(COVID/ETC CONTENT HERE) China Locks Down 11 Million in Wuhan,

[sandsunsurf]

Thank you for that thoughtful yet banal reply...

I was going to post something similar. The fact is we overreacted to a novel threat. In my opinion this was caused by a perfect storm of educated medical professionals who recognized the threat of a novel virus that was clearly more dangerous than the flu (at the time) who told politicians that they had to act to save lives, so the politicians went into analysis paralysis, delaying any action, while the media that is only focused on clicks and hating Trump stirred this all into something that the politicians then had to overreact to.

The thing is that the overreaction has been effective. The social distancing and government mandated actions certainly helped to make COVID-19 less deadly and less rampant, and through amazing science and educated medical professionals, we are in a better place than other countries.

Now, it is time to look at our path forward, and out of this in-progress economic disaster.

We should start planning now to reopen businesses in 2 weeks, but with some different (mostly temporary) rules:

1) Grocery stores can ask costumers to wear masks- based upon location/type/size of store etc. Also keep social distancing marks and guides in place.

2) Gyms and other businesses where people touch stuff all the time need to hire extra people to wipe and clean stuff continuously. Business could choose to require masks.

3) Restaurants and bars can reopen, with a temporary max capacity of half of what the current fire codes allow.

4) Restaurant servers must wear masks and either wear a new pair of gloves for each table or learn 100% handwashing and basically perfect serving skills.

5) Buffet style serving still not allowed

6) Shared food situations still not allowed

7) Personal hygiene related business must use maximum PPE (i.e. the barber has to wear a mask and not touch his/her face while cutting your hair).

The next steps will be voluntary serum testing at least or better yet antibody titer testing, and rolling out the vaccines more rapidly.

That’s just my $0.02, worth about that much. I’m not a doctor or MBA.

And since other posts came in while typing this novel: the mortality rate is definitely lower than 1%, based on almost all of the recent data.