Went to get some stuff from the in-laws house today. Apparently everything is completely over here in TX no restrictions that I could see in town and the only person I saw with a mask had it on their chin. Everything appeared to be at full capacity as well. reopen everything, get everyone into one room and lets get it all over with at this point. I am tired of waiting for this to blow up in everyone's face and I am guessing that it just isn't going to happen now, at least not here.
I think most people feel the same way at this point. The government dropped the ball to provide clear leadership & a direction for the country, and as a result, people got diffused about the whole situation. It's still
extremely dangerous - we're at 105,000 American deaths as of tonight - but people are just kinda "done" with the whole thing, and that attitude is going to affect behavior & potentially tragic results in the coming months.
I ran a bunch of errands today & that was the general vibe I got off people. Behind closed doors, people would do a quick question-check and ask if anyone cared about masks & they'd all come off, every time. A lot of places were very lax on the rules. Food workers were definitely more on the "screw it" side of things, from what I saw, at least in terms of enforcement. It's a difficult thing to reconcile for a lot of people, overall. Like, in my state, we have 3.5 million people & we've had under 3,800 COVID deaths, with 50% of those being from nursing homes. And we border NYC, which has had nearly 16.5k deaths (NY state is at 23k overall). I'm in the extremely fortunate position where I can work remotely the majority of the time, but many of my clients are getting hit super-hard & some simply aren't going to make it, which is terrible.
I don't know what the right answer is for re-opening, but I am definitely favor of a "phased rollout with safety precautions" approach at this point. From what I can tell, (1) the virus isn't going away anytime soon, (2) doing safe practices seems to help (social distancing, sanitizer, etc.), (3) the government aid has been pretty minimal & isn't really going directly to the small-biz companies who really actually truly need it, and (4) we have a wishy-washy plan of action on the federal & state levels to deal with it, without much enforcement going on. I've been extremely impressed with New Zealand's response. They've had zero new cases of COVID for 9 days in a row now, and have only one active case recorded currently in the
entire country. Just phenomenal.