Nobody wants to be in lockdown. None of us. But what a lot of us don’t want is “yo-yo” restrictions...back and forth again and again.
I used to work in meetings and conventions. We pretty much blew the one shot we had at my job coming back this year. There's no way a corporation in the country is having a major in-person meeting this year, and if they are it absolutely won't be in Florida.
From my perspective, the economy would right now be far better off if we had taken the time and got this right in May and June. Squashed the numbers flat, set up comprehensive testing and contact tracing, and backed it all up with a mitigation plan involving lasting reasonable precautions like appropriate mask usage. If we had leadership on any level to pull that off, then perhaps there might actually have been some stability over the next few months.
Instead, unless I'm going to a big-box I have to call or check ahead if I want to go shopping because I'm not 100% positive the place is going to even be open to walk-in customers. It's hit or miss if the restaurant I want to dine at is taking any sensible precautions at all, or if they're even open today. I don't know if there's going to be an economy for me to participate in come August and September, and I don't know if I'll have money to participate in it even if there was because I have no work, no job prospects, and soon no unemployment benefits.
The uncertainty is going to kill the economy far far more than the closures ever did. If there was confidence going into July, then a good part of the missing economy
would have bounced right back. Instead, we have 3 different threads debating on if or not the parks should even attempt opening. Disney is a bell-weather to the economy, and a symbol of stability and western society. If we can't presume confidence from them (and the situation on the ground is proof we can't, through no fault of Disney's..), we have systemic uncertainty everywhere.
We don't know everything about Covid-19, but we know a lot more than we did a few months ago. I'm not qualified to judge if reopening or not is prudent, and to what level, but I do know there is in fact this wave of uncertainty that we are all about to be engulfed in... and sitting here having strong feeling about the virus way or the other isn't going to diminish that wave at this point. Maybe there was a better way this should have all been handled, but the way this played out was not it. The incessant back and forth over opening or closing being the right or wrong thing to do gives me no hope in us finding the nuanced balance required to wiggle ourselves out of this mess.
