Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

There is really no easy answer as to whether we should continue the “stay at home” order or to start opening up businesses. It’s either die from the coronavirus or die from starvation. At some point with businesses closures, you run into people having no money for food; you can only have businesses closed for a limited time. The question is how long?

Here’s my thought process on leaning on continued “stay at home order”: say we open up the economy while the virus is still virally spreading while we still don’t have adequate materials for testing (the tests itself, the reagents, the PPEs and masks, everything that goes into the testing from making the tests to distributing to testing to analyzing results). Since the virus is still hot – and I don’t think people understand how CONTAGIOUS the virus is – cases shoot up which then endanger hospitals’ ability to provide care, thus leading to increased deaths, maybe to frightening levels. Once people realize that the virus is still around and infecting more people and killing their loved ones, they will go right back into their homes and hunker there for a longer period of time. This combination of fear and greater number of deaths will cause whatever meager economic revival to collapse, possibly even deeper.

As an analogy, during war, imagine your enemy is bombing your town. You don’t keep businesses open or go grocery shopping during those bombing runs. You hunker down in whatever safe space you got. It is only between bombing cessation you go out to quickly do what you have to do until the next bombing run. This virus is a more severe case of the bombing runs – it is incessant and doesn’t have quiet periods.

The second element of my thought process is I did some research about the 1918 flu because I always read about the medical aspects of the flu itself but not the economic impact. I was wondering why I didn’t read more about the economy of those times. What happened back then? There is a paucity of materials out there on the economic impact but I did see two websites addressing the economics. There is not a whole lot but basically both sites said there was an economic fallout but those cities that implemented the isolation/quarantine orders right after the first appearance of the flu and kept those isolation/quarantine order going for a longer period ending up having a faster economic recovery. Economically and health wise, those cities that responded quickly ended up with less deaths and a faster recovering economy. Those that acted quickly but then opened up the economy too soon, ended up with a slower economic recovery.

That doesn’t mean I relish the idea of people starving or being thrown out into the streets. No, I’m really scared about that. I really don’t want us to go there. So, while we are undergoing the “stay at home” orders, we need to deal with the jobless aspect. In Europe, I believe some European countries are paying businesses to keep their employees hired, even if those employees are stuck at home. This allows the companies to keep paying their employees and thus those employees can continue to buy food, keep a roof over their head and buy other necessities. Why can’t we do something similar? I think that is what the payments to small businesses are for but it’s not working? Let’s fix that, ASAP, then we don’t have to end the “stay at home” order too soon.

Or how about something way out of the box? What did we do before we had trade or monetary systems, you know like when we came out of the trees? Or, I’m surer the aborigines of old had some sort of system of keeping their people fed and clothed without a monetary system. Is there a possibility of doing something along the same lines temporarily? With automation and AI taking over jobs hanging in the horizon, this could be the time to start dreaming up solutions to “jobless” lives.

Or, can we borrow the “free ethos of the Internet”? A lot of businesses give their services away for free. WordPress is free. Software developers join together to create the software for free. Is there anything from their strategies that we can learn from?