Based on what? With what money?
It is important to understand that it doesn’t take that large a percentage of the population to continue to be frugal (often out of necessity) for the economy to be performing poorly.
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Your average working family hasn’t spent thousands this year on holidays, take aways, eating out etc. That’s where the money comes from. Yes, some will be down and some now redundant but I’d bet there’s a significant percentage that currently have far mor cash in the bank than normal.
Probably not if they’re anything like my missus.
Damn project new bathroom…
I don’t know if taxes will go ‘through the roof’ or if public spending cuts will be that drastic. I think it has actually benefitted from lower borrowing costs offsetting older debt that has been paid off this year.
I can see the government allowing inflation to eat away at the debt over time. I can also see it looking to sell off some remaining public sector assets or outsource more of its work
Right. They have not spent and the money has gone in the bank. Others who have lost their jobs are not spending either. So where is this flourishing economy coming from if no-one is spending.
Irrespective of cost, is there a way in which we can live, as we did prior to this, still with it running rampant but with the medical care and expertise to stop it’s impact on everyday life. Can we get testing to a point where we identify and treat patients very quickly before the virus saturates their system causing further complications up to and including death.
Personally, I think that testing might have to become something that is automated and easily accessible (think testing machines in the office lobby), and coordinated with a direct eradication effort. Find it and kill it.
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Trump had an idea or two on that… 
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I doubt it, the nature of the virus is that it can take upto 14 days to incubate, so you could test someone on day 1 and the virus not be detected and then they carry on with their normal routines for 14 days potentially spreading it to a huge number of other people who would then spread it themselves to even more.
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I just explained. I don’t have the figures (and can’t be arsed) But I bet more people cancelled a holiday than have lost their jobs.
An instant test would be a huge improvement but we’d need to know the timescale between exposure and testing positive. If I neck a bottle of whisky, I’m going to be blind drunk but could pass a blood test in the first 20 mins.
How many of those people not losing their jobs have also faced a fall in their incomes?
Unfortunately, we more or less know that to be around 14 days.
That’s a slightly different issue. Incubation refers to time from infection to symptom and so the issue you raise is why temperature checks are of limited help for this virus. However, for a period within that 14 days you should still be able to test positive, so the point of this hypothetical is to get testing sufficiently quick to turn around and sufficiently available that people can tested before entering any shared space so as to catch it during that 14 day period and minimize the asymptomatic transmission.
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Although one fascinating complication is that the incubation period may be longer in younger people.
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Rendering the test as useful in some instances as a DBS check.
But look at the savings. Fuel for one, traffic was better than halved for months.
I believe that if a vaccine is not found in a reasonable time, governments are going to start adopting a ‘stop testing, manage symptoms’ and treat covid-19 like any other illnesses especially once they start getting trends that people are getting infected with increasingly not falling sick at all.
This virus has all the characteristics that might have made us have to find a way to carry on and deal with it the same way we do Flu. However, to get to that point without ever having really truly attempted quashing it will be the biggest indictment of us as a society that I can imagine.
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That is why I think we need to get testing to an automated level, ideally at the workplace/school. Daily tests for everyone.
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