Reply to Would you support a hard shutdown option for two to four weeks to crush the virus?

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[quote=Anonymous]I honestly think a lot of people have no idea how many people *need* to work in a country of our size to keep people fed and functional.  And, with so many essential workers still working, a hard shutdown just won't eliminate the virus completely. It can't.  Other countries who have done harder shutdowns than ours (e.g. China) are authoritarian countries where people can literally be kept in one region -- not the case here.

Think about essential workers, for example. You need doctors/nurses, and people to care for their kids and feed them. You need people to take trash away. You need people to continue making food products, and people to distribute those food products. You need people to fly emergency personnel to where they are needed (and the support infrastructure to do so). You need people to ship gas around the country. You need people to handle the electric grid and water supply. You need pharmacists. You need social service providers. All of these people need their kids watched, and they need to be fed. You need UPS/Fed Ex/etc.  A lot of people are essential, and a lot of these people work in places where covid can easily spread, like factories. And none of these people are essential for "luxury" things like restaurants providing takeout, they're essential for truly essential things. Add on the takeout, add on the people who handle things like car registrations, add on people who handle entertainment (e.g. people who ship out all of those puzzles and books we were all using) and you're talking about a lot of people. The difference between "hard" and "not hard" is just not that stark, IMO -- during our shutdown, all of the stuff I listed was happening, and the only changes if we were to have a "harder" shutdown would be to close all restaurants and retail establishments dealing with mail orders, and those are NOT places contributing significantly to the spread.

The shutdowns in other countries, and in some US states, *did* work at dramatically flattening the peak, even as they were. However, due to the impermeable border between states and our abysmal national leadership, even in states that had pretty stringent stay at home orders for months (e.g. NYC, NJ, Illinois, etc) you *still* see the numbers rising.

Restrictions on what we can and cannot do are required at this point, IMO. But I think it's naive to suggest that just "shutting everything down" will "crush" the virus. People think that countries like China and Italy literally locked everyone inside (they didn't). Children went to school for much of the time in most countries, for heavens sake!

Rather, I think a national mask mandate, strong policies to pay people to keep their small businesses like salons and restaurants closed, severely limited access to indoor places where the disease spreads easily (e.g. dining, bars), innovation to things like air filters and building Plexiglas barriers in places like grocery stores, and ridiculously good contact tracing are our best bets. [/quote]

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