Nobody wants to go down in history as the person responsible for a large number of short-term deaths by giving the directive to lift the stay-at-home directives too soon.
Nobody else wants to go down for creating more Hoovervilles than ever thought imaginable. Millions upon millions of lives ruined, but hey we save 100K social security recipients right?
The virus itself did all this damage. Again, you're conflating the response as being the cause when it's really the virus itself that's the cause. Social distancing and economic shutdown isn't optional at this point; it would all be happening anyway.
By delaying the formal response it would have been possible to get most of of the economic harm of distancing while only getting a small part of the benefit.
Many people started distancing in the couple weeks before the shelter in place orders started. I know people that quit jobs to get away from the public, etc.
Yet many of those people who were increasing their distance, lowering their economic activities, etc. were also living with others who were in denial about the pandemic and where nothing short of a vague threat of citation/arrest or a closure of their hangouts would cause them to reduce their interaction... at least until people they know started dying, which would be too late for intervention (yet at that point they'd still drop out of economy!). In a "no order" world, you'd still get most of the economic hit of that household shutting down-- but they might often still get the infection, contribute load on the hospitals, and potentially die because one member of the household was less responsive to common sense.
Various legal and economic mitigations would also be less likely to exist absent an official response.
That's one explanation for politics, another explanation is that politicians do not care because they are not economically affected by their decisions, they have steady jobs and income, many have significant accumulated assets.
Unfortunately, both options are not mutually exclusive
Every elected official has to care about economic outcomes. Because the electorate cares. Hell, some political scientists think that this is the most prominent issue people vote on. And that's assuming elected officials actually don't care about their responsibilities to their constituents, which may well be true for some, but it's wrong to assume as a blanket motivation (and I'd go farther: it actively aids corruption to cast all politicians in the same mold, because to do so is to lazily shrug off the responsibility of making case-by-case judgments, which is itself what enables uncaring leadership to operate without pushback).
The only thing that might matter more broadly than prosperity/poverty is life and health.
Are you suggesting they’re shutting the economy down just for the hell of it? I can assure you that politicians do not harm the pocket books of their campaign donors on a whim. There is almost no one profiting from this.
I think we can all agree that the shutdown happened because of a genuine concern for what the new unknown virus could do. The last coronaviruses SARS and MERS could wipe 10-20% of the population, so that the baseline to prepare for.
Now we know the virus is not quite as deadly as anticipated (around 2%). And we know the economic impact is disastrous (+15% unemployment in the US after 3 weeks). So the strategy will have to be re-evaluated eventually.
My opinion is that politicians taking the decisions are too remote from people experiencing economic hardship, so they will let the economy get much much worse for way too long.
In all honesty, how is it irresponsible? New York is really bad. The rest of the country is in considerably better shape, and hospitals aren’t even close to being stressed in many areas. You’ve got nurses and doctors getting their hours cut back to nothing because no elective procedures are being done and the expected Covid surge never happened (again, not New York). Who honestly would’ve imagined there’d be doctors and nurses sitting idle during all of this?
There aren’t going to be any large gatherings or sporting events for the foreseeable future, lots of people are starting to wear masks and are doing much better as far as hygiene and social distancing are concerned. Why _can’t_ we start to think about getting things to slowly go back to normal? Keep the elderly (way easier for them to quarantine) and sick at home. If you can work from home, continue to do so. Everything else, figure out how to make it work within the framework of social distancing. There has to be more than a choice between “total lockdown” or “everyone’s gonna die.”
> The rest of the country is in considerably better shape, and hospitals aren’t even close to being stressed in many areas.
Why do you think that is? Because the stay-at-home orders worked. NY is the worst case scenario and you want to stop things before they get that bad.
If we had a magic dial for precisely tuning social distancing measures to cause minimum economic harm and death, we'd use it. Since we don't we have to err on one side or the other. So far we've erred on the side of caution, accepting short-term economic damage. As things get less crazy these measures will be gradually scaled back. It doesn't mean they were never necessary.
A lot of this situation reminds me of Y2K planning, but your comment is really spot on. Thank you.
Y2K is going to be a big deal if we don't do anything about it. We do something about it. People complain Y2K wasn't a big deal.
That, like this, means we're doing things right. Maybe we're going a little extreme, but the alternative is likely worse, and there is never a magic dial to spend just the right amount of effort/money/time.
NY is not even the worst case scenario. The worst case is NO ONE sheltering in place. Or the entire population of the US getting simultaneously affected. And nurse/doctor strikes or walkouts would make it FAR worse.
> Why do you think that is? Because the stay-at-home orders worked. NY is the worst case scenario and you want to stop things before they get that bad.
To be fair, though I agree with you in general, NY-- esp NYC-- is much more dense than the rest of the country and as a result R(effective) may have been much higher there than other places. It may be the case that much stronger measures were needed there then in many other places.
So while it is true that part of the reason other places are less bad is because the policies worked, differences between the locations may also play a significant role.
New York waited for things to be bad before they shut down. San Francisco shut down incredibly early in comparison at a time when the city was essentially perfectly fine and largely unaffected. This led to an extraordinary difference in outcomes.
The interior of the country doesn’t have the infrastructure to support exponential growth. Nurses and doctors and hospitals being idle is a sign that we chose the SF path, not the NY path.
The economic impact is of course absolutely terrible and this is shaping up to potentially be as bad as the Great Depression was. But letting the virus ravage small towns and cities without adequate support would be worse both economically and in terms of loss of life.
SF also lacks the density, and more critically the scale of NYC. Though credit to Mayor London Breed and Gov. Newsom for early and effective action.
Regions hardest hit by COVID-19 seem (informal take) to have largely been large, dense, sprawling cities. with poor public health infrastructure or responses.
In the US, it's currently mostly Northeast cities, generally surrounding New York, doing the worst. Wuhan (11 million) is also huge. Milan (Italy), Madrid (Spain), Tehran (Iran), London (UK) have also fared poorly, especially relative to their countries.
Outbreaks in less populated regions can and do occur. -- though often within institutional populations or equivalents -- cruise ships, retirement / nursing homes, prisons and jails, as well as anti-science religious groups, notably.
And not all megacities have been hit, especially those with solid monitoring systems, response plans, and infrastructure: Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, especially.
The combination of exponential growth with a sizeable lag means that you really don't want to come anywhere close to being stressed, because then you were just a few hours away from a calamity. Time for a car analogy: it's like braking on a wet road on a foggy night, then measuring the remaining few feet of road ahead and saying "we shouldn't have braked so soon".