice as likely to die as others in their demographic, be they rich, poor, old or young [4]. See the long term effects of SARS: if you survive, your health status and exercise capacity will be impaired for a long time, potentially for the rest of your life [5].
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[2] https://www.epmmagazine.com/news/new-drug-could-stop-sepsis-...
[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sepsis
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4066634/
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20337995
> Sepsis was a common complication, which might be directly caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, but further research is needed to investigate the pathogenesis of sepsis in COVID-19 illness.
> 91 (48%) patients had a comorbidity, with hypertension being the most common (58 [30%] patients), followed by diabetes (36 [19%] patients) and coronary heart disease (15 [8%] patients).
It's obviously bullshit. How would we know about "permanent" damage from a disease a few months old.
Some organs can and others can grow in size to compensate for reduce efficiency. Plus, there's no real evidence that Covid is causing organ damage.
> if your lung tissue starts dying, that's it
That's definitely not "it". Your lungs can repair damaged tissue and the system as a whole can adapt to compensate for portions that can't be repaired. And also no real evidence that long term damage is being done.
I don't think any other organs growing in size are going to compensate for reduced lung function. It's true our bodies adapt to damage but once the tissue is dead it's not coming back.
"only much older people have to worry about it"
That's false. There are a number of comorbidities that don't have anything to do with age. Immuno-compromised individuals, or individuals with pulminary conditions, are at risk regardless of their age.
Further, while the risk does go down for younger populations, only children seem to be fairly risk-free. Healthy individuals of all ages have died of this (at rates significantly higher than that of the flu).
Finally, younger people (even children) still get infected by the disease, still incubate it, and still spread it even if they have no or low symptoms. This means low-risk people can easily spread it to high-risk people without being aware of it.
"the cure already exists in washing yourself"
That's false. Handwashing is not a cure. Handwashing is a preventative measure. They are totally different things.
Once infected, handwashing will do nothing to protect you (though can still help protect others, so ill people should continue to handwash). There are no cures for COVID-19. There is no vaccine for COVID-19. There are no widespread treatments for COVID-19 (though some human trials underway). The only care we can currently provide care for people with COVID-19 is to treat the symptoms.
"This common flu is here to stay"
That's false. Coronavirus is not influenza. It is a type of coronavirus, and is closely related to SARS. The CFR of influenza is around 0.1%, while the Coronavirus is estimated to be around 1% (or higher if medical care becomes saturated).
"the absolute risk to vast majority of people is extremely insignificant."
That's unknown, but disagrees with pretty much all of the expert opinion on the topic. The infections disease expert in the US federal government (Anthony Fauci) thinks it's possible that a million people in the US will die of Coronavirus.
It's clear that some people DO NOT see this as a threat worth worrying about. Shame on them, I say. They're probably the same idiots that show up to work sick, and cough without covering their mouth around others.
A lot of people who apparently don't believe in biology, and don't have the ability to see past their own 2 feet.
The UK are focused on minimising deaths, by avoiding COVID-19 striking during next winter, when the NHS is at peak load due to winter flu. Instead, they will guide the first strike towards summer (NHS's least load), and impose measures to protect at-risk folk during that time.
It's a bit longer, but here's the Chief Medical Officer talking about the UK's response. https://youtu.be/IfJcwDaZrsA
UK is progressively adding lockdown too, per the response's plan.
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12388371580074475...
Eh ? Germany is on lock down right now, we'll be at Italy's level by the end of the week imho.
UK says: "we're all going to get sick so let's not do anything." DE says: "we're all going to get sick so let's spread it over a long time as to not overwhelm our health system." That's a huge difference.
It's a bit longer, but here's the Chief Medical Officer talking about the UK's response. https://youtu.be/IfJcwDaZrsA
UK is progressively adding lockdown too, per the response's plan.
The sad thing is it were places popular with the crowds that live paycheck to paycheck most of whom cannot afford any sort of medical emergency or being under a forced quarantine.
Shutting them down is the right move. Taking care of small businessowners running on thin margins - like mom/pop restaurants - is also the right move.
EDIT: Unless the government has no plans to help small businesses. Which is completely possible and probably even likely.
And bars, for instance, aren’t allowed to serve their primary purpose via delivery. Or movie theaters. Or music venues. Or retail. Or....
It’s gonna be a mess, because we already know the government is going to fail to alleviate the impact.
> Restaurants will be allowed to provide take-out and delivery services
"I know there will be significant economic impacts to all our communities and we are looking at steps to help address those challenges."
Are you expecting states to wait for something that might not come?
Maybe not all states, but some states can afford it better than others.
There is no historical precedent for any state bailing out an industry to this extent.
People literally don't have enough money if they don't go to work, and states literally don't have enough money to pay people (or businesses) not to go to work.
"These are very difficult decisions, but hours count here and very strong measures are necessary to slow the spread of the disease. I know there will be significant economic impacts to all our communities and we are looking at steps to help address those challenges."
Given that the Fed cut their interest rate to 0% and that treasury bills are under 1%, credit is approximately free to governments, so a well-run small business support program could end up costing much less than doing nothing.
I live an SRO. I don't have a kitchen. I currently don't have a fridge. I have a small grill and some shelving to store stuff.
I eat a lot of takeout. I'm glad to see I can still get takeout.
But, wow. This is beginning to look pretty scary.
I was homeless for a few years. The quarantine/containment measures are turning into a really big problem for the homeless population.
I don't even know where to begin trying to talk about that. At this point, I find the whole homelessness in the US thing simply infuriating. We mostly need to solve our housing supply issue and people are wholeheartedly against that and it's just infuriating.
I will add that Little Caesar's now has a "pizza portal" where you order online, pay online and enter a code to get your pizza yourself without ever interacting with a person. I don't know how to scream this from the rooftops so everyone gets the memo, but someone should.
> I was homeless for a few years. The quarantine/containment measures are turning into a really big problem for the homeless population.
How so? I assume that soup kitchens and the like will still be open.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homeless/comments/fipg6s/covid19_is...
(from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580519)
I have a form of cystic fibrosis, as does my oldest son. My younger son is a carrier.
People with CF typically require up to a quarter of a million dollars in medical treatment annually. With two people in the family who have it, that's a half million dollars annually.
I've supported all three of us on well under $20k annually for like more than 8 years or something. And I can do that because we've done a metric fuckton of research and made a lot of dietary changes and gotten off all the boat loads of drugs we used to take.
So having my food supply cut into like this potentially does enormous harm to me. And I will get zero sympathy from a world that didn't give a flying fuck about me when I was homeless and has spent years telling me to my face I'm a lunatic making up the whole thing about having CF and getting well when that's not supposed to be possible.
For me, this is very scary stuff. I literally am better off not eating than eating the wrong things.
A silver lining of the past decade of horrifying shittiness is that poverty and social callousness taught me this: My condition actually benefits from semi-fasting and I can live for several days at this point on almost no food. It no longer even causes nose bleeds and fun stuff like that.
I'm a good bit stressed out and suggestions that I'm too dumb to be aware that ready to eat options exist are in no way comforting to me.
A lot of them are things I absolutely cannot eat for fear of being immediately sick and beginning to undo nearly two decades of extremely hard won, painful progress against a Dread Disease that should have already killed me and I often wish it had. This is a shitty life in a shitty world full of amazingly callous people and I'm really not happy to still be here at this point.
:(
These are electric appliances.
Cooking for yourself is a good way to protect against the virus. Heat kills it.
I probably can't do that in my building. It's a secure building and I've never figured out how to get delivered food here. You need a key to enter the building.
But it's good info and thank you for posting it. I hope it helps other people.
Edit: FYI, cuz reasons, there's no lobby.
This is the main benefit I see of having our government take these measures: making people like you realize THIS IS SERIOUS. It has "looked pretty scary" for almost two months. And no one has taken it seriously. And now we're here.
I just think I am unlikely to get coronavirus because I'm a fucking hermit who works from home and doesn't touch anything and practices germ control so my genetic disorder won't kill me.
Maybe read all my comments before making insulting assumptions about me. I've already talked about having CF in this thread.
GP wasn't talking about you specifically.
Someone is thinking about it, but it was crappy before, and now it’s crappy and scary.
That’s the only thing I’ve noticed about the homeless population here
I hesitate to ask about the size of the space you have available, but in Paris it's pretty common to find one room apartments that are only 9 square meters. Typically you put a one or two top induction or electric stove (portable ones are actually very cheap and work well) above a minifridge and a hutch for dishes/spices with a sink about the size of your hands.
Thank you for both your concern and for being respectful. I don't wish to get into the details of my living space in this discussion.
Previous opinion piece by me if people really want to know what I think about how I'm allowed to mention a thing about my life and then decline to answer invasive personal questions:
https://witnesstodestruction.blogspot.com/p/a-pragmatic-appr...
If you don't want to discuss your apartment size, then I suggest to stop listing the contents and layout. It doesn't appear to me that others have a particular interest in your living specifics.
Myself I would find none of this to be invasive, offensive, threatening, or even very personal. As someone with extended multiple illnesses I do not have a secure living situation and I'm entirely unconcerned what fairly anonymous people know or think about it.
We've torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and zoned out of existence a lot of housing options that are being termed Missing Middle Housing.
The current YIMBY movement and Missing Middle Advocacy is the latest attempt to try to address this issue. New Urbanism was a previous one.
None of them get at the roots of the problem, which date to "the boys" returning home from WW2 and the birth of the modern American suburb.
In a nutshell, the vast majority of our housing financing mechanisms, tax incentives, etc etc are aimed at helping people get single family detached homes and homes today are more than twice the size they were in the 1950s while housing about one less person.
So our housing policies have caused "home inflation" in some sense. Homes are bigger and have more amenities -- or don't exist at all.
We now expect single people to rent a place designed for a nuclear family and get roommates to fill the empty bedrooms and split the rent. Then we make movies, like Single White Female, about what a nightmare it is to be forced to make ends meet by living with a total stranger and do nothing to change our policies.
I've made several stabs at trying to write about this, but none of that has gotten any traction.
Here's a few things by me:
http://projectsro.blogspot.com/2019/11/americas-housing-ghos...
https://americanhomeworks.blogspot.com/
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing...
You are right that posting on the internet is mostly a waste of time. But I'm medically handicapped, so it's where I spend the majority of my time, though I would prefer to actually have a life. I simply don't.
I am involved in stuff locally in my small town. I'm no one important and it may never lead to better housing here. On the upside, the local police department does hand out my fliers for homeless resources -- which is mostly websites, mostly written by me. So maybe the time I spend online isn't a total waste.
Have a great day.
Edit: Those are not intended to be "substantive" supporting links. I've studied this problem space for decades. I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I don't know of any other sources that will say exactly what I would like them to say. Sorry.
Do you currently have enough funds or collateral to purchase a modest home but there are no homes for sale in your area? Or do you mean the taxpayers should provide homes for free to the homeless?
To say nothing of the moral imperative to care for our most vulnerable people. A wealthy country with a homeless population shames itself.
I remember when, following the tragedy of 9/11, the PATRIOT act was passed.
This is another shameful moment in American history.
Here we are two decades later, with it renewed.
Per Wiki:
> Many of the act's provisions were to sunset beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. In the months preceding the sunset date, supporters of the act pushed to make its sun-setting provisions permanent, while critics sought to revise various sections to enhance civil liberty protections. In July 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a reauthorization bill with substantial changes to several of the act's sections, while the House reauthorization bill kept most of the act's original language. The two bills were then reconciled in a conference committee criticized by Senators from both the Republican and Democratic parties for ignoring civil liberty concerns.
> [...]
> Following a lack of Congressional approval, parts of the Patriot Act expired on June 1, 2015. With passing the USA Freedom Act on June 2, 2015, the expired parts were restored and renewed through 2019.
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2020/03/15/charlie-ba...
EDIT: It's until April 5th, so 3 weeks not a month:
https://whdh.com/news/all-mass-restaurants-and-bars-ordered-...
Yeah, I'd say it's definitely not just 'throw food in a box' and driving it somewhere.
On rare occasions it may be necessary to close a school(s) due to weather or other emergency situations. If this occurs, the district will make every effort to ensure that our students' educational opportunities continue while at home. Throughout the years, the district has compiled a comprehensive collection of online content and digital resources. The district also provides mobile devices for students to check out for home use to ensure that district students (non charter) can continue their learning without interruption.
...
The Instructional Continuity Plan (ICP) has three components: Content Delivery, Mobile Devices, and Internet Access. Content Delivery explains which resources students will use for core instruction and which materials can be used as supplemental resources to enhance core instruction. Mobile Devices provides the steps the district is taking to ensure that any student who needs a mobile device to access the instructional resources will be provided with one, upon request, for the duration of the schools' closure. ... Internet Access poses the greatest challenge to ensuring that M-DCPS students can continue their studies while at home. The district has taken steps throughout the years to assist students in getting access to the internet at home through projects such as The 1Million Project; however, partnerships with service providers is crucial to providing free or reduced-cost internet service to students should the district close in case of emergency situations.
http://icp.dadeschools.net/#!/fullWidth/2943
Also:
Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) is continuing its efforts to provide support to students and their families during school closures, which begin tomorrow, March 16. From distance learning, to community feedings, to facilitating childcare for essential medical personnel, M-DCPS stands firm in its commitment to support the South Florida community during this time of uncertainty.
A support hotline was established for teachers, students, and parents seeking assistance with distance learning.
During school closures, students and families may pick up hot meals to go, both breakfast and lunch, between 9:00 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.
A Mental Health Services hotline will be available for students.
An Employee Assistance Program hotline will also be available.
http://covid19.dadeschools.net/#!/fullWidth/3024
In contrast, I am extremely disappointed in how haphazard things are going in NC. I'm particularly disappointed in the UNC system which appears to have done zero advanced planning.
We still have water, sewer, power, and internet.
Oh and by the way the timetable on the retail apocalypse just got pushed up to this week.
Bailouts for the rich and corporations and that’s it.
Things seem great until they don’t. And then it’s go fuck yourself. No matter how conservative you are I ask you to look in the mirror and ask yourself if this is really how you want your kids to live.
We should consider more radical measures like temporary rent/mortgage freezes.
Well, no, if you bailed out businesses and consumers directly, there also wouldn't be a credit crisis.
Structurally, though, that's fiscal stimulus, which isn't the Feds job, and good luck getting much of that through Congress, and by that I mostly mean the Senate Republican Caucus.
> We should consider more radical measures like temporary rent/mortgage freezes.
While not that particular measure, a number of states and localities have adopted or are considering eviction and/or foreclosure bans, which leaves mortgage/rent technically due but limits nonpayment consequences.
Coronavirus is not a political thing, but our (partisan) elected leaders had an enormous amount of power over how prepared we were, and their agendas shape the on-going response. It's impossible to talk accurately about the problem or solution without mentioning parties and politicians by name.
I did not say anyone could prevent the infection from reaching the US. The damage can vary wildly once it's here. Containment is not a binary outcome.
Among the tools govt has: funding science, appointing competent officials at CDC and State Dept, travel bans, quarantines, financial relief, effective messaging, targeted testing, subsidizing tests and treatment, restrictions on gatherings, anti-smoking campaigns, regulations to reduce air pollution, not telling people that it's an exaggeration or a hoax, inviting the other party to discuss a compromise on life-saving measures, acting on the CDC's recommendations, sending govt workers home, enforcing anti-gouging laws... it's a long list.
As has been discussed here and elsewhere, many of Trump's behaviors and much of the Republican agenda has pulled us in the opposite direction of where we needed to be to deal with this. In the CDC, many people are "acting" roles because Trump refuses to fill vacancies. The same is true of the State Dept.
And the current administration messed up big time by not manufacturing sufficient coronavirus tests and instituting some sort of testing regime.
However, no administration could have prevented it from reaching the US. Trump's closure of the Chinese border is more than almost any president would have dared done.
China, Japan, and South Korea or other examples.
Japan, I don't know about.
South Korea is doing a good job, however it only took one rogue patient (patient 31) to go from 'well-contained' to 'nation-wide' epidemic. This is why containment measures are doomed to fail if the goal is to prevent the spread entirely. It only takes one person to screw it up.
We've built everything with growth as an underlying assumption with no ability to pause things and focus on essential services for a month or two and then start back up.
Probably ironically banks will be able to make even more money as people pull into credit lines to go over this hump
Constructor Bill now can’t pay. Bob’s Drywall is a creditor and is on the hook for a product he already shipped. Now Bob’s Drywall Supply can’t pay the company that provided him with Net 90 terms.
So Bob and Bill are now insolvent. And they fire their employees.
Suggesting that creditors somehow deserve “pain,” is just cruel. Creditors don’t “inflict pain” on people — they provide capital to people with a reasonable expectation of getting paid back. Of course I don’t care much about the Payday Lender/predatory lenders so much, but suggesting that creditors deserve some sort of payback is ridiculous. The vast majority of businesses rely on credit, without credit, you would have an economic collapse. And they aren’t the “least important” parties — they are the most important because they’re the ones providing the capital for businesses to operate.
“Yesterday Rick Santelli, who reports from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade the for CNBC, unleashed a rant against Obama’s newly announced housing bailout plan, intended to help some homeowners refinance mortgages and avoid foreclosure.”
1: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/rick-santel...
Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, was the group that was specifically against bailing out the banks. The Tea Party was more about not helping regular people.
It's not obvious at all.
The comment you were replying to said "can't pay the booze suppliers" so it's pretty clear they we using the normal business definition of creditor.
Now, of course, what of Construction Materials, Inc? Surely they buy the raw materials from someone and ...so on. Everyone does - or should do - the same: don't adjust the terms, simply accept that the past due items are past due and will be paid a bit later than normal.
Eventually it will hit a bank or large financial institution, and they ought to do the same: accept the situation and wait. It's costly when businesses go bankrupt and everyone knows that this situation is affecting everyone else and will blow over in about six weeks.
This applies even to the banks at the top of the chain -- at least until you get to (in the U.S.) the Fed itself, which can will money into existence if needed.
If bubble up economics becomes a thing I want full credit.
If the 700 billion dollars for quantitative easing went to 200 million U.S. adults, that'd be $3,500 apiece. If spent at the rate of $700 a week, that'd be five weeks' worth.
In my personal view 'The Market's purely reflect consumer confidence. They appear divorced from actual reality, aside from how that affects the mindset of easily panicked lemmings.
And the stock market varies wildly on a daily and monthly basis without affecting the prices of almost anything.
It seems clear to me that money is not even close to affected by consumer confidence the way the stock market is.
T-shirts, on the other hand, much more slowly change to match confidence, for the same reasons. If you think people collectively over- or undervalue T-shirts, it is rather hard to make money off of that mistake. In part because it implies moving physical stock, but also because they are a relatively refined product. Markets for natural resources see some of the same fluctuations as stock markets, although not to the same degree.
It’s also unclear how long it will take everything to recover, if they do continue to fall.
Oh, BTW, the floor is hard-set at zero, which they'll never get to, since -- given there is no underlying financial issue, and that demand is going to be higher than ever once we're done with this -- all these companies have intrinsic value.
Yes, of course, the market won't go to zero. But some firms will go under, and we don't know how severe the economic impact will be. Just because the crisis began with a natural disaster rather than a financial one doesn't mean there can't be serious financial impact.
But back to pandemics. Pandemics typically result in major booms due to (a) the die off, (b) the pent-up demand, and (c) the fact that everyone still trusts the financial system. The 1918 pandemic certainly caused major GDP losses, and short-term pain, but also caused the 20s
Short of a bailout, that’s not going to be easy to recover from. And even a bailout won’t be enough to bring about a full recovery anytime soon.
- Local and state governments provide bailout funds to suffering local businesses
- Said governments issue new bonds to pay for this relief
- Fed uses the recently-announced QE funds to buy the government bonds
The question then becomes if communities can get organized enough to approve this, and then convince ratings agencies that the new bonds are good.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/03/12/c...
Everyone else should wait for the upward trend to make sure it's not going to get much worse. You want to "predict the staircase" and not "the floor".
"Don't try to catch a falling knife."
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fallingknife.asp
Not a financial advisor, standard disclaimers, etc.
This is like looking at just the income statement as sign of business health. Balance sheet and cash flow are pretty important.
As someone with an economics degree I can assure you that a complete and utter collapse of aggregate demand is an underlying financial issue.
As I expect this to largely continue to be a problem through summer the tourism industry in downtown is going to be hit very hard.
The economic side of this is going to hit like a ton-of-bricks. It's going to be very painful, and we should do everything we can as a society to take care of those that are hit hardest by it.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/canada-suspends-cr...
Ironically this economic shutdown is probably what needs to be done to save the planet. Funny how humans react when their death might come in 2 weeks and not in 20 years.
That's a report released in 2019, but the subject is 2017 emissions.
Since Jan 1 2020 all vessels are restricted to low sulphur fuel. It used to be up to 3.5% worldwide, now you're only allowed 0.50%. Near EU you were already restricted, seems that was up to 1.5%
Unfortunately, reading the article does point to some bad actions: One cruise company seems to be installing scrubbers. They basically take the SOx out of the exhaust (and then dump it somewhere). This is still really bad for the environment, though it makes it appear you abide by the IMO regulations.
In any case, SOx emissions should be drastically slower since 2020. Also, further reductions should be possible. This as 0.50 SOx fuel didn't really exist; initially the plan was to mix 3.5% and 0.10% to get to 0.50%. Ideally the IMO now restricts everyone to 0.10% as it'll probably take 10 years again before anything like that takes effect.
(Or I could risk going without, while living at this continent’s ground zero for a pandemic.)
Entire industries are being shut down. There are no easy answers here.
With COBRA I believe you can also pay your premium after the month it's due. This can be advantageous because you can opt to not pay for your last month before switching to another plan if you end up not using any services from your COBRA plan that month.
Not having a homeless crisis is far more important than protecting rentiers. Just throw them under the bus.
They are not actually doing anything anyhow.
Is this a serious comment or are you trolling?
Forget about a recession, the devastation a policy like this would cause would plunge the US into a full blown depression. Deflation and asset price collapse across the board. YEARS of stagnation.
(To me) the answer here seems clear: A direct bailout in the form of $ to consumers and some mix of direct $ and tax credits to businesses.
Ah "cancel all debts to people not banks". Great idea, but emm. OK so the bank now doesn't have the assets on it's books, goes bankrupt can't pay you that money in your savings account.
"cancel all debts to people not banks, and let the government bail out those banks". Great Idea, but.... something something hyperinflation.
etc.
https://www.sba.gov/about-sba/sba-newsroom/press-releases-me...
Also from the announcement, lol:
"businesses with credit available elsewhere are not eligible"
Ah, so if you can get credit elsewhere, you can't get our help, even if it's needed.
This is just tip of the iceberg, now that this is declared national emergency, FEMA money and other sources are unlocked. Meanwhile, it's just the first week of things heating up to the point of these shut downs. Give the government time.
They have time enough to shut down businesses in a snap of their fingers. I don't think it's too much to expect at least a basic outline of a remuneration plan at the same time. I do not see why we should give them time on one issue but not the other.
Businesses should take advantage of these, and a restaurant operating in a city where operating a restaurant is illegal will not have credit available anywhere else.
(And, yes, I'm sure the more leftist and anti-capitalist out there will say "but are you really surprised?," and they'll absolutely have a point.)
It isn't so much about greed but rather responsibility. Is it really a businesses responsibility to take care of citizens? Shouldn't the government be doing that, and don't you pay them to do that?
I know America is skewed a bit, having businesses provide you your healthcare probably confuses their role in society. But something is off if you feel we should turn to a commercial realtor for community support.
You'd hope owners would keep a buffer of either cash or loans/credit-line to last three months, but a lot of them starting up may not have that bootstrap capital. Restaurants that have been around for years with good management can probably weather a month or two. Even the best well restaurants are going to feel the strain if we go to month three.
Coming out of the Xmas period, May, June, July looming which are low turnover periods.
If you're already teetering, you're going to fail. The UK's had a lot of big chains shut down or scale back recently too, there was a big explosion in restaurants and bars about 5 years ago and the first round of losers happened over the last couple of years.
The one thing we, in the US, have been consistent in this is that we’re too slow to act.
There’s obviously a risk of the pendulum swinging the other way but until we see a down tick in cases we have to assume we’ve got ground to make up.
Case growth won’t start decreasing until social distancing is widely adopted.
Tbh, I am slowly starting to get worried as recent FED move again focuses on banks and not on small business relief.
As you can see, bailing out businesses, as you framed it, could be helpful in avoiding full fledged system collapse, which just happens to be their mandate.
edit: corrected opening sentence
Same with SBA loans - how much paperwork will it take to owe a huge sum to the government with an uncertain business environment in a few months? A lot of small places will just close.
Fiscal stimulus is the only approach to keep these businesses afloat. Honestly at this point it might be better to skip the middle man and cut checks to individuals.
I don't think anybody can give you any actual number. But it's not hard to test a sample of people and determine the virus rate of spread, so we will know it when it happens.
You have to “keep your foot on the brakes” until the disease is no longer a threat. Take a look at countries where there is success - Taiwan, Mainland China outside Hubei, HK, Singapore, SK - they must keep whatever countermeasures are working for them in place to some degree or risk another wave of infections. I think the culture of wearing masks really helps, despite the public messaging to the contrary. It seems like it would be good if mask manufacturing spins up enough to totally saturate the world over the next few months, and western cultures get over themselves and start making it common to wear them in public.
Young People at the lowest risk from this virus are going to be much worse off than just catching a fucking bad cold.
The UK's answer to the problem is starting to look a lot more sensible than total economic chaos being caused by all other methods.
Happy to be downvoted to nothing because I am so over this.
The UK's answer to the problem may result in manyfold more dead than this approach. We won't be able to know until after the fact.
In that state of unknown, I prefer the approach that values lives over dollars.
Realistically how much would it cost to bail out these businesses and provide a safety net to people? I imagine the numbers are less than we'd first think.
It's a choice. It's not inevitable.
https://news.yale.edu/2002/05/23/rising-unemployment-causes-...
If small businesses are not economically relieved, there will be significant - and permanent - damage to those sectors.
I'm not saying that death rate and unemployment are unrelated (equating lives and money together). I am saying that we should prioritize lives first, and figure out the money once we stop the damage.
False dichotomy. There are plenty of economists and accountants and others who can work on the economic relief package and do so in a meaningful way while scientists and medical teams (plus politicians) handle the lifesaving operations. There is no reason they cannot run in parallel.
This whole comment is about the approach to covid-19 where life goes on as normal and you don't practice social distancing at all. One argument for people that do that is that they can't take off work because their businesses are open and will fire them. I believe the businesses should be forced into social distancing and provided financial help if unable to do that. We're actively going to see this happen in the next week—it started tonight—will it be late?
However, let's start with the decision that lives are more important than money.
A relevant question is "how much would this cost?", to which I have no clue. If we're talking billions of dollars, that's essentially a write-off amount at the federal level.
It starts with a concerted decision that lives are more important than money. If we can't get onboard with that, then there will always be people that put their well-being over others.
Hopefully 0 if we provide a robust social safety net for people who's livelihoods are harmed.
Do you have a link to statistics that support that? Is that on an absolute basis or on a per-capita basis?
On a per-capita basis, I see more hospital beds in Italy than in the US (3.18 to 2.77): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_hosp...
What's your source for data on critical care beds? I'd love to take a look
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/03/12/the-co...
Hospital beds are a different story, but not what is important for COVID, which needs ICU beds. Hospital beds are much easier to deploy anywhere (and with the emergency measures taken federally, will see a huge increase due to waived FDA requirements for inspection). An ICU is much more involved, and requires ventilators, specialty beds, special equipment, etc. Much more difficult to deploy suddenly in response to sudden upticks.
Practically speaking, the only thing a "working page person" (<60) could do is unknowingly spread the virus to someone else.
For these younger people their prospects are good if they receive that care. An overloaded health system may be unable to provide that care to everyone who won't survive without it, including some younger people.
A tremendous number of working people also have preconditions which are implicated for covid19 including hypertension and obesity.
If you are a younger person and carelessly get an avoidable infection and end up in an overloaded hospital needing intensive care, your life may well be saved due to being triaged ahead of an older person with worse prospects. But in that case your life would be saved at the expense of someone else's. ... someone else who's infection might also be due to your spreading. I wouldn't be okay with that, and I hope you're not either. So I hope your glib attitude doesn't mean that you're not taking avoidable risks.
In the US there hasn't yet been clearly established ethical guidance to direct triaging like that. Your local hospital may assign ICU care first come first served... if so mortality rates there for younger people won't look so good.
But there is nothing anyone can do to bring back our loved ones.
[1] https://edsource.org/2020/newsom-assures-districts-theyll-be...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/coronavirus-google-facebook-...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/us/nba-player-donations-coron...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577132
Closed shops can be reopened, dead people can't be brought back.
EDIT: it really scares me to see there a real actual living human beings on HN here who would in all seriousness downvote this.
https://politicshome.com/news/uk/health-and-care/illnesstrea...
However, the article you link to does not differ in its details from what authorities such John Edmunds a professor Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said 2 days ago [0] and Ian Donald Professor Emeritus from University of Liverpool wrote the same day [1]
These authorities are backpedalling in the face of deserved widespread criticism. But rather than changing the course of UK policy, they are only disavowing the phrase “herd immunity”.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C98FmoZVbjs
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/iandonald_psych/status/1238518371...
I guess people want far more aggressive policies but the same could be said of the majority of places. Italy and Spain are very much the exception in western countries and they are facing a higher scale. Here in Canada the federal gov has done absolutely nothing besides increased spending and repeating critiques of other countries for being too aggressive, meanwhile our prime minister is in isolation and Quebec just announced major bans of restaurants and bars, while also critiquing the prime minister for doing nothing. The current policy sounds more in line with WHO and the wider health system recommendations.
Even the US has faced significant backlash for their border policies from these same countries (our health minister has repeatedly claimed it has no scientific basis to close borders to places like China).
It’s hard to tell what people want vs just opportunistically critiquing politicians. I’m more curious from a practical healthcare perspective what they are expecting vs what’s actually being done. Border bans (can they do that w/o parliament)? Shutting down gatherings? Directly influence the health administration to test more? Better airport screening?
You mean the answer that consists in maximizing the dead count?
Case B: Drastic lock down, your daughter lives on your dime for a few months or a year before she gets a job. You live to see your grand kids grow up.
And you'd rather risk case A?
It's not a "fucking bad cold" for young people.
- Over 50% of ICU patients in Netherlands from COVID-19 are under 50. [1]
- Over 50% of ICU patients in France are under 60. [2]
- Over 40% of patients requiring hospitalization in China were under 50. [3]
Young people are not invincible. The fact that they can use up a significant chunk of already scarce medical resources suggests that we really shouldn't be sending that message and encouraging young people to not give a sh*t about the epidemic.
[1] https://www.ad.nl/dossier-coronavirus/40-a-50-nederlandse-co...
[2] https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/03/300-...
[3] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032
The cost will be at least the delta 1.3 million preventable deaths. This doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of folks left with pulmonary fibrosis, which has a 3-5 year life expectancy.
I'm in Seattle and, other than these closures, complete movement restrictions would be the next step here.
Funny enough that my country of birth, Peru, just declared a national emergency and declared quarantine for everyone in the country. Peru is a democratic country - at least for the last 20 years - but it had to enact this to stop the virus from spreading. It's a bold move, it's not a popular one, but it's the right one imho.
We should be doing the same, our current leader is - unfortunately - a coward who will always be afraid of taking a risk. It's on us then, as responsible citizens to make sure we don't go out unless we really need to for a while - at least that we can control. Just my two cents.
Weird you expected better out fo him.
Eg kitchen staff is infected, coughs into meal
1. Do you get if it’s cold food, like a salad or sushi?
2. If yes, do you get it if it’s warm food, like indian food?
3. If yes, do you get if you reheat/microwave the food? If so, what is required/
Have not seen a lot of discussion about this. Did see that in china restaurants would certify the body temperatures of all involved.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/transmissi...
And WHO says it lives on surfaces for a couple hours up to several days.
https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses
So, personally, I'm not eating anything if someone coughs on it or around it. I'm not even buying fresh fruit and veggies at the store right now.
I can't find any information about heating the virus to kill it.
Just cook it.
I mean, I cook some carrots, potatoes, broccoli, yes, but I don't want to risk cross contamination at this time.
Yum-my.
Also, you can go looking for historical dishes. Early Americans had recipes that were heavy on things like cabbage and apples together because it might be all you had left in the cellar towards the end of winter.
Heat also kills the virus so cooked vegetables should be fine (and cooked fruit too if you're into that I guess).
The worst case is probably dishes where many people interact with raw ingredients to create a high-touch item. Compared to physical contact with people, it's still considered a relatively small transmission risk, but in relative terms, it's higher than something that's boxed up right after it's cooked.
More: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/03/11/coronavirus-..., https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavir..., https://www.fdacs.gov/News-Events/Press-Releases/2020-Press-..., https://www.insider.com/what-temperature-kills-germs
Containers are a big risk though. Be sure to handle carefully and wash your hands afterwards.