Hacker News Reader

Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

> Add in the trillions in the bailout and economic damage, this might be the worst decision ever.

This was caused by the pandemic itself, not by the reaction to it. There's no scenario in which a pandemic ravaging unchecked through the populace does not create massive economic damage.

View on HN

States are reopening based on the rate of infection. If there was more testing and better contact tracing earlier, these reopenings would've happened earlier. Which means less money needed to keep the economy from crashing.

It didn't have to be unchecked. That's the thing. Taiwan never closed down.

We would have needed a better president in the White House at the very minimum to have had a better response. And that's enough of a counterfactual that I'm just taking the current situation as a given. Given the president we do have, the current result seems to have been inevitable one way or another. We could've had fewer deaths here in NYC with a better governor and mayor who acted more quickly, but again, this is a hell of a counterfactual.

Had we reacted better, it's reasonable to believe that we could have contained it properly and not spent as many trillions.

The worse we let the pandemic get, the more expensive it will be.

The countries that took early measures i.e. Taiwan and South Korea have not had anywhere near the economic shutdown we have had. Economic damage and the need for gargantuan bailouts has been greatly curtailed.

We are now perenially in a wave of shutdowns and loosenings as the virus ripples through the population till we have a vaccine or herd immunity or it is reduced to a manageable chronic problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com