Hindsight.
Right. Necessary is a hindsight question.
The real question becomes one of, knowing that we didn't know anything reliable,
"Was the shutdown
prudent?"
In some areas it didn't seem that way, in hindsight, but imagine all those flights from New York connecting to flights in O'Hare, or Minneapolis, connecting to...and you get an idea of how far, fast, and extensively this could have spread.
We needed to buy time to get facts. We needed to find out if the data we had was valid (some was not).
That wasn't cheap, there is still a lot of obfuscation going on with the number of deaths and what people died of, and some real despicable crap with medication trials, leaving out the essential ingredient in a pharmacological regimen that has shown great results (anecdotally, of course) when tried, in reducing hospitalizations and quite possibly, deaths.
We welcomed Tamiflu, why not something like it for COVID-19?
But now, we know more. We have identified those most at risk, we are beginning to find out how many out there had asymptomatic or low intensity infections. In other words, we're getting the denominator to go with the numerator, and those inflating the numerator (number of COVID-19 deaths) are being exposed.
We have a better handle on how deadly this virus is, and how deadly it isn't.
In most places, those data indicate it is time to restart the economy.
With this coming on the heels of an oil price crash, and the lockdown propelling those numbers into record negative territory, this startup might be a little slower than the last one. We don't have the oil patch to pull it out. But that said, fuel is cheap, so maybe that will help things get going again.