Not even close. "Durrr how ya gonna pay for it?"

If I was still living in a major coastal city I would be pretty concerned about the potential for societal breakdown. This is America, so expect looting and riots at the very least.

Yes we have a very different legal system, giant sweeping social welfare programs cannot be created and enacted unilaterally by the government.

In this moment it might seem a bit obtuse and slow but its designed to be that way, to prevent abuse and panic induced changes to the nation.

The province of Ontario, Canada announcing this morning:

New law to provide for job-protected leave for every worker due to illness, self-isolation/quarantine or to provide emergency childcare due to school closure.

No doctor's note requirement allowed.

Law to be retroactive to January 25.

This is horrifying to many Americans. Next stop, the gulags!

The only way to minimize the impact in the U.S. is for the government to step in and order a national quarantine enforced by the National Guard. ALL businesses shut down, cease all transport including airports and mass transit and any non essential travel made illegal. Real leadership would do what it takes, unfortunately we don’t have that.

My city confirmed its first case today. A tourist from New York, not surprisingly. They tested positive here, then went on to another county further west, where they are now in self-isolation.

good news comrades! The House has passed an aid bill including paid leave!

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...si-aid-testing

I think they are fortunate and unusual.

Thats not really possible. There are not enough men including all civil servants, police, and military to enforce such a thing nationwide.

The best thing to do is keep encouraging local and voluntary quarantines and isolation.

Much more effective and less tyrannical

Also what you are suggesting is largely illegal in the US. Just because its "an emergency" does not give the feds unlimited power.

If we're talking about people in their 70s, sure.

But for people over 50?

About half the people who bike to work at my office are 50 or older.

Including yours truly - though only barely so.

To me the notion that closed small businesses like bars and restaurants and even many larger ones like smaller hotel chains are going to have that 50% employer contribution seems to me absurd. Many of these businesses were hanging on by their fingernails already due to things like mandatory $15/hour minimum wages (didn’t Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia do away with minimum wages?). So a law like this here would be a death sentence for much of the economy and dead employers won’t be paying anything.

Romney proposed giving every US adult $1K immediately

yeah that outta do it

It's pretty serious, though. They might start looking at this like it's a war.

During WWII, two Pasadena, CA hotels were taken over by the federal government and turned into military hospitals.

There were lots of abuses in WW2 I dont think we need to really go into the finer details of internment.

I think you're on to something: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article241216061.html

Here too, where they were used as prisons and hospitals. The Grove Park Inn housed imprisoned Axis diplomats, while the Kenilworth Inn was used as a hospital. The government also took over other facilities here too, including the Grove Arcade, a shopping mall that was turned into a government office building, and Biltmore House, which was used for art storage for the National Gallery.

Our local crisis response plan involves comandeering hotels again if need be, and using them to provide the homeless and others with places to self-quarantine.

Challenging times call for challenging measures. Doubt it happens just saying that is what *should* happen.

County government here is currently asking all bars and restaurants to limit their service to takeout only. In the release they stated if need be, they will reevaluate the situation in the near future and won't just be asking. At least three, including two heavy hitters, have already closed their dining rooms. When you consider this, consider that the local government has a plan to comandeer hotels, that the breweries and music clubs have closed to the public and that even Biltmore House has closed the house to tours...

We haven't seen a situation like this since World War II.

I walked to city hall in my small town and noticed the poster that read all services were closed last friday til march 27th. I wanted to inquire about a garage I want to rebuild. Small contractors will all be affected by this in a big way.
There should be mechanisms in place within the macro-economic circles to effect a plug-out and plug-in for events such as these.

New Jersey curfew now

There's commandeering vital facilities during a national emergency and then there's internment camps. The feds can do one without the other.

Kid Rock is refusing to shut down his restaurant in Nashville. Nashville-Davidson and/ or TN should be able to force him to shut down.

I dont think they can for now, most of these are once again "suggested" They'd have to somehow make a public health case to a court which they probably cannot do yet as there are not enough cases.

Um... It's a bit late for that, and I'll just leave it at that.

Why? You can go to a restaurant without coughing sneezing on anyone (if you feel sick you should stay home anyway), shaking hands, etc.

This is all too much.

Yes. Much scarier than this virus.

The world has gone insane.


https://external-content.duckduckgo....3D1&f=1&nofb=1


https://i.imgur.com/0jpEjCh.jpg

Among other reasons, the people who work there would have to wear rubber gloves and should be wearing face shields at least to protect themselves. Remember that the transmission of this disease is not so much by droplets (such as being coughed on) but by transmission from surfaces to hands to nose/mouth/eyes. So any server or bartender who touched the table, bar, utensils, dinnerware, glassware etc would have to be wearing PPE.

Same goes for customers. Sitting at a bar would be especially perilous but even individual tables would need to be wiped down with alcohol or bleach between customers.

Oooohhhh a whole 1000 dollars, that will make up for months of unemployment...

The state doesn't need to prove the public health emergency to a court in order to shut businesses down.

Deteriorating is not the right description.

Everything is just shutting down. Like on hold.

The economy of March 16th is no different from the economy from 2 weeks ago in any objective measure.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/06/us-j...uary-2020.html

'Job growth smashes expectations"

We are pretty much going to lose a quarter or two due to quarantine but as soon as the Virus starts to die down or we get an idea of how the lifcycle is going to be we will bounce back quickly to the way it was before.

Actually this stock sell off and panic might have prevented a bigger and more general recession in the next 12-24 months. Like a pressure release.

For many people, it will pay the rent for a couple of months. And remember that it is on top of unemployment that's currently available to most. One additional "reform" that will be needed is to temporarily eliminate the requirement that those collecting unemployment actively look for work. Not only won't they find any right now but looking is counter to "social distancing".

If you are a service sector employee that cant get work for 3 weeks that 1000 bucks would be a big deal.

Plus didnt they announce some additional paid sick leave access to unemployment etc?

What do you expect the government to roll out 100% pay for everyone overnight?

Sure, many people can. Unfortunately I think you’re putting way too much trust in the commitment of the masses to public health. Way too many people are still not washing their hands regularly, trying to enact any measure of social distancing or staying home if they feel sick. If the world was full of responsible and respectful adults, you’d have a point.

This should be common knowledge by now, like 'social distancing' and 'flatten the curve', but people can be seemingly fine and be infected thus spread it around unknowingly. In New York, they are still allowing take outs (even alcohol from pubs) as to not wipe out the restaurant industry. My wife and I went out to eat over the weekend and decided not worth the risk and will lay low; we both have mothers nearby who are 70.

There are a long list of medications we are being warned about in my hospital that will soon be in short supply due to fact the precursors of which are produced in China.

Every hour there another list of medications that are going to be in shortage.

We never could even have had a small skirmish with the Chinese in the south China sea or defending Taiwan.

China could and still can have the capability to harm the majority of our drug supply faster than anyone outside of the Pentagon.

Well at least I hope we learned that allowing our enemies (and Communist China, who has been waging all out economic warfare since 1990, is indeed our enemy) to control our means of production for anything important (such as pharmaceuticals) is suicidal.

Had they threatened to cut off the production and supply of them, and while I don’t view that as a casus belli because we put ourselves in that situation, I hope it is a wake up call for us.

Not just for pharmaceuticals, but for many other things. 5G, Military technology, the strangle hold on rare earth elements.....
The USA can mine rare earths, but regulations price continues to let China control with worlds supply.

I believe there should be free trade with other countries, but what we have allowed China to do to us (and they have done with great relish accompanied by financial and political gain) is not “free trade” by any stretch of the imagination.

The mantra should be from anywhere but China now. Even our surgical and N95 makes are made in China, and yes we are having a shortage of them too btw.

The problem is that the health care system will collapse.

But this didn't need to happen at all. All of these western governments that are suddenly playing defense had two months to mount a proactive response. All of this disruption to our daily lives is the result of inaction (and incompetence) for two months while we watched this spiral in Asia. A perfect example of why it didn't have to be this way is how South Korea was able to get their pretty large outbreak under control, and with an extremely lowest mortality rate. Compare that to Italy, where the mortality rate has been 10 times Korea's and the outbreak got out of control.

American hubris at its finest. “We don’t need to worry about anything that’s someone else’s problem”. We’ll hopefully learn our lesson, only after the economy is in ruins and thousands are dead.

It finally reached San Bernardino County and now my med school is giving the option of either taking our prescheduled exams this week or canceling them, averaging our previous grades, and ending the year early.

I really dont know what everyone keeps saying "should be doing"

Nobody seems to have any idea what "should" be happening besides way over the top impossible nationwide shut down, I think its just everyone liking to bitch.

Every country is struggling with this, most worse than the USA at the moment.

There really isnt much a government can actually do about this kind of an incident.

Toronto's top public medical official has called for the closing of dine-in restaurants, nightclubs and theaters tonight.

I can't believe there are still going to be 4 Democratic primaries tomorrow. The smart thing to do would be to postpone all remaining primaries to a single day, preferably a Saturday, in a month or two. There's just too much panic out there to not affect results and turnout.

you really, truly believe the bullshit you just spewed? lol

come on man, so many businesses are gonna go out of business over the next 4 to 6 months. EVERYTHING will be different. It will takes years to dig out of this hole. At this point, we should be hoping that were not in a global depression when this subsides and just a global recession.

Really? Have you seen what South Korea did? EVERYONE should be doing that and the opposite of what the US has done. We havent tested, we dont have drive through testing, we havent isolated people and were not prepared for whats gonna happen in about 10 days.

The smart thing to do would be to conduct the elections--primary and November general if this isn't over by then--entirely by mail. I believe Washington State already conducts some elections that way.

I sat at the bar today. And your takeaway or delivery food is just as likely to have been contaminated.

No, this is all overreaction to cover for the perceived lack of reaction.

To a growing extent we do have drive-through testing (and in the city, walk-in, because in SF lots of people don't have cars and there's a thread on Nextdoor of people b*tching about "drive-through" testing). It's beginning to happen and I think tests are effectively available to any who need them now. You may have to make a phone call or two to find out how to get one but it will quickly get easier.

As I just posted, the Bay Area is isolating people more severely than anywhere in the world except China, Korea included, has done. If LA hasn't done the same, call your mayor.

You better hope so because, as I posted yesterday (with sources), the UK apparently has only 5000 ventilators for ARD (acute respiratory distress) patients compared to 75,000 in the US and an order for 70,000 just placed by the German government (not sure how many they currently have), which represents an entire year's production by the principal German maker.

You sound like you are in a panic.

I would recommend calming down.