Quote from: Gyfts on May 20, 2020, 10:20:32 PM

Quote from: SaltySpitoon on May 19, 2020, 05:02:28 PM

There is a deadly virus which we've both acknowledged exists. The government aims to maximize tax revenue to pay their salaries, compete in the global pissing contest that is, who has the highest GDPs/wealthiest countries etc. External medical personnel (in every country) said oh damn look at this virus, its bad, it'll cause X people to die and Y people to get sick. Internal government medical agencies see that information and go, yup that is right it looks like X people will die and Y people will get sick, here is what we should do (social distancing/shutdowns/masks). Trump administration that is not medical personnel says ok, we need to weigh X people dying and Y people getting sick with the economic damage that will be caused from the suggested measures. They get their wizards to model various scenarios and say, yup if we do this for this long, we'll lose $Z. So you compare the $ in X, Y, and Z and make a policy to minimize all three of those things.

This is the most logical approach because a public policy maker's job is to reasonably outweigh risks and balance them with the greater good. But considering US politics is an utter shit show, I've seen people try to make the argument that every life counts and that it's not worth reopening the economy because "people may die". We have the data and it's clear that it points to a reopening, but because grandma might die, this apparently means healthy 25 year olds can't work.

That's the hard thing to balance here, you have to strike a balance between public health risk and the reward of eyeopening the economy. Neither side of the aisle is going to want the economy to die, no one wants that to happen, but the parties have a bit of a different take on how they want to go about things and that's okay.

I think that at the end of the day we should follow scientific metrics in how we're going to open the country -- as a country we should follow something like NY in how we're going to open - https://forward.ny.gov/regional-monitoring-dashboard - take a look here and this will show you.

NY (and I think NJ too) is following a metric based system in how they're going to open different parts of the state if they're able to pass different metrics that experts have agreed on.