Here's the thing. You know when this thing will end? The second that the politicians run out of money. Right now, they think they can pay for their rules, and they have done so while amassing more power than before and tossing out the bits of the state constitution they don't like. They really don't care if you live or die other than that it will be bad press for them and potentially negatively impact revenues and campaign contributions.
And all of the above is clouded by the fact that this disease is problematic. It's more than likely less dangerous than the flu, but significantly more contagious and that combined with a hospitalization rate high enough that when combined with those other two factors means we are running hospitals in population dense areas at 100% or more capacity.
What we are seeing now is that the numbers are rolling in and there is a genuine point to debate.
Life saving policy caused economic upheaval. Politicians could mitigate this by running the printing presses. It gets them good publicity and they look likethe domin they did something good.
However, you now see that the policy is impacting supply chains. Most importantly food supply chains. Starvation has a lot higher mortality rate than this disease, and starving people like hanging politicians more than voting for them.
Right now, staying home seems like a viable option. But you have to imagine the world 3 months... 6 months.. a year from now.
Right now in a very real way we are setting up the situation where we have more money than food to buy it with. This leads to inflation of food prices, which we are already seeing. Part of that money chasing food is government bailout. That is going to run out and then you have inflated prices on scarce food with 10-20% unemployment? Right now, we have policy based on the notion that this disease would be worse than it is and that most people who were out of work would go back to working when shelter in place was done. A lot of them won't be. That reality is sinking in and policy is going to have to adjust.
Greenday can sniff his own farts and feel smug all he wants. But the reality is you have Trump saying we need to open up or we will have a pandemic and a depression and possibly food riots because this is not a functional model for long term behavior of human society. Then you have.. lets say all the democratic governors in the northeast who say that the orange monster is a tyrant that will kill us all and is advocating an apocalypse. While also planning THE EXACT SAME PROCESS being advocated by Trump. There's only minor differences, and the motivating reasons are exactly the same. But the publicity game is all about people pretending that if it weren't for the other guy, we could have gotten through this without harm.
And everyone wants to pretend this shit has something to do with an inherently superior set of ideals. It's not. Dairy farmers are dumping milk because their customer base and volume shifted radically and milk spoils faster than you can shift that process. Once you get past schools and restaurants closing and trying to pretend that one side wouldn't have done that (because both sides did), ideology doesn't come into it. Then look at the yeast situation. Demand shot through the roof. Manufacturing can actually make a shit ton more yeast. But they can't get enough of the right packaging, and without the right packaging the yeast doesn't live long enough to traverse the supply chain. You can pretend the problem is because the packaging comes from India. The real problem is that there is no secondary source of packaging that isn't also affected by the pandemic and has the capacity to meet that demand. Unless you change policy to allow more people to work on that problem, be it here, India, wherever, you won't meet the increased demand. And create scarcity and inflation.
It isn't the trump bucks hitting people's bank accounts that is going to cause inflation. That's mostly filling a hole created by lack of employment. The uncontrollable path to inflation is going to be all the imbalances in supply and demand. Where an american was spending say 10% of their income on food, and now will be spending 30% in part due to less income and in part due to competition for scarce supply.
And what about all the issues with rent and mortgages. Rent especially. You aint paying, they can't evict you, and you have lots of people being dumped on the street the first day it is legally possible.And they all start competing for what housing will have them. And what happens when you get competition for a scarce resource? And it won't just be shuffling of tenants. A lot of those vacancies won't be back on the market. Definitely not for people who didn't pay then, but a lot will be taken off the market if fiscally viable, go into foreclosure because the economic damage was to significant to the landlord, aren't where the demand is because the main employers in the area didn't survive this economic mess, etc.
If something isn't done to mitigate it, which is why despite the theatrics and finger pointing, you have diametrically opposed leaders going through the EXACT SAME PROCESS to figure out when they have to cry uncle and reopen.
This is because once Greenday gets done with his fart sniffing, and AVB realizes he's a lot more financially well off than most of the US and thus isn't facing the same problems, that the choice ISN'T how many corpses is it worth to save people from boredom, but how many dead sick people is it worth having to prevent stacking corpses from political unrest, or what the exchange rate is between covid-19 deaths and half the country slowly starving to death. It's going to be a choice between two flavors of shit sandwich. Not do no harm and fuck it all up.
And to be fair, there are people here who will be saying we should never have taken measures in the first place and be borderline psychotic about it. They aren't right either as they are pointing at numbers that are the result of HAVING DONE SOMETHING when they say it isn't bad enough to justify this. The thing is the majority of people making those claims are viewed as idiots. There's lots of people pushing the Trump fucked it all up and all democrats are saints narrative being treated as if they are the most reasonable people in the room rather than liars who are also full of shit.
This ride aint going to be fun, and neither party has a plan that will skip it. Everyone is trying to figure out how to make it shortest and everyone is working with estimates on how bad each bad thing is with spreads that are vast. It'd be nice if the monkeys would stop flinging poo while doing it, but pretending it isn't what it is on both sides of the aisle is bullshit.