COVID is doing one of two things in the political system. One, it’s forcing us to reevaluate our priorities. Two, it’s forcing us to make hard decisions. One politician is under fire for some fairly controversial takes.
Trey Hollingsworth, the politician in question, cited that we should be willing to let people die of COCID then let the economy collapse. Saying that allowing social distancing to continue to affect certain business was unacceptable.
“The social scientists are telling us about the economic disaster that is going on. Our Gross Domestic Product is supposed to be down 20% alone this quarter. It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils. It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils and we intend to move forward that direction. That is our responsibility and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.”
His statements do make some capital and economic sense, but health officials are not in agreement here. Social distancing won’t be always required and we are starting to see downward trends overall. Does not change the fact that we still have roughly two weeks to go before we start to reopen things.
Difficult decisions are ahead no matter what course we take
Things are really between a rock and a hard place at this point in time. On one hand it’s easy to say “we can’t afford to reopen and risk more deaths”. However, with 16 million people applying for unemployment and businesses being forced to stay down is problematic. Hollingsworth does ask a tough question, what is preferable: a moderate (potentially) increase in deaths by exposure or a second depression.
There is no safe answer to either question. It’s easy for those still working to form one opinion, and it’s easy for those who are not working to form another opinion. It’s easy for healthcare officials to say ‘stay closed’, but the world and money doesn’t stop. Businesses in general can not stay closed for much longer without some significant help.
While we are seeing some optimistic dates being set by companies like Cinemark and AMC, they are one of few. We have to assume that we have at least one more month of closures before we start seeing reopenings.
