Lance Mannion: Maxies is hanging in there...for now

Mined from the notebooks and adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday morning, April 25, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, August 9.

Optimistic sign outside Maxie's Bar & Grill on a major business strip in the nearby town of Colonie, New York. Sometime in mid-April, 2020.

[Still haven’t caught up with my July blogging, and at the rate I’m going I won’t without falling way behind on August’s. And then there’s June’s, May’s, and April’s. The post below is based on a notebook entry from April. Back then, of course, I didn’t see a lot of things coming. What I did see was that the cliches the media and politicians were using to describe what was happening--- “the economy is closed”, “the country’s in lockdown”---not only didn’t describe what was happening but were setting us up for something that wasn’t going to happen: a quick return to normalcy. It made me grouchy…]

A note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time: Saturday morning, April 24, 2020…

The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!

---You know who Tweeting his paranoia and narcissism again. That was on March 24th. He declared a national emergency on the 14th. Ten days in he was already bored.

The country isn't closed, you maroon. The country isn't your golf courses. The country is the people who aren't going to your golf courses because they don't want to help spread the virus.

---Me tweeting back for my own amusement as if he’s following me.

The economy isn’t closed, people. The economic activities we’re doing - childcare, cooking, cleaning etc - just aren’t considered valuable by most economists.

---Dr. Jen Cohen on Twitter, April 6, 2020.

Sound of the heat kicking on woke me up yesterday morning before dawn. First thing after rolling out of bed, cursing and blessing the furnace at the same time, and making a pot of coffee, I went online and ordered groceries. I heard the garbage trucks out front and went into a panic, until I remembered the Mannion guys had rolled the bins out to the curb the night before. I relaxed and set to work catching up on email and tinkering with a draft for a blog post until Mrs M woke up and came downstairs. Early for her. Almost nine o’clock. So I asked if she wanted to go with me on some errands I planned to run. She agreed enthusiastically, but took her time getting herself together. She made peanut butter toast for breakfast, poured herself coffee, swiped the laptop from me, and settled down to read the New York Times. When she finally got dressed and pronounced herself ready to ride, we headed out.

We went to the bank, got gas, dropped off a stack of Mom Mannion’s mail at my brother Larry’s for sorting and recycling---Larry is in charge of the management of the homestead and Mom’s finances. It was mostly junk mail, advertisements for stuff Mom no longer has use for and probably wouldn’t have wanted anyway back when she did, along with solicitations from the many charities Mom gave too much money, money she really didn’t have. Mixed in the stack were fundraising appeals addressed to Pop Mannion from Democrats running for various offices high and low who haven’t heard their biggest local stalwart has been gone for almost two years now. The mail was picked up off Larry’s front porch with a wave and a grin by our nephew Pat who was getting ready to begin his day working from home. Larry himself, a top salesman for a food distribution and restaurant supply company, was already busy on the phone, calling and fielding calls from the restaurants open for carry-out who are his customers, taking their food and supply orders for next week. From Larry’s we drove over to Barnes & Noble to pick up a book I’d bought online. A masked and gloved clerk brought it out to a table out front and when she’d gone back inside I got out of the car to fetch it. Then, errands run, we set off on another one of our long explores, first swinging through McDonald’s to treat ourselves to milk shakes at the drive-thru.

We set our course north, crossing the Mohawk on the Twin Bridges then getting off the highway just over the Albany-Saratoga county lines. We wound our way west through woods, fields, and farmland, passing along the way through shady suburban developments with bucolic and rustic names, small business centers seemingly all with a Dunkin Donuts, and by the occasional big box store, strip mall, and supermarket, none with empty parking lots.

We drove around for about an hour. We drove by repair shops, corner markets, and little out of the way motels. We drove by diners offering take-out and curbside pickup. I recognized a few as Larry’s customers and wondered with a smile if he was on the phone right then with someone inside. We passed and were passed by delivery trucks of all sizes. We slowed down for road crews. We looked in at construction sites. A medical center was going up. An apartment complex. Another Dunkin Donuts. We admired new homes being built and older ones being remodeled and repaired. Roofers were at work on a house along the river. A house down the road was getting new siding. Houses in every neighborhood were for sale. Some had sold or had sales pending. In front of one house there was a moving van and the former owners were moving out. At another house the new owners were moving in.

We honked in solidarity at homemade lawn signs expressing and encouraging support for essential workers, health care workers, and first responders.

And we reminded ourselves continually, as if we needed reminding, that inside most of the houses and many of the offices and stores that looked shuttered people were at work, children were going to school, people were carrying on with the quotidian and routine chores of daily life---cooking, cleaning, childcare, home maintenance and repair---those people being mainly, as Dr Jen Cohen has pointed out, women.

Meanwhile, back at the Homestead, Ken was taking his history class online and having a tele-meeting with his social worker, and Oliver was waiting eagerly for news via text notifications that the new laptop he’d bought online a few days ago was on its way.

When Mrs M and I finally made it back to the Homestead, more mail was waiting in the mailbox, and the groceries had been delivered but Oliver’s laptop hadn’t.

We finished off the day with our usual Friday night Family Movie Night, ordering in pizza and wings and streaming “Inherit the Wind” on YouTube.

And how did your day go?

Thanks for sticking with me this far. I’m much obliged. But I hope you noticed as your eyes began to glaze over and you were wondering where I was going with this, that just about every sentence above describes an economic activity. Work being done. Businesses doing business. Things being bought and sold. Goods and services were being exchanged. Money was changing hands, figuratively and literally. There just wasn’t enough of all this.

Nowhere near enough.

It’s a trivial concern. Amounts to little more than a pet peeve. But I hate it when journalists, politicians, and anybody else with a highly trafficked platform say the economy is closed or that the country’s in lockdown. We’d be better off if we had closed up and locked ourselves down a month ago. But that’s not what we did and not what we’re doing.

The economy isn’t closed. It’s ground to a near halt. The country isn’t on lockdown. It’s falling to pieces. We’ve been plunged into a recession and are headed fast for a depression. Our most well-meaning and responsible public officials have been put in the untenable positions of having to decide how many people they have to accept getting sick and dying in order to save the livelihoods---and with them the lives---of the rest of us.

I got even more infuriated when the talk turns to “opening up.” As if we’re one giant superstore on Black Friday waiting for the doors to open, and once they do the nation’s bottom line will be saved in a rush.

Business will pour in, customers will mob the counters, lines will be out the door. The shelves will fill up, the phones will light up, the sales team won’t be able to keep up with the orders. Folks in logistics will go happily nuts coordinating shipments and deliveries. Marketing will never have had it so easy. The staff won’t be able to handle the work. The NOW HIRING signs will stay up. Human Resources won’t be able to process applications fast enough. All the new hires will barely have time to introduce themselves before they have to jump in. Everybody will be asked to work 24/7. No one will complain. They’ll be so glad to have jobs again they’ll forget to put in for overtime.

This isn’t going to happen.

Many of the businesses that had to close their doors won’t re-open. Many people who want to go back to work, who need to go back to work, won’t find their jobs waiting for them. Prices are going to jump, wages will be cut, services will be curtailed, and amenities, benefits, rewards, bonuses, and simple extras consumers and workers take for granted will disappear, as stores, manufacturers, and companies move to recoup their losses as fast they can and the greedier ones take advantage of their customers’ and employees’ desperation and resignation.

And people will continue to get sick and die.

Hopefully not at the same rate as before. The numbers of both will likely come down. But not all at once. Not even quickly. The virus isn’t showing any sign of having burned itself out. But that’s how it sounds. It’s as if any new cases and deaths that occur after we “open” will somehow not count---or be counted.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ok, you’ve read enough by me. Here’s British science fiction writer Charlie Stross writing in his online diary last week [April 16, 2020]. The post is titled “It’ll all be over by Christmas”...

Let me make some predictions, starting with:

No it won't.

Vaccine development will take a flat minimum of 12 months. Then another 1-3 months to ramp up (on a Manhattan Project management basis) and a to-some-extent-overlapping 1-3 months to roll out around the various nations that are involved. (I predict the USA will merrily go its own way and faceplant, unless y'all elect a competent next POTUS. Or VPOTUS, insofar as Biden appears to be past it and Pence is incompetent at anything but arse-licking.)

Meanwhile.

Lockdown can't be sustained more than 1-2 weeks after peak ICU occupancy passes, so it will be lifted in mid-May in the UK and possibly as early as May 1st in the USA. (I know the Eastern Coalition are kicking back against Trump's deranged demand for an early restart: I expect other states may also join in if their estimates of the long-term damage track reality.)

Trump is shooting for May 1st because he's been told the economy will take 6 months to recover, minimum, and he's shooting for the November election deadline. This is laughably optimistic, even if the pandemic had burned out by May 1st: we're in Greatest Depression territory already, the hospitality sector has crashed 75%, airlines have crashed 90%, etcetera. It's not going to be back to normal by November, even if the Fairy Godmother shows up and banishes the horrid virus with a wave of her wand. Period.

So. The immediate peak hospital occupancy will pass, lockdown will be lifted sector by sector (or all at once) and region by region ... and the 50% of COVID19 cases who are asymptomatic will go back to work, mingling with the uninfected.

1-4 weeks later there will be a secondary surge in infections and it'll follow the same exponential growth as the first spike in Feb/March. And lockdown will resume, probably in mid-June. (It may be mitigated by summer heat, in which case things will look good for a month or two longer, but I'm not holding my breath: even if heat prevents spread, the prevalence of air conditioning in public spaces in the US provides a transmission-friendly environment.)

If the howls of rage at the first lockdown are deafening, the second lockdown will be worse: think of toddlers being sent back to bed with no supper. And that's the lucky work-from-home class: the working poor—with no savings and jobs they need to be physically present for—are going to be increasingly angry and fractious at their exposure. Expect civil disobedience and possibly summer riots unless central banks throw money at the grassroots -- and not $1200 for 10 weeks: more like $1200 per week.

Oh, and then there are the hospitals. Hospital staff will begin to catch their breath in mid-May after two months of running at maximum speed ... then it'll all crash again 4 weeks later. They're getting no respite. About 25% of medical staff are off sick with COVID19 themselves at present, far as I can tell: this cohort will be coming back to work by the second lockdown, but a bunch more will be down and sick.

You can't run doctors and nurses at full pandemic intensity for all that long without them burning out, as well as getting sick. There will be horrifying staff attrition, and although this year's graduate cohort got pressed into service early, next year's cohort will be suspended because teaching ain't happening.

So we're going to see repeated 4-6 week lockdown periods alternating with 2-4 week "business as usual" patches. Somewhere during the second or third lockdown most of the pubs/bars/hotels/restaurants that hibernated during the first lockdown and came back from the dead will give up the ghost: by September-November the damage to about 10-30% of the economy, disproportionately the service sector, will be permanent (FSVO "permanent" that means not coming back until after the pandemic, growing afresh from zero rather than reviving from hibernation).

I do not know what the hell Trump will do when his "get America open again" agenda runs into pandemic spike #2, around the beginning of June. Expect denial and heel-dragging and a much worse death toll, this time reaching the rural heartland (where hospitals may not have any ICU beds at all: there's going to be carnage). By August he may well be in full-on meltdown. I wouldn't even be surprised to see a second round of impeachment hearings as the Senate Republican Party tries to throw him under the bus so they can pivot to President Pence. Assuming it's not too late to save their campaign ...

By September there's going to be social unrest just about everywhere that hasn't nailed down a massive social spending/social security project on a scale that makes the New Deal look restrained and conservative.

And that's going to be the picture until June or July 2022.

Extra lulz in the UK: the Prime Minister is out of hospital but hasn't been seen since Monday—my guess is he's hors de combat for at least another two weeks. A quarter of the senior ministers of state are rabid objectivists who actively hate the poor and want them to die, and a majority of the cabinet are still going full steam ahead for a no-deal Brexit transition on January 31st, at which point the UK economy shrinks another 8% overnight. Boris, in principle, has the credibility to pull them back from the brink (and is a perfectly ideology-free vacuum of naked ambition, so he's personally capable of pivoting) but if they try for a maximalist brexit in the middle of a pandemic there will be pandemonium.

Wildcards: we might conceivably find a simple and effective medical treatment. Or vaccine development is ridiculously easy. Or the 50% of asymptomatic carriers are a sign that the pandemic is more advanced than we realize, that immunity is long-lasting, and that we're much closer to achieving "herd immunity" than anyone in the epidemiology community currently realizes. But I want to emphasize that these are all straw-clutching exercises. In all probability, they're not going to eventuate.

Have I missed anything out? (Aside from the giant meteor, Cthulhu awakening, Krakatoa erupting, and a Dalek invasion. NB: one of those things actually happened last month.)