Keeping the Economy Closed Too Long Can Cause Deaths, Too

Here's the prediction I made, you know, very early on. I was talking to my friends. I think I said this. What they're going to do, they're going to say, we're only going to keep things closed until April 12th. And that's what Trump said at first. Easter, we're going to come open up. And I said about a week before, they're going to say, well, we got to push it back. Sure enough, April 30th. Then May 15th. Now it's June 1st. June 1st for who? Who just said, I think New York just announced this. They said June 1st? Yeah. They said they're going to start May 15th with outside of New York City, right? Is that what Cuomo said? I'm not entirely sure. But I feel like he said they're going to start. I do know a lot of jurisdictions have slowly entered, you know, the phase one. There was that Trump argument with Kemp in Georgia about going too fast and stuff like that. Yeah. So I guess, you know, people starting to realize if you don't open things up, there's nothing to save, right? Right. What's what's freaking me about all of this is the tribalism behind whether or not we should reopen the economy or stay locked down. It's connected to everything, right? What do you mean? The tribalism. It's connected to everything. Totally. Totally. So, you know, I had a friend messaging me saying, stupid people who want haircuts are going to get us all killed and they're going out and protesting. And the first thing I'm like, you really don't think just because one guy was holding that dumb sign. That's what everyone is thinking, right? No, that's not the case. But what's crazy to me is you had the UN, a UN advisor come out and say, we're looking at 130 million people are going to starve because of the economic shutdown. And that's going to be much worse potentially than the actual pandemic itself. And these kind of facts are ignored because of the tribalism of what's happening. You know, Trump tweets it out. Therefore, it's an hour, right, left, you know, conservative, whatever. I don't think they know exactly what to do. I mean, I think there's some educated decisions that are being made by medical professionals. And then they have to adjust those based on new statistics that come in. And I don't know if they have adjusted. The initial idea was that there was an X amount of people that were infected in California. It turns out there's many, many, many more. And the most recent thought is that there's somewhere around 400,000. Now, there has been some dispute about these studies, you know, whether or not these studies are accurate, whether or not the tests are accurate, whether or not you could get it again, whether or not it even matters if you've already had it, you might be able to get it again. There's no adjustments. No one's saying, hey, this is way less deadly than we thought it was going to be. You know, there's... This sounds like the problem of government. I've never been one of these small government types. You know, as much as people might want to argue with me, I lean a little bit left on a lot of issues like government programs, I think, are good things. It just seems like whenever the government enacts something, it's so slow to fix it if it goes bad or when things change, right? So slow to adjust if they need to shift back. They tend to just dump more money into it if it's not working properly. I want to know why some people just shake this off. That's to me the most... It almost seems like you're dealing with more than one virus. It's like you're dealing with a bunch of different versions of a virus. I think you are. I think they've said they found multiple strains, like that it changed a little bit or something. I don't want to... I know they did say that about India. They said that the strain that they have in India is apparently very different than the strain they're experiencing in Europe. Yeah. I heard something similar about Washington. They found two strains. Liberal and a conservative strain. I don't know, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The crazy thing to me is that people... A lot of Trump supporters... I'm not trying to blanket every single one, but there's some high profile ones that are really acting like since the beginning, they've doubted it every step of the way. I'm like, have you looked at the spike charts? Here's what I say. If in New York City, we're seeing thousands more dead, what are they dying of if not some kind of infection? I mean, you can call whatever you want. You can act like nothing's going on, but we're seeing huge spikes in the amount of people who die. You can't pay attention to them. There's fools no matter what you do. There's always going to be fools. It's obviously a real virus. It's obviously real dangerous. It's the... Well, tribalism. Yeah. It's foolish, but it's... You got to just dismiss that stuff. You can't even debate it or dwell on it. But what's interesting to me is... Well, there's a bunch of parts that are interesting. What's interesting to me is who... Georgia's opened, right? And then parts of Montana have opened. Things that have opened in Texas. It's going to be interesting to see what the response is going to be, whether or not they come back online quicker and their economy builds up quicker, or whether or not they get a second surge and they have to shut down longer. It winds up being that maybe you should have waited longer and would have had less infection. We just saw a city of 10 million in China enter lockdown again. To what degree? I'm not entirely sure, but they've announced re-upping all the social distancing measures and certain closures and stuff like that. And they're saying it's because someone, a student... I think they're saying a student from the US came back. Of course they're saying that. Right, right, right. Re-ignited that. But there's also a bunch of studies now about reinfection. It's a whole lot of we don't know and everyone's freaking out. Whenever there's a new disease and everybody's got to scramble in real time to try to figure out what the fuck to do about it. And we're all just weirded out. Everybody's weirded out. No one knows what is normal now. What is reality? The reality we live in. You see movies now when people hug or shake hands and you're like, ah, what are you doing? I've been watching these commercials. You see these commercials, they're all the same. Where it's like, we're all in this together. And then it shows people banging pots and pans. And it's like, we may not be able to hug anymore, but the love is there. It's like, all identical. But then all of a sudden an older commercial pops up. And I was watching this the other day and it's like a guy walks up, shakes his buddy's hand, pats him on the back and then gives his wife a kiss on the cheek. And I'm like, that's an old commercial. I can tell it's an old campaign. Yeah. Because they would not do that. Most of them are old because you can't shoot anything anymore. I don't know how, I'm curious how they're doing these commercials where they film New York. I guess they're going out in New York and filming people actually cheer from their balconies and stuff. Huh. Yeah. Wow. Look, I think there's a real tough question that a lot of people want to ignore. I think there's a lot of Trump supporters who are pushing it because they're in favor of reopening the economy. But there's that equation of at what point is having things shut down more damaging than. So at a certain point we have to recognize people are going to die no matter what we do. Well, there's a Bloomberg, not the mayor, but there's a Bloomberg statistic on the economy that measures the downside. Like when the economy goes down, how many people die because of it? And you could kind of trace it. It's very disturbing. And when we're talking about deaths, we're talking about there's something that we can immediately deal with. It's right in front of us. It's a disease that's happening right now. Go after it. Stop it. But the secondary reaction to that, in fact, because you're closing the economy might wind up killing as many people as you're trying to avoid being killing in the long run. Or more. Yeah. Or more. Yeah. So I don't know. The big story on the UN was that their advisor said 235 million starving in the next year or so unless things kick back into gear.