I have to agree. A full lockdown of the country with a return to normal at the speed China achieved would do more than fooling around with interest rates. In the current situation, there's not much productive a business can do with more loans anyway.
They won't come out and say it, but the plan is to let the virus slow roll through the population of young/healthy to build up herd immunity. Some will die, but it will be better in the long run. You can tell that's the plan as they're talking about "flattening the curve." The area under the curve is the same, but they want to allow it to slow roll through the population so we don't over load the healthcare system.
Compare this "flattening the curve" plan to what China has done. They have gone full on "shut down everything" and isolated the whole country. Their idea is to eradicate the virus in the country. This is a worse plan because it means they will not have herd immunity, though they may transition to that plan as time moves forward.
This is why a full shutdown of the country is a bad idea. What happens then is when you start opening the country up there's a whiplash effect and it starts spreading rapidly again. For what it's worth, the UK publicly announced this is their plan. I forget the stat but they said they plan to let 40 or 60% of their population get it.
You mean like shutting down travel from contaminated countries, which was widely viewed as a terrible choice just a week ago?
There was only one way for the virus to get here, and that was through travel.
CDC fucked up the testing after that failed, which got us to where we are now. Testing is supposed to be fixed this week.
CDC just recommended people not gather in groups of more than 50. Things are starting to tighten down significantly.
At this moment, I feel like we have a very real chance of getting a handle on things within the next two weeks. From there, we live through another month or two of lockdown and slow burn our way into summer.
It's going to be hard, but I don't think we're dead in the water yet.
