I'm beginning to wonder...

If bringing our economy to a screeching halt isn't literally a cure that is worse than the disease.

1. Everybody will be exposed. It's a true pandemic. No one will escape this by hunkering down in their underground bunker.

2. Two weeks or 30 days or whenever from now, the virus will still be around, we still won't have a vaccine, and our medical system still won't have the capacity to handle the problem.

3. But while we shelter in place and wait for...something to happen, the economy is tanking, and while some people are getting sick leave/unemployment, many aren't. That includes part-time workers, gig workers, the self-employed, and small business owners.

4. Direct cash payments--IF the Republicans can be persuaded to allow them--will be a temporary fix, but how long can the government keep them up? And will that money be enough to keep everybody going? $1,000 or $2,000 a month isn't enough to pay most people's regular expenses.

5. And here's the kicker--during a depression, people die. Those at the bottom of the heap starve, die for lack of shelter, die for lack of medical care, etc. Charities and social agencies don't have the resources they normally do. More people get sick. More people suffer. Will you get one of those government checks if you're living on the street? Will you get one if you were already unemployed? I suspect that during a prolonged depression, the death rate caused by deprivation will far exceed that of Covid-19.

I understand the strategy of allowing hospitals and medical suppliers time to spool up, but I wonder if that's going to make any real difference, since we can't realistically buy the 6+ months we actually need. So maybe we should just resume normal life and accept the fact that some of us will fall ill. We can still practice social distancing and proper personal hygiene. And of course, as test kits become available, people can determine whether they need to self-quarantine.

I've accepted the fact that I almost certainly WILL be exposed. I'm in a higher-risk group, due to my medical condition(s). There is definitely a very good chance I will be exposed, a good chance that I'll get sick, a small chance that I'll need to be hospitalized, and a very small chance that I'll die. That's the case no matter what I do. So, waiting inside for the other shoe to drop and watching news broadcasts about how the world is shutting down is almost worse than going ahead and contracting the fucking thing already.

I think that sooner rather than later, we're all going to start going stir-crazy, and our dwindling bank accounts won't help. Maybe a society where we're all wearing masks and gloves but things are functioning is better than everyone cowering inside their homes. After all, there's only so much content on Netflix.

Kevin - never happy. Bitches about a problem, then bitches about the solution to the problem. Anything to bitch about, and if there is nothing to bitch about, then bitch about that. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

And what, exactly, are YOU adding to the discussion with all your nasty personal attacks?

In a bad flu season, 60k die. In an average flu season, 30k die. Life goes on normally. No one shelters in place for the winter. Life has multiple risks every time one walks out the door. 

No one knows -- or if they do, they aren't telling to avoid total panic --  the true mortality rate, because no one seems to have a handle on the number of people who had the coronavirus and either never knew thay had it, or they never got medical help, or the doctor/ER/clinic they went to never tested them for the virus. Thus, the true mortality rate *could* be not that much different from seasonal flu.

There is some mortality rate for the new virus that would be preferable to destroying the economy of every country on the planet. What rate is that? Twice the normal flu? Three times? I don't know, but I think that this country may be tiliting too far in the direction of saving some unknown number of lives at the cost of economic Armageddon.

Yeah, that's my point. As you say, there must be some point--either in level of coronavirus deaths or damage to the economy, or both--where just gritting our teeth and preparing to treat people is preferable to everybody hiding at home and everything grinding to a halt.

We will probably get to that point in a few weeks, when we see just how completely and thoroughly everything is going to hell when there's no businesses operating and nobody working. One by one, people who have been cooped up with nothing to do and slowly draining their savings (if they had any!) will start to say, "Screw it, I'd rather risk it than stay at home one more day."

And destroying the economy would produce far more fatalities than even the worst-case scenario of Covid-19. Often, deaths from poverty are invisible. But that doesn't mean they're not real. A depression moves millions of people from the "struggling" to the "impoverished" category.

You can't pull the economy out of this nosedive.  It would be roughly 11 million dead with a 3.4% fatality rate if the whole country gets exposed.  There are some things you can't unsee and some damage that can't easily be undone.  This is one of them. To put it in a historical perspective, 405,000 Americans died in WWII. It is going to take a much larger effort than was undertaken post World War II to rebuild the world's economic and political systems after this clears. 

The severity of what we are in store for hasn't hit a lot of people yet. People are mostly worried about trivial things like their vacation plans, social life, investments and so on.  I'd suggest these things aren't the things people should be worrying about right now.

I spent some time working on county emergency preparedness plans roughly 20 years ago. What shocked me, was the first thing that local governments are told to be ready for no matter what type of catastrophic event takes place is euphemistically referred to as carcass disposal.  That is what a lot of your state and local officials are working on right now. 

Spend time with your loved ones now even if you have to do it remotely.

I agree with everything you said here. America is coming to the realization that no one or anybody can save you from everything. Wash your hands.

"People are mostly worried about trivial things like their vacation plans, social life, investments and so on"

The future of one's life savings is not a trivial thing. It is a major thing.

As a smart guy (seriously), where would you be putting your money today? Cash, money market funds,Treasuries, stocks that now have collpased to 2017 levels? I haven't looked, but I'd guess there has already been a rush to buy gold and gold stocks. Actually, I'm afraid to look at anything except this ridiculous forum.

I have quite a bit of cash, and if I had the nerve, I would begin buying stocks in small amounts over time, realizing I couldn't predict the bottom, but assuming the market would come back in a few years. What stocks? I don't know. Index funds, maybe. What say you?

I've been researching another "way out." We don't stop people from being exposed--we can't. We don't develop a vaccine--we won't do that in time. But perhaps we can come up quickly with medications that can treat Covid-19. There are some very preliminary clinical trials going on right now.

There's also the factor that hospital overload can lead to treatable patients dying. So we need to expand care facilities. One massive resource available that for some unfathomable reason, isn't being used is the US military, including the National Guard. If this is a national emergency, and one of the greatest problems is a lack of hospital beds, why doesn't the military start building field hospitals? Like, yesterday? FEMA could coordinate the efforts. It's been done before, in local disaster areas.

Perhaps somebody could poke our Blunderer in Chief and tell him this.

You have to realize that the drop in common stocks could very easily be correlated to a drop in the actual worth of companies--their profitability, their earnings per share, their future prospects. In other words, the market has dropped in value by one third, but maybe the worth of the companies on the exchange has, too. So maybe stocks are not a bargain now--they're fairly priced. Impossible to tell.

Gold prices have dropped 7.6% in the last 30 days. Gold stocks have performed a wee bit better than the market as a whole, but have crashed along with everything else.

I would be worried about liquidity if I got into stocks. The markets may not be sound for quite a while. But of course, it's all a guess at this point. I think you're in an unusually strong position, and if I were you, I'd stay there. You have cash, you have flexibility.

I'd like to think that the market will recover eventually. It probably will. Probably. But I'm much more worried about the economy in general. The stock market doesn't matter nearly as much as people's incomes do.