RinVa posted an article with this excerpt:
"The president told sports commissioners earlier on Saturday that he hoped that sports fans could return to stadiums by August."
Not gonna be much of a baseball season, if any.
Perhaps some exhibition games, not much more...
Smokin Joe wrote:
"Right now, the only thing that could hurt the POTUS more than waiting too long is to jump the gun and invite a second wave of the virus."
Absolutely right.
Any attempt to "reopen the country" should be based LOCALLY on the infection rate in cities/counties of each state. Perhaps the "second task force" can handle such authorizations.
Reopen NYC too soon, and the infection rate is going to zoom up again, resulting in another shutdown which may last as long or longer than the first one.
Out in North Dakota, however, the infection rate is so low that getting stuff up-and-running again is worth the risk factors involved.
Our rate is low, at least so far, but keep in mind the usual in-town vector points are closed. Restaurants, small town cafes, the bars, schools, and the churches, all are common face to face gathering points and not open at present, so human to human contact is limited to passing each other in grocery stores. Even the parks are closed in town, and the schools are shut down. That has been a limiting factor in transmission, keeping rates low.
What makes this particularly difficult to assess is that without those usual vectors, actual community contagion is hard to assess. I went over the numbers for the State (updated this AM), and of 6787 tested, 6580 were negative (that's good news). of the remaining 207 who were positive, 20 are currently in hospital, of the 187 left, 63 have recovered, of the 124 left of that number, 3 died. That leaves 121 people who are infected, not in hospital, and recovering at home.
People here, in a State where winter alone can kill you, are generally pretty good at looking out for one another, and I would expect that the vast majority of that 121 are doing what needs to be done to limit contact and get well without passing the pathogen on.
However, open the traditional vector points: schools--(a biggie and occasionally referred to in this household as the State mandated pathogen exchange), Bars (where judgement may be impaired, now with extra results), local diners, restaurants, and cafe's, and that entire dynamic could change with just one or two infected people moving through the crowd.
Here, too, a premature opening of contact-type jobs could cause a second and more intense wave, more intense because if people think it's over, they will tend to be lax in vigilance and precautions.
If we look at the 1918 Flu epidemic, not for the pathogen but the epidemiology, it was the second wave that killed the most people. While some of that may be the result of viral mutation or other factors, I think the human nature of being lax after the storm, so to speak, may have been a contributing factor.
For now, some businesses are adapting, with limited contact and no contact deliveries of food and other sundries, but for some, that will never replace the original model. It is survival mode for those businesses which can adapt.
Elsewhere in the economy, for the most part jobs like mechanic, farming, pumper on oil wells, truck drivers, warehouse personnel, construction, store stocking staff, etc. are jobs which permit social distancing, where face to face contact was originally limited, and remains so. That may well allow those functions to remain pretty much unchanged, but the crash in oil prices (and oilfield jobs) is limiting and reducing the amount of people employed in those professions. Even the current oil surplus, partly because of reduced travel, is causing problems in the supply chain, not because there isn't enough crude oil, but because production is overrunning storage capacity. Sooner or later, wells will be shut in, if the Russians and Saudis don't reach a production restriction agreement. It's wonderful that the world has more fuel than it can use, but that causes economic problems, too.
(Can we please quit spending tax dollars on windmills and solar arrays, now?)
For those of us in the industry, we know there is no simple on/off switch on an oil well. The decision to shut in a producing well is not taken lightly, because getting that production level back seldom happens if the well is placed back in service. Candidates for that would have to be carefully selected to optimize production vs expenses, and yet, the initial production from unconventional resources, while high, has been unsustained in the past, so those wells recently completed and still in the high production phase are doomed to reductions from IP of 80% or more, the area under that production curve represents the oil which normally pays for drilling the well and completing it.
Shutting them in requires at least a temporary loss, choking them back may affect production for the life of the well because this is also the 'cleanup' phase where debris (small rock particles) generated by fraccing are pushed out of the well and giving that debris an opportunity to settle in the formation may lead to plugging that would require recompletion (a new frac), something that could nearly double the cost of the well and render it uneconomical.
Right now, I'd be setting up my store to do residential deliveries (lots of single family dwellings here) and operate it like a warehouse/shipping point/distributor.
The problem with that is that some things are a matter of personal preference, so, aside from brands and flavors, items like bakery and produce would be difficult to pick for a large clientele base for delivery, many prefer to pick their own. Some want their loaves soft, others prefer rolls that are chewier, etc. Produce becomes even more demanding.
All the money spent on setting up endcaps and checkout aisles with those impulse buys will be for naught, relegated to making pop-ups on your computer screen, hoping to find the right candy bar, gadget, or sports drink to lure you with.
Clothing stores will have the problem of people not being able to try on or feel a fabric, and that means items returned will possibly have been exposed (no different from something tried on and put back now), but those returned items present a risk to employees, and infected employee could pass that back down the distribution chain...
So, before anything gets back to normal, I foresee some changes that may end up permanent, or at least open up another version of traditional marketing, if not here, then in the larger towns and cities. Human to human interaction has already, in many ways, has gravitated to exchanges over phone screens for the young, and with the exception of activities which simply cannot be carried out vicariously, the effects of this may well be less. The absence of team sports and other interactions could cause fundamental and unhealthy changes in the ways humans interact, an area often devoid of or deficient in empathy as it is.
Looking at new infections in this state, the pattern (such as it was) broke five days ago, with previous peaks in new infections coming in double peaks with a day's lull in between, separated by six days between primary peaks. The peak came in on the 31st, as expected, but had a second day sustained, then dropped for two days before rising again. Still not enough data to say what the significance of that is, but the pattern changed. By the end of April, we should know more. Each drop is still more new infections than subsequent drops, and with numbers this low, that may reflect testing activity or other factors. It would be good to be able to see when the negative results were on a timeline to compare.
But for now, lifting restrictions on crowd interaction is probably contraindicated. Not enough data, and the overall number of newly infected does not show a clear trend of decline.
So, economically, hopefully soon, but not yet, and not in all sectors--just those which do not require much face to face interaction.
Some sectors will have to adapt to survive in the meantime.
For some, the adaptations will remain as a new paradigm.
