Originally Posted by Duffman

I hope you're kidding, because I would 1000 times prefer a depression to millions of Americans dying literally for the Dow. Regardless, we can either listen to health experts now and avert a complete catastrophe with a quarantine that buys time until we can learn more about the virus and ramp up production of tests, PPE, containment measures, and establish safe protocols for the public that can hold us over until a vaccine can be safely produced and manufactured and accept that there will not be an immediate return to normalcy, or we can ignore what all the experts are saying because it's inconvenient and rationalize that a bunch of politicians, businessmen, and talk show hosts who've probably never even taken college-level biology class are more credible than epidemiologists and doctors who, on top of being smarter, spent decades studying how to solve this exact scenario. Nevermind that the doctors and epidemiologists are just doing their jobs whereas the politicians have vested financial interests in returning everyone to work, but I digress.


Italy is about 2 weeks ahead of us and you can see how that's playing out. It took martial law and mandatory don't-leave-your-house quarantines enforced by police and military to even begin to reverse the infection trend. And when their hospitals exceeded limits, they had a 10% fatality rate. You don't think the same thing will happen here? If we just try to power through this and act like "if I get coronoa, I get corona" then millions of Americans will die. I'm willing to bet the majority of people who are supporting the whole "let's get back to work" idea also think this whole thing is overblown, and that mentality will change real fast as soon as someone they care about dies, especially if it's because they couldn't get healthcare in an overburdened clinic. So what happens then? Civil unrest and another quarantine when the gov't has already blown it's load on a $2T bail out, it can't afford to keep people off the street in the midst of a pandemic that could easily kill more Americans than all the previous wars combined, and we really do end up with the worst-case apocalyptic scenario. So yeah, I think we should play it safe on this one, defer to the experts instead of loud-mouth politicians who know nothing about epidemiology or biology and have made an entire career on manipulating people into serving them, and accept that this is a necessary evil. But then again, I watch CSPAN because I think all the networks are garbage MTV for adults, so do with that what you will.