Thank you. This is one of the better articles I've seen written on today's topic. I've seen a couple similar as well.

For me it is

1. Staying alive / staying healthy / saving lives.

2. Second, fixing the economy and getting money back in to people's hands.

This article does well at saying how. I'm retired and at risk, so I am fine to shelter pretty much as long as necessary to feel safe. This crisis will permanently change my life. If I walk in to a restaurant that is over crowed (likely half its old capacity) I'm walking right back out. I'll probably continue with some sort of mask and continue to wash and disinfect my hands. Being in large groups is over for me. I have not been able to go to a bar, night club, or concert for years anyway. I'm probably done with movie theaters and the like. I'll have to wait for the Blu-ray or DVD or Cable TV showing.

Luckily as long as my health - gouty arthritis and osteo-arthritis and weak heart - hold out I can go to wild lonely areas to take photographs or shoot stuff at home. More or less what I do now - home studio and travel to the desert and mountains a lot.

By Aaron E. Carroll
Contributing Opinion Writer
April 26, 2020

The way forward in the coronavirus crisis keeps getting framed as a choice between saving lives or saving the economy. It’s a false choice. The only way to save the economy is to take the steps that will also save lives.

A number of states are declaring that their economies are open for business. What they’re really doing is saying that it is permissible for many businesses that were closed by regulation to achieve adequate social distancing to open once again. It’s likely that many will. Small businesses have been devastated by this lockdown, and they’re eager to get going once again.

But businesses do not exist in a vacuum. They need employees, some of whom will not be able to come to work because they are in a high-risk population — they are older, have chronic health conditions or care for someone that does. Others are parents whose children are still at home because schools and child-care facilities are still shuttered. They won’t easily be able to get back to their jobs.

More significantly, an economy depends on consumers just as much as producers. Businesses need customers. It’s not clear they plan to participate.

If a nail salon or tattoo parlor is open but no customers show up, those businesses will suffer. If restaurants are open but no one shows up to eat, those restaurants will suffer. When movies, concerts or sporting events open up, people aren’t going to show up, no matter how much performers and sports teams would like them to.

Despite the many news stories covering the protests demanding that governors lift restrictions, the number of Americans who agree with the protesters is very small. Surveys show that a vast majority of Americans support strict shelter-in-place policies that are intended to limit the spread of the disease. Fewer than 20 percent of Americans think they are unnecessary.

Eighty percent of those surveyed said they could shelter in place for at least another month, and a third said they could for at least another six months.

“The economy is just us,” said Betsey Stevenson, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. “How much would we each be willing to give up to stay safe? If we open tomorrow, few are going to be willing to take the risk of engaging fully in the economy. Who wants to be the guinea pig who tests how dangerous going to a crowded restaurant still is?”

That customers and workers fear an outbreak is only part of the problem. There’s also the reality that they are right to be fearful. Loosening restrictions is likely to cause the number of Covid-19 cases to increase. Most businesses aren’t prepared to function in a world where the chance of getting an infection is real. The mayor of Las Vegas wants to let casinos reopen, for instance, but she doesn’t have a plan for how they can do so safely. She thinks everyone should figure it out for themselves.

But the casinos don’t know either. No one seems to want to take responsibility in case something goes wrong. The liability risk could be enormous if people get sick, and it’s probable someone will.

Some industries face greater challenges in figuring out how to safely operate. For example, people can’t wear masks and eat at a restaurant, nor can they wash their hands between bites. Even if a restaurant complied with “distancing,” reducing the number of customers so that they can be spaced (which would reduce revenue significantly), that might not be enough. A recent study showed how a single diner in a restaurant in China who didn’t even know she was sick infected nine others, some probably through the air-conditioning system.

Should things go wrong, outbreaks will begin anew. That will mean we will need to re-engage in extreme social distancing to stop them, with a repeat of the same economic shock we’re experiencing now. People will be even more fearful, and that can have long-term repercussions.

“Once people start hearing of people getting sick and dying after eating at a restaurant, who’s going to want to go out to dinner again?” Professor Stevenson said.

Rather than find out, we could get our act together and do what we need to do to make people safer. First, we need to acknowledge that we’re not ready to loosen the restrictions currently in place. Almost nowhere in the United States is the rate of infection assuredly low.

Then we need to take the steps nearly every single plan recommends to move forward: We need to ramp up the testing infrastructure to acceptable levels. We need to create the public health work force to conduct contact tracing and isolation. We need plans for monitoring locations to know when we need to get more restrictive should things go wrong.

The real disconnect here is between experts of all stripes and our politics. Those who would normally lead in the federal government seem disinclined to act fast to fund and build what we need to reopen carefully. They also seem reluctant to provide the specific guidance necessary to determine how businesses can remain safe when they do.

They describe the disconnect as one between those focused on public health and those focused on the economy, but they’re mistaken.

A recent survey asked noted economists across the country whether they thought the government should invest more than it currently is toward measures like accelerating testing and providing financial incentives for the production of a successful vaccine. All of them agreed that it should.

The survey also asked them whether abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high would lead to more economic damage than staying in lockdowns to prevent a resurgence. None of them disagreed.

Economists and public health experts aren’t on different sides here. The way to save the economy is to do everything public health experts are asking for. As an added bonus, it will also save a lot of lives.

epidemiologist Dr. Knut Wittkowski, formerly the head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York City. Wittkowski argues that the lockdown prolongs the development of the "herd immunity," which is our only weapon in "exterminating" the novel coronavirus -- outside of a vaccine that's going to optimistically take 18 months or more to produce. He says we should focus on shielding the elderly and people with comorbidities while allowing the young and healthy to associate with one another in order to build up immunities. Wittkowski says, "So, it's very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated." Herd immunity, Wittkowski argues, would stop a "second wave" headed for the United States in the fall. Dr. David L. Katz, president of True Health Initiative and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, shares Wittkowski's vision. Writing in The New York Times, he argued that our fight against COVID-19 could be worse than the virus itself.