Really cannot overemphasize how much worse a chaotic cycle of opening and closing would be compared to just staying closed.

There is not enough political will for economic relief as it is. We see how long it takes to get even the inadequate $1200 "one time" check. https://twitter.com/GGrucilla/status/1249665784361545728

If the country opens back up... it's going to take a while for the resurgent virus to show up in the numbers, so we might be open for a couple of weeks. But we won't be equally open... cautious people (and cities and states) will play it safe, if they can.

But if the so-called president of these benighted states is proclaiming the US is open for business, there's going to be less leverage for employees to continue working from home, getting PPE, getting hazard pay, etc.

The piecemeal protection from evictions, etc., will start to evaporate while people are still finding their footing, and then as the virus roars back it all shuts down again?

Imagine that over and over again.

Every single cycle of re-opening and closing is going to kill more local businesses, render more people homeless, damage the economy, ruin more lives.

It would be far less damaging to keep the country in lockdown and pay the price of doing so. Have the government pay out to keep the economy on life support. Keep people and businesses alive.

That way we will be in lockdown for less time overall and we also won't have the economic shock of closing each time.

And there's no realistic way to get the relief we need if we're opening and closing all the time.

And yes, more people will die if we open too early, repeatedly. But I want to be clear that I'm purely talking about the economic damage for a reason: the people pushing for opening have already made the case explicitly that mass death is a fair price to pay for prosperity.

It's been hard to get everyone on board with the shutdowns. Not everyone even is on board. Each time we have to do it again, it's going to be starting over from scratch, with more resistance. Because "it didn't work last time." Because they remember the pain and the cost.

To the kind of reductively absolute thinking that wins out with this crowd, "oldest are most vulnerable" = "only kills old people". They think that we don't need testing to do a smart/phased opening, we can isolate everybody the virus will kill because (they think) we know that.