No, I know the lockdown won't be forever. The life as we know it I was talking about was society.
What if it takes many years (if not a decade or so) to recover economically?
What if mutations make a vaccine impossible and it becomes an endemic?
What if we never really go back to the days when of flying without a mask or going to a busy outdoor concert?
I was really down the day I wrote that post. I don't always feel like that, but on my bad days I worry the effects will be much worse than we're willing to consider right now.
The economic after-effects of this are going to persist for years, long after the medical emergency is over.
Economically, this is going to be the worse thing we have seen in our lifetimes. Whole industries are shut down and will continue to be shut down for some time. The ripple effect of that will be felt by the rest of the economy. There will be immense uncertainty, immense loss of consumer confidence, a huge decline in spending, and rampant unemployment. Communities like Whistler and Jasper and Banff that rely heavily on tourism are going to be especially crushed by this, because the tourism industry as a whole is going to be completely
**** for years to come. (I'm grateful that I got to see Las Vegas in January, because it's not going to be the same for a long time, if ever.)
Our government, god bless them, has taken aggressive action to try to dampen that ripple effect, but government can only do so much. They they can't support the whole economy indefinitely. We can hope that the strong government economic action will keep this from spiraling out of control, but the effects are still going to be really, really bad in spite of their best efforts.
We're going to see huge numbers of bankruptcies and loan defaults and mortgage defaults. People who were strong credit risks when they received their mortgages or loans are going to be financially ruined. The banks themselves will be financially imperiled as a result. This is going to be like a replay of the 2008 financial crisis, but on a much larger scale.
And what's especially worrying is that even if we as a country do everything right, our bungling neighbors to the south are going to be hit very hard by this, and since our economy is so interconnected with theirs, their economic woes are going to haunt us as well.
So many people are going to be ruined by this. It's going to be heartbreaking.
-k