I want to say first off that I appreciate the well thought out response. So often these conversations become dominated by low hanging fruit and it poisons the capacity to carry on meaningful discussion.
So thank you.
I think every guideline you listed out is entirely defensible and I don’t think there is a single one I disagree with on it’s individual merits.
However, where I do draw some serious contention is the underlying assumptions you rested your case upon and upon which you want to apply those guidelines.
Namely, putting a timeline on re-opening and inferring that not doing so in thirty days will make the solution worse than the disease.
I think one thing that has habitually been difficult for many to process is the need to parallel process multiple what-if scenarios and go through a rigorous “compared to what?” analysis when doing so. While being open-minded and self critical enough to your own preferred prescriptions.
Becuase here is the thing, so far, no country has demonstrated the ability to beat the virus by leaning into it. By playing the game the way the virus plays best. The only thing that has worked is attrition and avoidance. Places that do it too late have been hit harder, places coming out too early(or worse, racing toward a not yet proven herd immunity) have only been punished in even more diminishing confidence and in the cost of human lives.
And one of the unheralded things that ultimately makes an economy go is confidence. And fear is a confidence killer. Right now, the majority of Democrats AND Republicans are more concerned that we will ease restrictions too soon, which signals that fear is still present. And if fear is still present, you can’t simply force people to be confident.
And here’s the other thing, even if we do everything on you list in every state in the next thirty days, and we assumed that public sentiment flips the other way, what you outlined is still a MASSIVE contraction of the global economy that will rival the Great Depression. Except in that scenario we presumably still lack adequate testing and no real nationwide tracing system, and so what likely happens is we get far worse pockets of resurgence and a back and forth game of opening and shtutting things back down. A game far more pervasive and deadly, both to human lives and confidence, than had we spent more time reducing positive cases and getting the necessary infrastructure in place before re-opening. You also risk people rioting for being forced to work in what they feel is an unsafe enviorenment. And there is a healthy body of historical evidence to back that areas that stayed locked down in 1918 faired FAR better economically in the mid and long-term than places that didn’t. So even though it may seem counter intuitive to you, the evidence demonstrates that the strength of your lockdown is going to determine the strength of your long-term economic growth and the speed at which you actually recover to pre-outbreak economic levels of growth.
Either way, your scenario or the alternative, you are talking about the need for massive intervention not seen since the Great Depression. And that is where my argument steps in.
What needs to happen regardless, is a massive additional investment on the level of wartime spending toward setting up systems to support the forecasted unemployment and economic contraction, of getting a robust tracking system in place(that can be a source of tens of thousands direct jobs and multiple times that indirectly). Taking previously politically infeasible steps like canceling out types of debt, rents, mortgages, and coming up with ways to keep the necessities of life and safety in people’s hands that are projected to be impacted for the next years. Providing means to increase both compensation and protection for workers forced to work in hazardous conditions. Because the moral case here is toward protecting the citizenry, not the GDP or the markets that don’t care if we the people live or die.