There are millions of people who still haven’t received unemployment: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/44percent-of-us-unemployment-applicants-have-been-denied-or-are-waiting.html

But let’s say that problem will be fixed soon.

We still have millions of people on unemployment, and those funds will run out. We can certainly print money in perpetuity to fund unemployment, but is that sustainable? Wealth does not come from central banks sending out checks. Prosperity is not fostered by putting otherwise productive people onto welfare instead of to work.

The wealth of a nation does not come from its currency unit dispersal, it comes from its productivity and from the freedom people have to be productive for themselves.

We’ll be looking at a massive reduction in quality of life for millions of people with no plan to fix this or even a concrete idea of what it might mean. This kind of scorched earth approach from the state is exactly what we see when we fight a war: we do a pretty thorough job of fucking things up, but we utterly fail to put things back together. That’s in part because we never have a real nation building plan that makes any sense (probably because the war was a goal unto itself) but it’s also because fixing something is harder than breaking it.

That means we typically see worse problems down the road than the ones we were trying to solve by getting rid of some tinpot dictator.

The death rate from this virus is low. Even in the worst hotspots like NYC it’s lower than the worst case scenario we all feared. We’re not going to have the 2 million deaths in the US like they projected. We probably won’t even see 10% of that any time soon.

The county with the most deaths is Kings County. They have almost 5000 deaths in attributed to COVID in a population of 2.6 million people. The official number of positive cases is 52,000, which makes it look like there’s a 10% mortality rate. But we know that number is way off. It’s probably off by an order of magnitude. There’s evidence that NYC’s infection rate is at least 20%. In Kings, that would mean 520,000 people have been infected, not 52,000. And it would mean the mortality rate is 1%, not 10%.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html

And this is the worst mortality rate for the worst county…

Statewide, testing indicates New York’s infection rate is 14%. Compare that to the population of 20 million, and it means the 28,000 deaths in New York state translate to a 1% mortality rate, at worst. Why at worst? Because we don’t know how many deaths are being chalked up to COVID unnecessarily and we don’t know how many people had COVID 2+ months ago but never got tested and who probably won’t have antibody counts that would show up in testing now.

All of our data is skewed one way, and it’s the way that makes death rates look worse and infected rates look lower. More testing and data could very possibly reveal exactly what the most skeptical critics have been claiming all along: COVID could be like a really bad flu year in terms of mortality rates and worse: the shutdown didn’t do anything because it came too late and was otherwise implemented thoughtlessly.