Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

The savings rate isn't that surprising. With high uncertainty and a widespread expectation of economic pain for a good long while consumer sentiment has to be in the tank. Add the decreased opportunities to even spend money, and it's hard to expect anything else. I know our spending has been *way* down the last couple of months--mostly because of deferred/cancelled travel, but also little things: I used to eat lunch out most days, a $4 cup of coffee in the afternoon, etc. etc. etc.

Same. We typically spend a substantial amount of discretionary income on travel. We were booked on a big Alaskan cruise, with all the options, our biggest vacation in a decade, and that's $9k that's back in the bank doing nothing, and I'm in no hurry to spend it because even with a company that's succeeding, I don't really know the future holds. If everyone went back to work tomorrow, I don't imagine that rampant consumerism is going to make a comeback any time soon.

Jeff said:

When I was in my 20's, all I wanted to do was eat, drink and ****

Was that supposed to go away when I turned 30? I guess I'm behind the curve.

SIX

All guests over the age of two and all team members will be required to wear face masks covering the nose and mouth throughout their visit/work day. Accommodations may be made on a case-by-case basis for persons with disabilities, health concerns, religious restrictions, or other circumstances that in Six Flags’ discretion warrant a modification of this face mask requirement

So do you get a note from your pastor or something? I don’t see ApolloAndy writing any of these, but I could be wrong.

$20, I'll write you a note for anything (though I'm pretty sure you can get ordained in "random internet church" for $20). It's also good for the economy since it gets money moving.

Our family spending is WAY down. Our grocery bill has gone up, but our eating out is probably 1/4 of what is was, our gas is effectively zero, and our travel is actually zero (Cancelled a weeklong trip for 11 to Disneyland. Cancelled our two week summer trip for 5 to New York). Our home improvement spending is up a bit as well, since that's about all we have to do.

Someone I work with got a license online to be wedding officiant. He officiated the wedding of his daughter to her fiance over the weekend. Their church is not performing weddings right now so they went to a park with 10-15 people and had a wedding. Don't think that license will allow him to write excuses to get people out of wearing masks at amusement parks though.

A lot of politicians don't understand economics very well. So they thought getting money to people would keep the economy going. To a limited degree it did but there is just a lot less spending right now. Getting stimulus checks and increased unemployment checks to people and keeping paychecks flowing with PPP loans wasn't going to result in a lot of consumer spending because of the uncertainty and fact that so many businesses were closed so the opportunities to spend were not there. Once they figured out that reality, the discussion of opening things back up started. And when they saw there was a lot of public support for that, the movement began to build. Populist support on both sides.

Regarding testing, at least here in central Florida, there are countless places where you can go without any referral needed and get tested. My wife, daughter, mother-in-law, and I all went Friday evening to a local urgent care and got tested pretty quickly. I know the Orange County Convention Center has a great testing setup as well, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about that process and how quickly the results arrive.

Did you get the swab up to the brain? I've heard mixed reactions from "it wasn't that bad" to "it literally forced tears and goop to come out of my eyes involuntarily"

Politicians don't understand economics or public health very well, let alone the intersection of the two. How the feds didn't start by writing checks for testing, research and even the seeds of vaccine manufacturing first is beyond me. You know what my stimulus check went to? Nothing, it's sitting in my savings earning 1.3% interest.

You get 1.3% on your savings account? Holy crap. I'm lucky if I get 0.2% (not exaggeration). Most of my money is at least invested in something.

Technically it's a money market account. Capital One. It was 3% a couple of years ago!

Ah, okay. The money markets that my investment firm is offering are in the 1.5% range.

BrettV said:

Did you get the swab up to the brain? I've heard mixed reactions from "it wasn't that bad" to "it literally forced tears and goop to come out of my eyes involuntarily"

It appears to be the same swab thy use for the flu and when I had that done years ago it definitely made my eyes water and is not something I'm in any hurry to experience again. Not the worst thing ever but no desire to repeat it. My husband had it done a few weeks back because of an exposure incident at work and it was an issue for him because his nose had been broken multiple times as a teen and the swab didn't want to go in. He gave them permission to just force it in and he could feel the cartilage doing funky stuff and an hour later something that had been moved out of place suddenly snapped back.

BrettV said:

Did you get the swab up to the brain? I've heard mixed reactions from "it wasn't that bad" to "it literally forced tears and goop to come out of my eyes involuntarily"

I got the swab up the nasal cavity. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Not a laugh-a-minute funfest, of course, but not particularly terrible, either.

I have had an ENT put a scope up there a couple of times and definitely was a very odd sensation but would happily take that over Novocain shots at the dentist any day.

Shades said:

Remember this curve? The whole point of flattening the curve was to keep the hospitals from getting over taxed.

• There are no timescales on those curves
• There's no way to know which curve we are on at the present time, or where on which curve we are. The curves aren't going to be nice and smooth like that.
• Initially, it may have made sense to think of one national curve. Once the tourists got home from NYC and New Orleans, there became many local curves, and unless travel patterns change again, it probably makes sense to think of the problem that way going forward. So nationally we may be trending down, but in a town in Iowa where there's a meatpacking plant?
• All of this may point to a failure in communications, and that would be a fair criticism, although a simple and compelling explanation may have been called for at the time.

And it's not the case that the only way out is "herd immunity" and/or a vaccine. There's no herd immunity for SARS or MERS, nor does a vaccine exist. Those viruses basically went away. The way out - which herd immunity would accomplish, if it's possible - is to drive R-0, the number of people each infected person in turn infects, down below 1. One way to do that, the way places like New Zealand have, is to quickly and effectively isolate infected people. If we could do that, the virus, sooner or later, goes away on its own. But the "sooner or later" depends on how effectively we can identify infected people and we have made minimal progress on that front.

(We could also develop drugs that, although not vaccines, make infection less likely (think PrEP), or treatments that make Covid-19 less fatal. I assume smart people are working on those avenues as well.)

Tell me more about this. Say we implement strong testing, tracing, and isolation protocols. Is there some point at which the virus actually "goes away" as in, it is eradicated and is no longer found in any human population? Or does it "go away" as in some small number of people have it and we continually manage testing, tracing, and isolation in perpetuity to keep that number constant, even as the other 300 million people live mostly normal lives?

SARs and MERs disappeared because they both killed people too fast...

I think that's what a lot of strong leadership listening to experts are driving toward. The approach in the US seems to have been:

1. Social distance
2. ...
3. Normalcy!

The NZ/AU approach went something like this:

1. Social distance hard, lock it down even though it hurts.
2. Prove that transmission has slowed or stopped via rigorous testing.
3. Resume a cautious but restrictive normal, continuing to test, trace and quarantine as necessary until there's a treatment or cure.

Economically, both approaches suck, but I can't see any way that the US approach isn't economically much worse, as it likely creates a cycle of infection spikes that are only mitigated by repeating the cycle we're now prematurely ending. The down-under approach sucks because there will be certain industries and businesses that will absolutely collapse because they were chosen to collapse, where as here that's happening organically (and likely with the same results).

I dunno, all of the solutions suck, just some less than others.