Russ Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…With the number of cases rising exponentially, if you’re going to apply testing and isolation and giving people ICU care and hospital beds and ventilators, you need for that problem to be manageable in size relative to your healthcare infrastructure or you do end up being like Lombardy in North Italy. So we could end up in that position say two weeks from now. I’m not sure we have to, but I think the single biggest thing we can do to stop being there given that the tests are not in our labs at the moment is just for people to interact with others as little as possible. And it’s as if we’re trying to put the economy in a coma, to cite an analogy Larry Summers gave. So I think we should be trying to put the economy in a coma. I’m okay with government doing that, but I think personally we need to be doing that quicker than what the government is up to. Yeah, I mean a lot of things got put in, I would call it a deep freeze very quickly. Sports being the obvious one. Broadway I think followed shortly after that. I think the place where the biggest hole was bars and restaurants and the government did that. Most of our restaurant owners and goers I don’t think particularly were excited about self regulating there. But certainly, churches, synagogues, mosques all just very quickly shut down, which is pretty amazing. Plenty have not, right? Plenty of religious ceremonies are still up and running. You can walk around different parts of Virginia and see people intermingling at a large scale. We’re not really quite there yet in my view. If 30% of Americans, if you poll them, they say they’re not even worried. So there’s been a huge failure of communications. Some of that comes from our President, but it’s really not just that there are so many businesses, institutions in the nonprofit world that just have been very, very slow to respond.…

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