The Re-Opening Plan
 

Nothing political about this, but it will become so. What we need is movement to metrics for Re-opening:

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/03/needed-reopening-plan-fast.html

Shutting everything down and staying home for a few weeks is a sledgehammer. OK, our leaders have to hit a virus with a sledgehammer when they have nothing else up their sleeve. But it cannot last. Businesses will close, people will lose jobs, the economy will not be there to start up again.

Needed fast: a plan to open up the economy again in a virus-safe way. Every business should be (and likely is) working hard to figure out how to operate in a virus-safe way. Federal state and local government need to be working 24 hours a day during the next few weeks to promulgate virus-safe practices. Not because they are particularly good at it, but because they are the ones shutting things down, and their permission is needed to reopen, fully or partly. People also will want the confidence to know that businesses they patronize are compliant. You've got two weeks -- figure out what combination of personal distancing, self-isolation, testing, cleaning, etc. will allow each kind of business to reopen, at least partially.

The option to force everyone to stay home and close all "non-essential" business for three or six months is simply not viable, at least for a disease something short of the bubonic plague. The option to wait two or three weeks and then start thinking about what it takes to allow, say, the local dry cleaner to reopen, which will take another month or so, is simply not viable.

Take two weeks. Find out who has it and who doesn't. Test test test. Isolate, put out the embers. And reopen. Slowly, cautiously, partly. But reopen.

I have kept public health and economics separate, but they no longer are. Shutting down the economy is a public health measure. The costs of this measure are astronomical -- at least a trillion dollars per month. As yourself what the government could have done with a trillion dollars to nip this in the bud. Please, next time, be ready. Massive testing, identifying cases, contact tracing, isolating areas with known cases, early and hard might have cost a lot of money and disruption. Even 100 billion dollars now looks like a very small sledgehammer.

I suspect it's a bit premature to plan for reopening. Things are going from bad to worse to, worser LOL

Read the article, Bill.

He is simply asking the question: if they shut it down, what are reasonable metrics to reopen.

Now is exactly the right time.

I've been asking myself this very question. Right now, we have no idea how many lives will be lost nor even if the virus has been contained. It is unlikely we will ever know, though at some point we can intelligently guess, how many lives were saved.

I'm in day 7 of a 14-day total self-quarantine. I figure if I can stay healthy I'll at least be able to help. Problem is I have no idea and nobody can tell me when or how to re-enter society or what precautions will be needed.

I disagree completely.

If you want to have a repeat of the panic setting up this anti-virus, then just go ahead and do not plan for the restart, including the conditions that need to be true for a restart to be undertaken.

The jury is still out as to whether this Covid 19 will prove to be worse than previous years where the dramatic response being undertaken was NOT done, there is a general concensus that the harbingers are not good, but the climate idiocy is ample proof that concensus does not universally imply good sense.

A restart plan needs to include direction to business as to what conditions need to be true before they are allowed to restart and also what conditions will apply if they independently decide NOT to restart (e.g. government pulls their support for their Covid related compensation/allowances). The machine called the economy requires coordination and time much more than a shut down did - additive processes are inherently more difficult than subtractive ones.

Dennis

^^^^ what he said.

Good to sense someone else with some sense in CO.....

If the machine called the economy requires coordination who was coordinating the economy prior to COVID-19?

It is time to at least start thinking of the parameters of what is going to be needed. Business and the economy is going to need as much if not more help in getting back on it's feet. It mst likely is going to be a slow and incremental process full of starts and stops. You had better have at least 3 different plans for 3 different scenarios and a couple of subset plans for each condition . People are not just going to jump up and say lets get to work again and tomorrow the economy is on again. Business maybe down for a long time and have expended it's capital in that time, workers may have moved on in one way or another. The big thing is the customers might not be there anymore or have the where with all to purchase or use that product. In other words it may not be that the spirit isn't willing but the flesh is incapable of doing. The people and nation may have expended all it's resources present and future in sustaining themselves during their down time.

The America that you knew is now truly gone. the perfect metaphor is that the store shelves that once were full are now empty and gone. If you don't believe me take a look at the extraordinary measures the FED and other CB's are taking to back stop the contagion of fear that is gripping the world. They are throwing in everything including the kitchen sink and so far to no real avail. They are burning everything without regard in a scorched earth policy. For they see it as a no tomorrow scenario.

Test, contact trace, isolate infected clusters (Korea model). Develop some sort of identifier that you have either tested negative or are recovered so it is safe for those to go about their daily lives. Once we can identify the enemy, we can deal with it directly and put the rest back to work. Maybe we need those cool Logan's Run crystals that change color based on our status.

At some point, large masses of people will recover from the virus. and we will need to know whether those that recovered from Covid-19 can be reinfected or can retransmit the virus via casual contact from an infected person.

If the answer is no, they can't get reinfected, then it will look like some dystopian movie where "the cured" can be easily identified and allowed to roam freely and get back to work while the others remain quarantined. Is that what they had in BladeRunner? So we will need those questions answered. Thinking about it that way makes me want to really pull wants left out of stocks and put it into cash. It will be interesting to see how China recovers as the contend that there are no more infections on their end.

The people who shut it down did so for the goal of public health. They have the power and to some degree the expertise. The people who start it up are going to be private industry, and I would be surprised if industry isn't already working on getting back into production.

Xi will simply order that all the Chinese must return to work or be disappeared.

You guys are talking as if we are going to survive this.

We still haven't been able to get people to stay home. Not just the spring breakers. I see people going to the hair salon, harbor freight, lowes and kohls. The US is doing terrible at containment, let alone making plans for a start up.

The economy hasn't been shut down so it doesn't need to be restarted. A few sectors in some states have slowed, that's it. The self-isolation/social distancing plan will work and in a few weeks we'll all be fine, spending more money than we have, because that's the American way, getting the economy back to normal.

Probably because we will.

Humanity will survive it like they survive the common cold..but will anything be left except the vestiges of our previous lives..

Kohls has shut all of their stores.

I've mentioned several times that my wife is a nurse. She works in the elective surgery department. She just got news that she's going on unemployment for the first time in her 26 years with this hospital. So you have nurses, automobile workers, fast food workers, restaurant workers (not the same as fast food), Hotel workers, even construction workers all going on UE. What part hasn't been touched at that point? This is going to take some serious thinking as to how and when we decide things go back to some sort of normal.
Meanwhile, my phone is still ringing. Weird.

Sure, some people are out of a job but not that many. Fast food and restaurants around here are all open and doing take out. So things slow down for a month in a few areas. Not the end of the world. Everyone I know are professionals working from home. Everyone I know is still working like nothing happened. Just in their pajamas. Movie theaters are closed, that's a bummer. But they'll be back open in April sometime.