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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about that. I'm ready to go to the gym, go out to restaurants, and just yesterday they took the caution tape off of the school playground and lots of kids were there.

I don't think demand will immediately return to 100%, but I think quite a few people are itching to get out and spend money and enjoy life. Maybe not in some areas, but most of the country is probably ready to go.

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40% of households making under 40k a year have had a job loss since March

Is this an argument for lack of consumer demand?

Keeping things shut down isn't going to help these people get back to work.

I think this is an argument for lack of money to be spent since a hefty portion of people have lost their jobs and paychecks don't happen instantaneously and unpaid bills probably come first.

Sure, but it's circular logic to suggest that there's no need to rush reopening since demand will be low anyway... (As others have said)

When you need those jobs created by reopening to get people back to work and closer to the point of having disposable income again.

This isn't pure chicken & egg, since consumer debt is tightening up while business debt is getting cheaper. Plus the only way we're going to alleviate fear is by opening and seeing what happens.

Even testing vaccines will require that leap of faith at some point. After all, what good would a clinical trial be if the patient quarantined during it?

Here’s one example. Restaurants will likely be operating at 50% capacity or below for the foreseeable future. Their business model does not work at 50% capacity. Many, many jobs are not coming back.

Sure, but that's artificially limited supply. Which isn't an argument for saying there's lack of demand.

Consumer confidence is being eroded more and more every single day, and the savings rate of an American has almost doubled to 13% in the past 2 months. Purchasing power of an average American has most likely decreased somewhat, if not significantly, given the unemployment numbers. All of those things don’t just bounce back like a rubber band when the country is “ready to go”. It will be years before we get back to the GDP numbers we were seeing pre-Covid and that’s probably considering that everything trends upwards from here on out, which is highly doubtful.

People are surprisingly ready for a serious respiratory disease.

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