Would You Buy a Used Pandemic From This Man?
Clearly, picking small population states, with therefore few cases, and no major crowded urban centers, are good targets for the first experimental rollout of limited opening. Also, since there will still not be sufficient testing even for a large city, a large fraction of testing will be concentrated on these states. Some of the states, like Hawaii and Alaska, can also be isolated from many people coming in, or being checked and quarantined.
The main problem could be that never have small states and communities had to trust a federal government for guidance and monitoring, of whose statements, analysis, and guidance, are much more likely to be lies than truth. It is also clear that top businesses are very hesitant with no trustable guarantees about testing, tracking, PPE, honest monitoring, and catastrophic external healthcare. Employees would also be hesitant, having to trust their employers, fellow employees, and the federal government to guarantee their health care and salaries if they get sick. Everybody is well aware that Trump has political motivations to make this work, or appear to work, which even lowers the level of trust and belief.
People in high risk areas want to flee to states or rural areas where they can live a normal life as well. This movement from high risk to low risk areas, with a pandemic that is riskiest for days before it can be detected, could destroy the low population density immunity of the states in the trials. That would put an extra burden on the trial states, unless the President can call out the national guard to isolate the state. However, cutting out normal tourism also impinges the businesses, and if national guardsmen are called up from the given state, that also draws from the recovery. The somewhat borderline low level of infections in these states actually relies on the stay-at-home protocols from highly infected regions.
The restart of these small states as a trial, is not going to impinge on the gross financial outlays needed for the vast shutdown of the nation’s main businesses. We now have 22 million unemployed.
In the past, small business loans were marred by the discovery that they applied as well to giant businesses, if only owned by one or two owners. Such would be the case with Trump’s own multi-billion dollar and self owned Trump Organization. I haven’t heard about this yet from the current law.
While we all hope that we can restart businesses as soon as possible, experts have pointed out that a failed restart followed by a Second Wave would be much more costly than waiting another week or two to restart. It also would seriously delay a full restart of a major part of the country.
Today, Governor Cuomo of New York extended the lockdown to May 15, along with the other six adjacent states. The Mayor of Los Angeles also extended their lockdown to that date.
Let’s see what comes out today, after Trump informs Governors of what his plans are. Not to mention the lack of time for feedback or any committees or Congress or businesses and business groups or modeling groups to include their calculations, requirements and advice.
For those not of great age, during a Nixon campaign, a humorous opposition ad was a picture of Nixon with the question: “Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?”.
