COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)
They never touched the majority of the makeshift units put in place. No one that needed a ventilator was denied. Everyone that was pulled from their regular jobs to man the response teams have been sent back. And now the hospitals are short hundreds of millions from the lack of business and employees are having to make sacrifices in vacation pay and contract employees are being voided. It's kind of weird for contract nurses to be fired during a pandemic because of restrictions placed in response to it, no?
You know, that's a good thing, and the safer at home orders are what made that possible. It's like saying a dog, running after a car, was stopped by his leash, then you go and say, "see, we don't need a leash on the dog, he stopped right there, he didn't even get hit by the car". The infection rate wasn't changing, until changes were made in the general public.
You do realize that the decision to shutter certain businesses was going to be made for us, if not early by government officials, then late due to the illness.
Do you think flying ground to a halt just because of 'safer at home' orders? We never ate out much anyway, but we even have limited our delivery orders. Itching to go to a hotel any time soon? Cruise? Think those meat processing plants closed due to Government orders? (technically yes, but as a response to a massive infection spike at the plant, due to likely not taking good safety precautions) . Getting on a street car any time soon? Bus? Train? How will you feel about a concert? A sporting event?
The hospitals part can be fixed, and I believe they are trending that way.... by allowing non-emergency procedures and having procedures in place to keep COVID cases away from the general population and preventing/limiting doctor/nurse travel between the two groups. A/C vents need to be reviewed as well to make sure there isn't spread that way.
I get a bit fussy about this "shut down the whole economy talk". First off, the whole economy isn't shut down. Significant parts are, but not all of it. I"m not even sure it's half (anyone have data on this?) and many of those parts, were shutting down due to consumer sentiment/choices anyway.
Don't you think I want those jobs getting back to normal? Hell, I'm working 3 days a week (and being paid as such) due to people not flying. It sucks. It sucks hard. But it will be worse if we go about this stupidly and get hit with a harder round 2, with a 900k case head start.