It looks like active cases in the USA dropped for the first time today. I'm not saying it means anything, but the curve of active cases looks more than a little bent.
Pretty sure that's happened before (like after a month or so of stay at home) only for it to be meaningless. I'd also be leery because of attempts to start screwing with reporting specifically so they can claim that and force people back to work.
I hope you understand that most of the "essential" workers who have been working constantly through the pandemic are generally "less well-off"? The people coming back will come from nearly every economic class that still requires employment.
It's not insane when you consider the consequences of forcing those people to stop working. I don't like it either, but if any of us want to continue buying food at the food store, people in ag jobs have to keep producing. They should have (and possibly could have) been more-aggressive about testing. Relying on half-assed safety procedures is a good way not only to risk the health of your employees but also risk lawsuits and shutdowns from your workforce becoming incapacitated.
Seriously, if you are running a business in this climate, you need to realize that getting your people sick is a good way to kill your own business. Employers and employees are going to need each other to get through this crisis.
While that's true (that the essential workers are some of the worst treated/compensated), and certainly there's more than just the lowest income people that are being pushed back to work. But many of the higher income people have been working, and could continue to work from home a significant amount, and are much more able to practice social distancing. And they'll be much more able to handle it if (or I should say when) we have another explosion of cases and need to try and flatten the curve again. You're also ignoring that he's talking about the fact that those people that were already there are also going to be hurt, as more people increases their risk of exposure.
Are we also going to ignore a big part of that? We have a President and political side who has been demonizing immigrants, and they're a HUGE part of our food production chain. We're not magically going to replace that with American workers. And because of our immigration policies (and its not like they're going to improve during a global pandemic), we're going to have serious problems as those groups get sick. Which is what we're seeing in the meat packing plants with them trying to look the other way. What happens if thousands of migrant workers die? Even if we weren't openly antagonistic towards them, they'll stay away simply because its too high of a risk. And then what? We force Americans to accept that level of pay and care?
Absolutely, but I don't know what to say when you see the rampant psychopathy on display. Its clear there's a lot of people that have outsized power to ruin people's lives telling them they should be happy to risk their lives for shitty pay, while having not great health care to rely on. And if they don't then no job, and guess what they'll probably prevent them from collecting unemployment as well. And businesses that want to take care of their workers are going to be steamrolled into bad behavior because people in the government care more about money than people. How many of them have straight up said that yep people will die so what that's just the price people should pay. Or the asshole that said that it wasn't meat packing plants enabling the spread of the virus, those workers are getting it at home, and we should send police to their homes to enforce social distancing.
Certainly this is difficult situation even for good people taking smart actions. But its much worse because we have lunatic moron assholes with outsized power, making stupid decisions. We still don't even really have a plan for coming back, that is anything more than vague staged transition with "wash your hands and wear masks". We spent basically two months just in stasis while dipshits tried to fight over who's to blame and a bunch of other bullshit that doesn't help a goddamn thing, so we're going to end up back in the same place if not worse. And its very clear to see. Or we'll delude ourselves into idiocy because the summer sun keeps its spread to a minimum, and then fall hits and we end up with explosive spread because people are back to not taking it seriously (possibly even more convinced that its all a hoax), and we start doing sporting events and other shit that causes it to spread worse than ever. We're pushing 80-100k deaths even with us taking drastic measures for 2-3 months. Objectively that's going to start climbing as we open back up. Even if it tapers off through the summer, it will almost absolutely be back. And instead of preparing for that, we're gonna try to just go back to business as usual and then we'll be back to this same stupid situation.