Not getting a virus is important, but you know whats more important? Having food. Having AC, water, utilities. Having a roof over your head. The amount of entitlement in this forum of folks who just have zero clue of what its like to be your average middle class is just exhausting
My first-blush reaction was hey, just follow the government's orders & shelter in place if you're non-essential until this dies down. But story after story is coming out about how people are still having to pay business licenses, business rents, etc. without actually working & getting an income. Which is fine, except that they've also applied for government financial aid & have gotten nothing. And this applies not just to business owners, but also individuals who haven't been able to get unemployment or the $600 weekly stimulus assistance yet. There's only so much emergency funds you can burn through until it's gone, and only so much credit you can apply for before you burn that up to & get denied. From a Facebook post from a guy north of where I used to live:
Is there anything else I can do for The State of Michigan Governor Whitmer? I paid my 3 Liquor Licenses on April 30 $4000, I paid my 3 Restaurant Licenses April 30 $1700, I paid my Workman’s Comp Premium $4800 (still have to pay workmans comp on PPP), I paid my Property taxes Feb 12, Murrays and Pirates Cove $23000, Schloegels $21000, my personal residence in Michigan $5800, my rental house $2800, my two parking lots $700.—-don’t worry about the food that needed to be thrown out that was only $6000 since Insurance didn’t cover I will pay out of pocket, I paid $38000 in March Payrolls not covered by any plan. This week i will pay off the last of my vendors and maintenance people who, luckily I haven’t had to call (wonder how they are surving). We need income to pay these expenses! Thank you for protecting us from ourselves! 113 Covid-19 Cases, 14 deaths, 300,000 people to feed in the very insignificant Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In spite of the governor I will survive! (This is not a political statement, it is an economic argument, and i put it out there to emphasize that if this is happen to me, its happening to a whole heck of a lot more people who likely can’t withstand anymore)
This dude is over $100k in the hole right now, between his business & his personal expenses, with no end in sight. I'm willing to bet that the small business stimulus check he'll eventually get won't cover
nearly that amount. I think a big part of the problem is that we didn't have an effective & efficiency emergency-aid system in place before all of this. I understand the virus is horrible & we need to get things locked down, but if the government is going to order you to stay home & stop your business activities, then they need to compensate businesses properly & an in a timely manner, and if the individual economic aid packages are having issues, they need to send out the National Guard (with proper PPE) to make people are getting food, supplies, and medicine.
I primarily support small businesses in my work in IT, and most of them are getting hit really hard. I suspect a large portion of them are not going to make it out of this without going bankrupt. The only ones who are getting the small business stimulus are the ones who have really good financial people on their payroll, who can navigate things & pull strings & get the funding coming in. Some areas are getting better...my food-service clients have generally gone from a 70% drop over the last couple of months to a 30% drop, but a lot of my other clients are just straight-up closed. I've been able to setup numerous VPN installations for those who can work from home, but if you have to make stuff or provide an on-site service, things are still pretty sketchy right now & the government hasn't exactly issue a clear & detailed plan for supporting small businesses owners over the next few months & possibly years, so it's understandable why people are starting to get freaked out...they're literally running out of money, going into enormous amounts of debt, going bankrupt, and have no way out at the present time.
I don't know what the right answer is. Initially, I thought we should just do a complete & total lockdown for 3 weeks & call it "done" - get the 2-week virus out of our systems & then an extra week to make sure it's really dead. But a smart phased rollout sounds more doable...so many companies are still running as essential, so it's not like we can completely shut things down properly. Not only that, but the data isn't saying what we thought it would. In NYC, for example, there are over 21,000 deaths from COVID. However, the statistics say that the majority of people being hospitalized aren't the people still working, but are actually the people staying at home:
It underscores the need for people to double-down on protecting themselves and their families, the governor said.
www.marketwatch.com
“We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percentage of essential employees were getting sick because they were going to work. That this maybe was nurses, doctors, transit workers—that’s not the case,” Cuomo said. Some 83% of new patients are out of work or retired, and aren’t even leaving their home on a daily basis. “This is a surprise. Overwhelmingly, the people were at home,” he added.
Not only that, but "96% of those hospitalized in recent days have underlying health issues, things like cancer, asthma and diabetes, that can make COVID-19 more severe." So staying at home, oddly enough, is turning out to be not the right answer, which kind of defies logic, but the facts are the facts. This is one of those things that changed my mind about being in support of a (smart) phased rollout: if the majority of people getting sick staying at home, and if most of the people getting sick have underlying conditions, then we can take precautions to get people back to work. The WHO has already warned us that COVID will be with us for a long time:
"Make no mistake, we have a long way to go. This virus will be with us for a long time," WHO's top official says.
www.cnbc.com
And for most states, 1/3 of the deaths are in long-term care facilities:
The report comes as the government announced all states must now meet federal reporting guidelines. The type of information gathered by states up to now has been inconsistent.
www.npr.org
In my state, 50% of the deaths are in nursing homes, to the point where they're doing COVID-only nursing homes:
"This is really the safest approach," said David Grabowski, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School.
www.nbcnews.com
The reality is that we can't do this forever. I wish we could ride it out, but financially-speaking, that just isn't going to be possible for most people & for most businesses, so I understand why different states are taking what look like bad approaches to reopening...they're stuck between a rock & a hard place. Currently, there is no right answer. What we need is clear direction from the government & expedited financial aid to businesses & individuals in need in order to support them until we can get back on our feet as a nation. The actual rollout & implementation of those two things has been less than desirable, unfortunately.
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