Via DaringFireball (A politics & tech blog):
We all miss so many people, and so many places. Real leadership can and will instill collective patience that many lack or are simply running short of individually. A sense that we’re in this together, and that the quickest (if not only) way out is via short-term collective sacrifice. Wear masks, stay apart, don’t gather. Find more patience.
One thing this administration and by-proxy, our leadership in Congress and Senate have failed to acknowledge is the fact that Donald Trump may have possibly won a re-election had we been in a place with COVID-19 that is equal to countries like Australia or New Zealand. If we had acted swiftly and with expedience in February and issued a full shutdown of everything, we would be living out our summer and fall in a much better place without a quarter of a million Americans dead.
The stock market tanked in March anyway and the unemployment skyrocketed in Q2 anyway. There was nothing we could have done about that so we should have used that painful 3 month period to completely shut down and I think Trump would have been re-elected.
Unfortunately, I’m not an economist so I have no idea what the impacts would have been to the markets in Q3 but what I do know is a lot more Americans would still be alive and you can’t put a price on that.