I get that many people aren’t, but I happen to be in the camp that it is not worth ruining the economy for the 0.001% that might die from this illness. I just don’t trust the government and experts when it comes to things like this...growing up on the east coast 99% of blizzards and hurricanes were the ones we were warned “this is the big one folks!!!”. People stopped trusting TV meteorologists. I get that this COULD be that 1% the experts are right about, but to me the risk is low enough that it is worth reopening the economy entirely on May 1st if things haven’t gotten worse. Just my opinion.
I think we'll be lucky if we come out of this feeling like there was an overreaction. That would mean that the safer-at-home orders worked. There's a critical caveat here to comparing with meteorologists. Weather will happen the way it wants to no matter what the media reports. The forecasts and hype don't influence magnitude of the disaster except for a few more people might drive out of the way of it. In this instance, more media attention now has a direct impact on the magnitude of the tragedy. If the media treated this like it was seasonal flu and hardly covered it, we'd be in for a much worse result because people would not take social distancing seriously.
The projections right now are 50,000 - 135,000 Americans dying. Even if we lose only 50,000 people in a best case scenario, that will be traumatic milestone for the country. That 50k is among the most conservative estimates and the reluctance of states like my own to put effective safer-at-home orders in place will likely prolong the pandemic unnecessarily. By the time this is over, everyone will know people who fell seriously ill or died. Even if the virus was eradicated in 1 month, the psychological impact of that magnitude of deaths will prevent people from participating in crowded live events until they become more comfortable engaging in public crowds again.
We were the first industry to shut down, and probably the LAST that will be allowed to open. Restaurants, hairs salons, and EVERYTHING else will be allowed to open first. Everyone I have spoken to says things will open sequentially by region....most likely tourist- & convention-reliant destinations (Vegas, Orlando, SoCal/Anaheim,
etc) will open sooner than other markets if not hit too hard. All we can do is hope at this
point! A lot of people’s summers (and further!) dependent on the next few weeks....
This is a false choice for the entertainment industry. If they were allowed to open up tomorrow, hardly anyone would buy tickets for the next 3 months and venues would have a difficult time finding ushers and such to expose themselves to large crowds. Similarly, Broadway wasn't forced to shut down. Equity lobbied for it because their own members didn't feel safe.
Regional sequencing will depend on containment. Ultimately for the economy to reopen and stay open, we'll have to corner this virus into regional pockets of the country and maintain quarantines, contact tracing, and exhaustive testing in those pockets to weed it out and prevent a resurgence. The local governments of tourism-driven areas may be more prone to open up faster, but in the end the decisions will come down to where the virus is lingering and where it isn't. Fortunately rapid testing may make it
practical to test people as they enter airports and prevent transmission across flights. That's probably the best thing we've got going for us on the other side of this so far.
Compounding all of this is that hospitals are under-reporting confirmed cases which will likely
throw off projections. Failures to have enough testing supplies and expedient results has driven hospitals to unofficially tell patients they have COVID19, go home, and come back if their symptoms worsen. To-date, we've still only officially tested half of what Italy has by relative population size, and one-third less than Spain has. Whatever our improvements in testing are, we are still behind.
Not saying we should
definitely not reopen in May, but the only thing that sucks worse than closing the economy once is closing it twice because we reopened too early while too many regions were still acting business as usual with no serious effort to truly stop the virus in its tracks.
I am comfortable though saying we should definitely not
reopen entirely. Returning 100% to business as usual everywhere will be a mistake. Some precautions will be needed -- the magnitude of which will vary by
hotspot.