CoronaVirus USA - Open by easter?

[Initscri]

Not a chance, Easter is 12th of April for anyone who doesn't know, that is about 2-3 weeks away and there is no way the world will get rid of corona that easily.

To his credit, he's not suggesting we can "get rid of" the corona virus by then, just that the infection curve will have flattened, so easing the total social and economic shutdown might be justified.

Mostly he's just trying to stop the panic and turn the market around. His hotels are at risk of bankruptcy if this goes on for months and months. It's true though that we as society can't really afford to live in this state of near shutdown until summer vacation. Most businesses will be completely bankrupt by then and people will be broke and starving from lack of income. At that point, political revolutions and government overthrows become realistic.

I think many people are underestimating the economic effects of shutting down even for just a few weeks, let alone months. Most businesses won't last longer than a month, and most people already live paycheck to paycheck with almost no savings.

Not only that, but the stock market rising/economy doing OK is practically the pro of his presidency. As stock prices were a couple of days ago, that was essentially all wiped out.

I hate to say it but politicians think 1st of one thing: poll numbers.

Whether you agree with it or not (or how messed up it is in concept): That isn't going to look good going into election season. I'm sure that provides some form of influence into him trying to spin up some public hope, even if it is misguided.

[Bezobraznike]

   Politicization of the virus is what we are seeing in the last few months. All of them (I didn't notice any exceptions) are using virus to promote
themselves and their parties. It's ridiculous what they are saying in the last couple of weeks, how they talk about virus, about their sacrifice for
the people, but under table they are pushing their own secret agenda. Scaring people and offer salvation in the same time is what they do, and
I see that this is working, and I doubt it will end in next 20 days. They imposed total control and this state is good for them, people can't meet,
people can't gather to talk and protest, in news all we see is the virus, everything else is not important.

[gentlemand]

  Politicization of the virus is what we are seeing in the last few months. All of them (I didn't notice any exceptions) are using virus to promote
themselves and their parties.

I've seen this bitcoinerish attitude expressed multiple times recently. At times like these it looks puerile.

Wannabe dictators like the Hungarian administration and proper ones like Russia will use it to suppress some extra dissent and ramp up fear of foreigners.

Elsewhere I haven't seen a great deal of evidence of that though I'm sure it's a handy opportunity to offload some bad news and tweak the odd awkward element. No government wants to drive their population insane with isolation and impoverish millions of them but there ain't much choice.

[gmaxwell]

Also, don't forget it is viral disease which means those who have got already infected cant be cured!!

A vaccine is not effective on someone who is infected (or about to be infected). But it's going to take a long time to have a vaccine because vaccines are administered to healthy people so they must be very safe, so the fact that they don't help the currently infected isn't much of a concern.

I think it's much more likely that we'll have effective anti-viral and/or clonal antibody treatments long before effective vaccines. There are a half dozen trials ongoing now for various new and existing anti-viral compounds.   Clonal antibody treatments don't even require any research breakthroughs, just the time it takes to isolate and clone cells that produce effective antibodies.

Both anti-virals and antibody treatments are used to treat sick people, so they don't have to be very safe-- they only have to be safer than the virus. If they're highly effective they only need to be slightly safer than the virus.  Because they don't need to be very safe, we don't need to do much testing before widely deploying them.

If we find anti-viral treatments which are highly effective against sars-cov-2 and are fairly safe then in the developed world the issue will largely be resolved.  You get symptoms... you visit a doctor and get an anti-viral shot (maybe even a pill, though rapid development might skip the restriction that compounds need to work orally). Done, no need for a disruptive response because people won't die, at least not in large numbers. (The situation in less developed parts of the world might not be quite so good).  In the long run, a vaccine  can eliminate the issue when one is finally ready (hopefully-- for some human coronaviruses immunity doesn't last very long).

Im just saying its impossible to open up business doors by April 12th !!

Places with larger numbers of infections and already straining hospitals like New York and California just won't. If other places do, in a week or two after they will see increasing hospitilizations, panic, and shut things down. Worse, because of the lag they'll continue to see increasing numbers after the shutdown and we'll potentially see even more panic, harsher lockdown mechanisms, etc.

In an exponential process the derivative is also an exponential... meaning that the more people are infected, the faster the rate of growth. Interventions like shutdowns and distancing temporarily change the exponent. An effective 'shutdown' must have a period of low contagion long enough to substantially lower the amount of infections in the population, or otherwise when you drop the shutdown you immediately jump to a tremendous infection rate when the original exponent is restored.  Like "lasing a stick of dynamite".  It certainly seems like in many places in the US where the infection started later people are taking shutdowns far less seriously then they are in (say) California-- instead of learning from earlier examples they look at them and say "well good thing its not so bad here, we can still go party", so it's quite plausible that there is still significant amounts of ongoing spread in these locations, many new infections, primed for an explosive outcome if there is a premature "all clear" sent by the whitehouse.  

The only way an early back-to-work works out well is if some of the more fringe epidemiology theories circulating hold and that the virus really has a R0 of 23 and a very low hospitalization rate and in fact a huge number of people have already been infected.  Existing data doesn't completely disprove this theory as far as I know but the growth rates of hospitalizations we've seen are pretty strong evidence against it. (If it were really the case that the virus was ludicrously infectious but just hospitalized very few people we would have seen the hospitalization rates spike much faster and everywhere almost at once).  I think these sorts of high R0 low-hospitalization rate theories are just hopeful fantasy.  There has been a lot of hopeful fantasy being thrown about by people who really don't want to face the reality-- this one is just a little less innumerate than most of them.

It's also absurd that a significant percentage of our testing capacity isn't being directed to sampling instead of obviously symptomatic people which would help us better understand and prepare for the spread and avoid making a costly mistake like prematurely reducing countermeasures (or keeping them around too long, for that matter).

Personally, I don't expect them the administration do anything that stupid-- though they might talk about it for the sake of encouraging hope. But then again, I also didn't expect them to respond so slowly to begin with...

I think it's really unfortunate that to prevent mask shortages the surgeon general and the CDC have materially mislead the public about the efficacy of masks.  The obvious way to phase out shutdowns would be to massively manufacture masks (even just surgical masks) and make wearing them in public mandatory for everyone.  There is significant evidence that population scale use of masks significantly lowers contagion for similar diseases and for sars-cov-2 in particular, and it would be a great way to reduce the unacceptable spike in additional hospitalizations a couple weeks after reducing distancing measures. In addition to the direct effect of reducing the spread, masks serve as a reminder of the risk (improving compliance with handwashing and distance keeping), discourage touching the face (for most people), and would be a visual identifier for idiots who are out without taking the pandemic seriously and whom should be avoided as a result. At this point, however, I think it would be politically impossible to go that route because it would require politicians to admit that they mislead the public, and it would require convincing the public to wear masks when many people now believe they don't work.

[Febo]

Despite what you believe politically, President Trump made a statement "showing hope" to have the USA "open by easter".

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/politics/trump-easter-economy-coronavirus/index.html

Do you think this is possible? What do you think the impact of this will be if this is forced ahead (companies allowed to re-open up, etc). Do you think it'll make the health and/or economic problem better or worse?

LOL on Easter hospitalised covid-19 patients in USA will peak. Number of infected will start dropping, but what matters most are the ones in hospitals. And special the ones that will die. At Easter time will be many many deaths.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

I don't know--where I live, there are a lot of businesses that are still remaining open, including restaurants, gas stations, and even tobacco shops.  There's definitely a sense that things are a lot different out there, including store shelves which are almost empty, but so far it isn't too bad.  But again, that's where I live.  Other areas, other countries have been hit a lot harder.

As far as major improvement by Easter....that's optimistic.  I'd like to see it happen, but I'm not confident it will.  I can't stand Trump, but I'm not going to criticize him for his optimism.

[Argoo]

   Politicization of the virus is what we are seeing in the last few months. All of them (I didn't notice any exceptions) are using virus to promote
themselves and their parties. It's ridiculous what they are saying in the last couple of weeks, how they talk about virus, about their sacrifice for
the people, but under table they are pushing their own secret agenda. Scaring people and offer salvation in the same time is what they do, and
I see that this is working, and I doubt it will end in next 20 days. They imposed total control and this state is good for them, people can't meet,
people can't gather to talk and protest, in news all we see is the virus, everything else is not important.

Politics are inseparable from the economy, especially in those cases where the measures taken to combat coronavirus directly affect it. Now the economy is stopping or slowing down significantly in development, and therefore the issue of combating the spread of coronavirus can be called political.
Trump's decision to abolish quarantine by Easter has a certain meaning, because the state suffers very large material losses every day, and the mortality from coronavirus is not so big. However, everything will depend on the extent of the spread of this pandemic, both within the United States and around the world.

[Febo]

I don't know--where I live, there are a lot of businesses that are still remaining open, including restaurants, gas stations, and even tobacco shops.  There's definitely a sense that things are a lot different out there, including store shelves which are almost empty, but so far it isn't too bad.  But again, that's where I live.  Other areas, other countries have been hit a lot harder.

As far as major improvement by Easter....that's optimistic.  I'd like to see it happen, but I'm not confident it will.  I can't stand Trump, but I'm not going to criticize him for his optimism.

In general USA had not yet been hit most. Europe is a tiny bit a head and slowly number of infected will start declining, but number of hospitalised will keep increasing fro a week or two.   I believe some USA states will only now realise how serious it is and will close all not 100% needed services and force people stay at home.  

[Lucius]

COVID-19 is just start to do his work in the USA, Trump, as usual (as some others have realized) is talking about what his voters want to hear, and Easter is definitely too early for the pandemic to end and for life to return to normal. If we look at the chart, upward trajectory is start only before 2 weeks, and today we have 85 000+ infected, and NY is on top with 100+ deaths and more than 6000 new cases in 24 hours. USA is already now country with the highest number of infections achieved in less than 2 weeks.


https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

If we compare it to Italy which currently has 80 589 cases, and fact that things have gone worse from February 20, then we see that things are developing at a pretty high rate in the USA. I'm not sure what the measures (and if any) are in terms of restriction of movement (travel), but if the usual migrations occur before Easter, the virus will spread even faster.


https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

[dioanna]

Despite what you believe politically, President Trump made a statement "showing hope" to have the USA "open by easter".

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/politics/trump-easter-economy-coronavirus/index.html

Do you think this is possible? What do you think the impact of this will be if this is forced ahead (companies allowed to re-open up, etc). Do you think it'll make the health and/or economic problem better or worse?

The USA shifted on top of the list in just a short span of time, Trump has so many bashers and getting less support fro his negligence.
I guess it's just his way of spreading hope even if it seems too late.  I just hope that it can happen. No one hopes for the worse.

[gentlemand]

In general USA had not been hit most. Europe is a tiny bit a head and slowly number of infected will start declining, but number of hospitalised will keep increasing fro a week or two.   I belie some USA states will only now realise how serious it is and will close all not 100% needed services and force people stay at home.  

It now has the world's highest number of cases. The death rate will surge soon unfortunately.

If I were running the US I see no reason why you wouldn't impose internal border controls. A lot of states have very, very few routes between them and they could be easily controlled and often have barriers in place already to check produce and trucks. There seems little point in making some guy sit in his cabin in Montana to save someone in LA. However that's all too late now.

If they had been put in place at the right time whole swathes of the US could operate relatively normally just as China did.

A shit ton will be learnt for when this happens again.

[stompix]

Despite what you believe politically, President Trump made a statement "showing hope" to have the USA "open by easter".

He chose a symbolic random date that has close to zero scientific data behind it, but, that's Trump.
Not going to argue about the reasons, we know we can't stay forever under lockdown, you can't quarantine 300 million for that long and expect when they come out everything to be fine, restarting an economy half or 3/4 shut down for that long will take a lot longer...

But the whole "easter" thing makes nonsense.
Unfortunately, some areas of the country have not yet seen the real numbers of the spread, even if you quarantine them now, there is no time till easter to eradicate the virus. And when people will come out of it and feel safe and travel much more than before, what we need is one case for a repeat.

A 2-3 months lockdown will not be possible, I'm out of self-isolation myself right now after a hell of two weeks and now that I'm free...well, I'm free to go to the supermarket and thank you god to take my kid out for a walk so he can unleash some of that infinite energy he has, but if this goes for more than 2 months I won't make it out of this sane.  Nor will my company with just the work from home scheme.

Till easter is too early, till May is too much, everything between is a gamble. But we're not talking about just money but also human lives.
No matter how you look at it, there is no decision that will be good for everyone.
 

[Gozie51]

I hope that he will back up what he is saying because people are worrying, these kind of times are in need of responsible and reliable leaders. If US opens by easter as he says then economy will stabilize as soon as possible.

This for me is not only about economic recovery but the risk involved. If the virus is still around, it will still be a big challenge and it could get another pandemic outbreak. I guess Trump is eager to kick start the economy but is better to be cautious about the situation.

[abhiseshakana]

Despite what you believe politically, President Trump made a statement "showing hope" to have the USA "open by easter".

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/politics/trump-easter-economy-coronavirus/index.html

Do you think this is possible? What do you think the impact of this will be if this is forced ahead (companies allowed to re-open up, etc). Do you think it'll make the health and/or economic problem better or worse?

When talking about President Trump, we must understand what is called geopolitical tightening & political tightening. The current condition of geopolitical tightening is Anglo American and its political tightening is a political alliance that is actually a partner country such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, India, & Vietnam. Anglo Saxon and America or can be called anglo America want to rule the world by fighting the rest of the world. This is evident when America closed access to Europe except Britain, which means America is challenging continental Europe led by Germany. America also attacked Russia using a proxy war with Saudi Arabia as its pawn.

Currency wars, technological wars, trade wars fought by hegemon have changed the world geopolitical order, which in the end there is a new balance.

To smooth Trump's steps in the second period so that Trump can become a tool to dominate the world, the republic party scheduled many ways ranging from choosing Joe Biden, which was easier to defeat than Bernei Sanders, as his opponent & had to win the war with Russia, China and all of his crony states before the 2020 election is an absolute. So Hegemon chose biological warfare and was made worse by slamming crude oil prices. The peak of the war and the American ace in winning the war is the dollar reset value. and resetting the dollar value is very appropriate when the benchmark interest rate is 0%. The Fed has already given that signal, so we are just waiting for Trump's surprise in April.

Some people think that if Corona is America's biological warfare, why does this attack America so badly, it is only as war casualties. For the resolution of the Corona problem itself in the United States, I think it still takes a long time because the rising curve of corona sufferers in America is still steep. But reflecting on China now, they can be free from the coronavirus pandemic.

[gmaxwell]

and avoid making a costly mistake like prematurely reducing countermeasures (or keeping them around too long, for that matter).

Personally, I don't expect them the administration do anything that stupid

The latest whitehouse briefing extended measures for another 30 days and the president was quite emphatic about the importance of not prematurely declaring victory.  I'm happy to have had my expectations confirmed here.

[thesmallgod]

I do not think it is a good plan to open the country by Easter especially in some large cities like New York that are still recording massive cases. By the way, if there has been a drastic reduction in the case of the virus before Easter, maybe they can partly reopen for easter but it is not save especially in some densely populated area. We have heard cases of re-contraction of the virus due to carelessness. 

[Jeremy Franklin]

Despite what you believe politically, President Trump made a statement "showing hope" to have the USA "open by easter".

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/politics/trump-easter-economy-coronavirus/index.html

Do you think this is possible? What do you think the impact of this will be if this is forced ahead (companies allowed to re-open up, etc). Do you think it'll make the health and/or economic problem better or worse?

I don't think the US will be back to normal by easter. Things will get far worse before they get better. Let's see how Donald Trump we be able to manover out of the mess he created when he downplayed the Covid-19 outbreak. I am really praying for the people. Things are likely to get very ugly pretty quick.

[eaLiTy]

Do you think this is possible? What do you think the impact of this will be if this is forced ahead (companies allowed to re-open up, etc). Do you think it'll make the health and/or economic problem better or worse?

It is an impractical dream by the president to get everything back to normal and the experts said it best, the virus decides when everything will be back to normal, you really cannot predict what the situation will be, there are more than 150,000 patients in the USA and the health care authorities are predicting that we will see a death rate of around 100,000 people in the next few months and that is not a good sign to relax and expect that things are going to be alright in a short period. The next two months are crucial and if the spread can be controlled then it will be great for everyone, if not we will see hard times in the coming months.

[Initscri]

Do you think this is possible? What do you think the impact of this will be if this is forced ahead (companies allowed to re-open up, etc). Do you think it'll make the health and/or economic problem better or worse?

It is an impractical dream by the president to get everything back to normal and the experts said it best, the virus decides when everything will be back to normal, you really cannot predict what the situation will be, there are more than 150,000 patients in the USA and the health care authorities are predicting that we will see a death rate of around 100,000 people in the next few months and that is not a good sign to relax and expect that things are going to be alright in a short period. The next two months are crucial and if the spread can be controlled then it will be great for everyone, if not we will see hard times in the coming months.

I don't honestly think the death rate is going to be as large as people make it out to be TBH. People are often comparing it to the flu which is over-diagnosed (there-by lowering the death rate percentage).. But at the same time Corona is under-diagnosed. I'm sure there have been plenty of people who have it, weren't able to get tested due to either limitations or difficulty in finding testing, recovered and weren't apart of the statistics.

It's an impractical dream, but I do feel like certain countries could do more (and I'm not naming the US here) to stop the spread. Enforcement of social distancing should be a further practice, unlike in countries like Canada where it's been mostly "recommended" up until this point.

I'm sure parts of the US are the same.

[Wind_FURY]

There are people spreading information about Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, and Azithromycin as an effective treatment for COVID-19 on social media. Is that fake news, or is that the cure that might beat the pandemic?

Plus, Chinese propaganda, https://twitter.com/kpags1/status/1244344145646440456

Who's fault is COVID-19 pandemic?