Let’s make this clear: We can’t “open up the country” while the virus is still raging.
I’m tired of people pussyfooting around the issue - It’s literally impossible. I know people on dKos are smarter than this, so I’m just venting here.
Let’s just imagine what it would look like. Let’s say all our political leaders decide, “yup, back to work… just deal with it”.
They can’t force people to ‘go back to normal’. Who exactly would be going to restaurants and movie theaters? Who exactly would be traveling and staying in hotels? A few would, and they’d make the situation worse for the rest of us. It would be chaos – stuff would still be mostly shut down, unemployment would be the same. No private business worth a damn will comply, or they’ll be forever tarnished. You think Disney world would just open back up? NBA would re-boot their season? Forget about it. Meanwhile, the number of cases would skyrocket due to increased activity out there among all the idiots, who would infect the rest of us. The virus would be out of control in the US with millions of case, and many thousands of deaths… causing further panic and chaos. It would last for a long time.
The news would be filled with overflowing ICUs, people on ventilators, coughing up blood… stories of people being turned away, and told to go home to die. People are simply not going to get used to that kind of situation, they won’t stand for it. The problem would linger and linger, wrecking the economy far worse than whatever is happening now.
Meanwhile the rest of the world would be slowly coming back online, like China is doing now. You think they’re going to just allow diseased Americans back into their countries? Hell no, we’d be cut-off completely. Mexico might actually pay to build a wall to keep us out.
It would be a complete disaster in so many ways, making both the health and financial problems far worse.
I’m so sick of anyone even contemplating this – it’s just completely stupid. The only reason Trump and other sickos are floating the idea is political cover. They know it’s impossible, but when this is all over, and it wasn’t as bad as the worst-case projections, they’ll be screaming “if people had listened to me, we wouldn’t have wrecked the economy! everyone over-reacted!”
Our only choice is to do what we’re already doing, but more so – more testing, more ‘social distancing’, more lockdowns, more medical infrastructure preparation and investment, converting factories to produce equipment we desperately need… I do hope some miracle treatment is invented – we should be trying everything we can, and I hope a vaccine is available sooner than predicted – if there’s any way to speed that up, we should do it. Could we stagger trials? Do larger test groups sooner? I don’t know. But, until and unless those things happen, we’re all in the same boat, and the virus is the captain.