Pops wrote:
The week of Semana Santa in San Jose is traditionally as dead as it gets. That is up until now. My personal belief is that the measures being taken are creating more havoc than the virus left unchecked ever would have. People will die from the virus. A small percentage will die that would not have died from contracting the normal strain of flu. There will be lots of deaths that result from this hysteria that will never be attributed to the disease such as drug overdose deaths, suicides and stress induced homicides, heart attacks and strokes. The effect on the economy here will be housands of businesses close and hundreds of thousands of lost jobs. It will take many years to approach recovery.
The service providers that we most frequently come in contact with will be extremely hard hit. Not just the girls but the hotel employees, hotel owners, restaurant employees, cab drivers. Costa Rica doesn't have much of a social safety net. These people will turn to family and will suffer as they normally do, together. If you have ever had a relationship with a Costa Rican woman you will learn that family comes before you do.
Being in the most at risk group, I have not ventured out much. There is no real shortages here yet. Food is readily available. The number of people on the street is exponentially reduced. I was on Avenida Central yesterday and I estimate that the number of people out was about 20% the norm. I spoke with Dr. Lee the pharmacist who advised he had accounted for one average day of receipts in the past 5 days. That was including at least two days before the total closure of Costa Rica to tourists. I only saw 5 or six people out that I thought might still be tourists here in country. Leaving is not a problem if you are already here. Most of the businesses were still open on Avenida Central but owners were talking about closing next week.
A real sign of how bad things are here will be the week of Semana Santa when families normally go on vacation here. If the beaches are empty it will indicate that things are exceptionally bad for the middle class here. It will devastate the industries that count on this week like stores do Black Friday sales. Whether things open back up after April 12th will depend a lot on how the disease progresses throughout the rest of the world. It took three months in China for new cases to start declining. If the states follows the same pattern then expect the panic to continue until after mid-May. I suspect a complete lockdown in the states is coming soon.
The decline in China is the only successful containment of this thing...they basically confined everyone as I understand it. And that works. If people don't see people the virus can't go anywhere and it dies.
But Italy just surpassed China in numbers of deaths (and perhaps in people that have it) Spain is not far behind. And most of Europe. And other parts of the world where people are not being quarantined.
I am in quarantine at the moment. I came back on a flight last night from South America (where there has been little known infection so far) and now have to quarantine for 2 weeks. I think it is the only way this thing can be slowed down. If not slowed down then the health care system gets overwhelmed with people needing respirators, etc. (And that doesn't take much...only a few dozen cases in a major city). So next it is triage. Who gets on the respirator, who doesn't. And true, it is only a small percentage of the population that gets the virus and gets this sick. But the difference between 1% and 2% is a lot of people. Anyway.
Yes, it has a huge economic impact. So is it worth it? If you don't think it is then I suggest getting it over with. Let everyone mix and mingle...let the whole place get it...let those that die die, and the population would then be more or less immune.
I don't agree. I say we fight it to the end. Slow it, delay it, save as many people as we can, keep the infection as low as possible until hopefully we can get a vaccine...maybe in a year or two. Either way is painful.
But it is real. It is very real. I have family members that may not make it. I have a relative stuck in Europe.
Be sure of this though...what is happening in Italy and Spain is only a few days or weeks away from what will happen in the US, and anywhere else that does not isolate the population from each other. It's too late to stop it anywhere, so slowing it is the only option.
And politicking and conspiracies and all of that are not going to help one single person on earth.
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