Why wouldn’t it be sustainable? As long as the supply chains hold I don’t see why it isn’t doable. There will be a severe economic impact but the alternative is worse.
Unless you have the military enforce the lockdown, people will eventually refuse to starve quietly in their houses and will brave the "terrifying" 1% chance of death from COVID to go back to being alive.
Honestly, with the governor this morning toying with "about 18 months", we are agreeing to give up more than 1% of our life just to reduce the risk of the 1% chance of death.
If you do order the military to enforce it, you are likely to end up with a civil war. Some people will eventually resist, and then either the army starts firing on Americans or they let people go on with their lives.
On a more personal note, the mental health cost of perfect social isolation is already getting to me, and frankly, I don't think I would survive more than a bare couple of months, even if the magic goods fairy delivered me every essential item I could ever want in infinite quantity.
Massive economic impact. After a couple of months, a good chunk of all retail businesses that aren't grocery stores are going to be irrecoverably bankrupt.
Sure but what happens if we do nothing for a month and let the virus spread rampant. Then we bankrupt the entire country paying for healthcare assistance packages for those who cannot afford it and are the hardest hit. Or would you recommend we just leave them sick on the streets?
The cost of healthcare for all of the illness even if 100% of the population got the virus this month is less than the economic destruction our self-imposed economic sanctions have already caused even if they ended today.
This is only true if you don't count the cost of massive casualties that are impossible to fully quantify the cost of and only count of the cost of running the healthcare system at existing capacity.
Let's cook up a fantasy scenario where we have unlimited resources and can treat as many patients as needed. Let's also optimistically pretend that only 1% of cases need ICU treatment. Take 1% of 327M and you get 3.2M ICU beds required. Now let's say that at the peak, half the population is sick (likely given the unmitigated exponential explosion scenario), meaning we need 1.6M ICU beds at the peak. We have roughly 100k ICU beds in the country, 1/16th what we need. The cost of those beds would be trillions of dollars. Of course we can't magically materialize ICU beds, so hundreds of thousands will die. I'd choose 6-12 months of the GFC over that _any day_.
Do you not believe these basic facts or just don't have empathy for other people who are at risk?
2: 12 months of not actually living is already giving up about 1.3% of the life of our whole population, and that's not counting the health problems caused by poverty or the mental health cost of eternal social isolation.
3:. There is no believable model where 100% of the population gets the illness. Even the absurdly pessimistic models end up at 60-70%
4: the models that assume nearly everyone gets sick require that there are already many, many, many undetected cases, which makes severity and mortality much lower than is being otherwise imagined
5:. This will sound callous, but 99% of fatal cases involve folks with other serious chronic illness, and at least 80% (good numbers are hard to find) are past retirement age. Though these people add.much value and happiness to our world, they aren't going to produce much more economic productivity. This doesn't mean they don't matter, but we were having a discussion on economics
Actually, I'm sure it is not.