America should be ready for 18 months of shutdowns in a "long, hard road" ahead, warns Neel Kashkari, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Kashkari, while acknowledging the downside of what a prolonged shutdown could mean for the economy, said the U.S., "barring some health-care miracle," is looking at an 18-month strategy of rolling shutdowns based on what has happened in other countries.
“We're looking around the world. As they relax the economic controls, the virus flares back up again," Kashkari said Sunday on CBS' 'Face the Nation'. "We could have these waves of flareups, controls, flareups and controls until we actually get a therapy or a vaccine," he said.
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Iceland has embarked on a massive testing regime, testing nearly 5% of its population, more than any other country on the planet, and found that upwards of 50% of people that were asymptomatic and not currently in quarantine, tested positive.
That's FIFTY PERCENT of those who are ASYMPTOMATIC, TESTED POSITIVE.
If we have anything even close to that percentage here, reopening the country would result in so many deaths they wouldn't know where to put the bodies.
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Repubs are hanging their hat on a test involving blood serum screening for antibodies. They believe if people test as having the antibodies, then they have immunity and can safely return to work. But this test is useless and meaningless, as we still don't know why some are testing positive for the virus weeks after testing negative.
Are people showing as reinfected because whatever immunity they built up was weak and only temporary, or was the virus never wiped out, just suppressed below the testing levels threshold, only to come roaring back? Yet unknown.
Either way, having SOME antibodies at some point is no guarantee of not being infected later.
Covfefe-19