The bills are now coming due for big companies and millions of laid-off workers. Decisions made in the next few days will shape how coronavirus impacts the economy
Congress has passed a $2 trillion rescue plan but before those funds start to flow, American companies from the owner of a single liquor store in Boston to corporate giants like Macy’s Inc., must decide what to do about April’s bills: Which obligations do they pay and which can they put off? How many employees can they afford to keep on the payroll? Can they get a break on rent?
The decisions they make this week could shape how deeply the economy is damaged by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Rent is due. Utilities are due. Credit card bills are due April 1,” said Hadley Douglas, who has laid off two workers from her liquor business, The Urban Grape. “The deadline is looming large and it is petrifying.” She said her landlord turned down a request to temporarily pay half the rent but said to keep in touch as it was focusing first on smaller, harder hit businesses.
Millions of Americans are suddenly out of work and many businesses have already closed under orders from state and local governments to close to prevent the spread of the virus. A record 3.28 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the week ended March 21.
The U.S. restaurant industry has lost $25 billion in sales since March 1, according to a survey of 5,000 owners by the National Restaurant Association. Nearly 50,000 stores of major U.S. retail chains have closed, according to the companies.
An estimated $20 billion in monthly retail real estate loans are due as early as this week, according to Marcus & Millichap, a commercial real-estate services and consulting firm. Many retailers and restaurants have said they are not going to pay their April rents, which in turn poses a threat to the $3 trillion commercial mortgage market.
Economic activity in the U.S. and other developed countries could be lowered by a quarter, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Friday.
Companies of all sizes are feeling the squeeze, especially retailers and restaurants that have closed their doors during the outbreak. Nike Inc. is asking to pay half its rents. TJ Maxx is delaying payments to its suppliers. Victoria’s Secret and Men’s Wearhouse have furloughed thousands of workers. Cheesecake Factory Inc. closed 27 of the company’s locations and furloughed 41,000 hourly workers, nearly 90% of its total staff.
Tyson Evans, a 23-year-old line cook for Cheesecake Factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, said he and fellow workers were stunned to learn about the furloughs. He said they believed the company would continue to employ them despite a drop in business. He is now filing for unemployment.
“We keep this company going,” said Mr. Evans, who is currently living with his parents and worried about paying bills including his phone, grocery and prescriptions. He has started an online petition to urge the chain to keep paying furloughed workers.
Denise Burger, a 64-year-old Cheesecake Factory server in Escondido, Calif., said she was counting on the 36 hours of work the company had scheduled for her before the furloughs came down. Ms. Burger said she’s been contacting her mortgage and credit card companies to try and postpone payments.
“This pandemic has put much stress and strain on me,” said Ms. Burger, who is single and has worked for the company for six years in a job she loved.
California-based Cheesecake Factory said it would continue to provide health insurance for employees until June 1, and provide them a daily meal from their restaurants that remain open for take-out orders.
Cheesecake Factory has notified landlords that it won’t pay April rent. “Due to these extraordinary events, I am asking for your patience and, frankly, your help,” wrote Chief Executive David Overton.
Owners of independent and small restaurant chains have also asked their landlords for rent relief, with mixed responses. Some say landlords are offering them deferments of several months, whereas others haven’t gotten much help yet.
“Landlords, if they are overly greedy, they could be losing us,” said Andy Howard, chief executive of Huey Magoo’s Restaurants, who is pleading for a break on rents for his Orlando, Fla., chicken tenders chain.
Residential and commercial landlords say they have been flooded with requests from individuals and businesses saying they will struggle to pay their rent for April and beyond.
“I feel like I’m running triage in a retail hospital out of my apartment,” said Ami Ziff, director of national retail for Time Equities Inc., which owns 122 retail centers, including shopping centers, malls and street-front retail locations in 25 states.
Mortgage firms are bracing for a wave of missed payments starting April 1 as borrowers lose their jobs. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say they will offer deferrals on home mortgages and postpone foreclosures. Auto dealers say consumers are calling to put off their April lease or loan payments.
Guy Hillel, 47 years old, got laid off from his job as a food and beverage manager at a Times Square hotel earlier this month after the property closed due to the outbreak. He is eligible for $504 a week in unemployment benefits, a fraction of what he was earning.
Mr. Hillel, who has a wife and two children, says it isn’t enough to cover the family’s expenses. He has called credit-card companies to negotiate payment extensions, and tried unsuccessfully to delay his monthly car loan for his family’s Volkswagen Tiguan sport-utility vehicle.
“It’s extremely stressful,” Mr. Hillel said. “It’s crazy: I’m more exhausted now than I was before when I had a job.”
Mr. Hillel estimates his family will receive some stimulus money, but not the full amount awarded to couples.
The federal economic stimulus program passed last week will provide direct payments to Americans as well as loans to large and small companies. The bill includes $350 billion to help small businesses keep people on their payrolls.
For employees, it increases current unemployment benefits by $600 a week for four months. It also provides one-time checks of $1,200 to Americans with adjusted gross income up to $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for married couples; individuals and couples are eligible for an additional $500 per child.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Trump administration aims to send out direct payments to individuals in three weeks and that banks should be able to originate same-day loans for small businesses in as little as a week.
Many business owners and individuals said they have little in the way of cash reserves or savings for bills that come due in the next few days. Some wonder whether the aid will be enough.
The Small Business Administration said the stimulus bill provides “small businesses with the resources they need to get them through this unprecedented time.”
America’s large, marquee retailers are also struggling.
Macy’s Chief Executive Jeff Gennette told suppliers last week that while he had hoped to reopen stores by April 1, that was highly unlikely. “While our digital business and call centers remain open, we have lost the majority of our sales,” Mr. Gennette wrote in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Macy’s has suspended its dividend and drawn down its credit line to bolster its cash. It has reduced pay for executives. It’s also canceling some orders and has doubled the amount of time it gives itself to pay suppliers, to 120 days. Nevertheless, Mr. Gennette wrote in the letter, the retailer may need to begin furloughing some of its 130,000 employees.
Nike has offered to pay 50% rent on its 384 closed U.S. stores, landlords say, and when the stores reopen, a percentage of sales in lieu of any rent for 12 months. Nike executives said they will continue to pay workers while the stores are shut.
“We are currently honoring all existing contracts with our landlords. In collaboration with our real estate partners, we provided a proposal looking at near and long term approaches that we believe will help ensure both parties remain viable business partners through this unprecedented time,” a Nike spokeswoman said.
Tapestry Inc., the parent of Coach and Kate Spade, extended U.S. and European store closures through April 10, but is continuing to pay store workers. “What will be important as we come out the other end is to have a committed team of people,” said Chief Executive Jide Zeitlin.
Mr. Zeitlin said the company is in negotiations with landlords about rent forgiveness and is looking at other expenses to cut aside from labor.
T.J. Maxx and Ross Stores Inc. have canceled orders through mid-June and are delaying payments to suppliers, according to people familiar with the situation. A T.J. Maxx spokeswoman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Ross Stores didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Financial pressures are particularly intense for small business owners; In a typical community, about half of small businesses had less than two weeks of cash liquidity, according to a 2019 report by the JPMorgan Chase Institute.
Pennsylvania deemed auto repair an essential business, which allowed Tom Bemiller, the chief executive of The Aureus Group, to keep open his three repair shops in the Philadelphia area. Revenue is down 35% this month, he said.
“Customer after customer is telling us I am not going to get my car fixed until this blows over,” said Mr. Bemiller.
Mr. Bemiller said his priority is to pay his 25 employees and his suppliers. His bank is working to determine whether it can retool the terms of his company’s $450,000 loan to allow for interest-only payments and has increased its credit line by $50,000, enough to cover two weeks of payroll. Pennsylvania is letting him delay certain sales tax payments; American Express Co. has agreed to waive fees and interest if he delays his $270,000 corporate credit card bill for one month.
“Right now everything is on the table because we are in survival mode,” Mr. Bemiller said. “We are reaching out to all vendors and creditors and asking for help and trying to delay payments as much as possible.”
Mr. Bemiller has reduced his own salary. He hopes to defer payments on his mortgage, student loans, credit card bills and other expenses, but hasn’t had time to work on that yet because he’s been singularly focused on the business, which provides all of his family’s income.
At Envision Travel Holdings Inc., a travel agency with 11 offices, revenue has fallen by two-thirds in the past month and is expected to drop to near zero in the next month or so. The Las Vegas company, which normally has 40 employees and 25 independent contractors, has laid off four workers and cut hours by 20%.
All but one of Envision’s landlords has agreed to reduce rents, cutting payments to about $15,000 from $38,000, with missed payments tacked on to the end of the lease. The travel company put a hold on its 401(k) retirement savings plan and, for now, dropped its 50% contribution to the employee dental plan. “We are analyzing every expense, line by line,” owner Thomas Carlsen said.
“The universal advice we are giving tenants is don’t pay your rent and see what happens,” said Derek Wolman, partner at law firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, which often represents bars, restaurants and hotels in lease negotiations. He said this is especially true in New York state, where there is pending legislation that would give 90 days of rent forgiveness to residential and commercial tenants who suffered financially as a result of Covid-19.
In Detroit, Bedrock, a developer and property owner created by billionaire Dan Gilbert, is offering free rent to more than 100 small businesses and restaurants from April to June. “Hopefully, they sense we’re in it to help them,” said Matt Cullen, chief executive of Bedrock. On Monday, Michigan ordered all non-essential businesses to close.
Smaller landlords who don’t have enough reserves to tide them through a prolonged pause in rent collection say they are in a precarious state.
“Why is the landlord the first line in bailing them out?,” said Corey Bialow, a small property owner. He owns a stake in 12 properties in different states including New Jersey and Massachusetts. He said he will be on the hook for additional costs beyond mortgages such as real estate taxes, maintenance and insurance and will have to dip into his savings to pay for these. “I’m personally on the hook.”
Coyote Hole Ciderworks, a three-year-old cider producer in Lake Anna, Va., saw an 80% drop in revenue after it was forced to shutter most of its operations.
Coyote typically employs seven workers most of the year and fifteen or more in the summer. Now, just co-owner Laura Denkers and one employee remain on the payroll; Her husband, Chris, has stopped taking a salary so the company can continue paying health insurance premiums. The Denkers’ 10-year-old twin sons have cystic fibrosis, which makes keeping health coverage crucial.
The couple began applying for a $60,000 disaster loan from the SBA on March 20. They said all the information they put into the system was lost when the SBA revamped the disaster loan application process because of technical difficulties.
The small company has secured a 90-day reprieve on mortgage payments from its bank; Mr. Denkers plans to pay the minimum allowed on his corporate credit card and is trying to defer payments on equipment loans and other bills. “The next three weeks is the real crunch time when we need an influx of money,” he said.
Jodi Rodriguez, until recently director of retail and sales for Ovenly, a New York City-based wholesale and retail bakery that laid off all of its 72 employees, filed for unemployment March 18.
She wrote a letter to the landlord of the building she’s lived in for eleven years, asking for a temporary discount on the rent on her New York apartment. Ms. Rodriguez owns a rental property in Florida, but the tenant is a make-up artist who isn’t currently working. “I’m unsure whether she is going to pay or not,” Ms. Rodriquez.
“The hardest part right now is health insurance,” said Ms. Rodriguez, noting that coverage through Ovenly ends March 31.
Even businesses that have had gains are facing uncertainty. Ms. Douglas, the Boston liquor store owner, said in-store sales are up 130% over what she had budgeted, more than offsetting the collapse of her catering and event business. She’s keeping a close eye on cash flow and expenses, worried that she, her husband or one of their employees might get sick, that worker illnesses could disrupt her supply chain or that the state could order liquor stores to close.
Ms. Douglas is a member of a local business group in Boston’s South End neighborhood that recently surveyed more than 100 small firms. Most of the owners reported revenue is down by 90% or more in March, with monthly losses totaling about $8.5 million for the 72 businesses that provided specific figures.
“Every order we put in is nerve-wracking because we are so worried about getting stuck with product we can’t sell,” she added. “We are open today but that doesn’t mean we will be open next week.”
Two new roadmaps lay out possible paths to end coronavirus lockdowns
With Covid-19 racing through the country, the United States is virtually locked down. At the same time, the yearning among Americans to reopen their communities grows, as does their desire to return to some semblance of normality.
In an effort to chart a path toward that goal, public health experts laid out two new roadmaps over the weekend.
- The first, from Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy expert and vice-provost of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests lockdowns could ease up in June.
- The second, from former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb and colleagues, doesn’t set a date, but rather outlines the evidence that communities would need to begin lifting some of the more draconian restrictions.
Both roadmaps are predicated on the United States sharply ramping up testing for the disease and hospitals acquiring sufficient supplies at a time of extraordinary global demand and growing shortages — both of personal protective equipment to shield health workers from infection and ventilators to help the gravely ill to survive.
The roadmap from Gottlieb and several co-authors, including Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, envisions four phases.
1) Phase 1 represents the current situation, in which the outbreak is growing. Only once certain thresholds are met —
- hospitals are able to cope with the flow of incoming patients and
- new cases have dropped in a particular area for at least 14 days — could
2) Phase 2 begin.
During that stage, physical distancing efforts will have slowed spread to the point at which schools and some other types of societal functions can resume, though people 70 and older and others at highest risk from the virus would still need to restrict their movements.
The report suggests counties or states may move from Phase 1 to 2 — and back to Phase 1 if containment starts to erode — at different times, based on local conditions.
Rivers acknowledged that won’t be anytime soon.
“I don’t think we are close to moving out of Phase 1,” she said. “I think staying home is what we need to be doing right now. And how fast we get to Phase 2 will really depend on how effective our interventions are now and how aggressively we are able to scale up our capacities.”
3) Phase 3, the lifting of all restrictions, would only occur when a vaccine to prevent infection and therapeutics to save people who become infected are available. Gottlieb said he thinks vaccines might be two years away, but feels confident some therapies will be shown to work by the summer.
4) Phase 4 would entail planning to build the country’s capacity to respond to the next biological threat.
Gottlieb, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, acknowledged some aspects of the 20-page report may seem unrealistic at the moment. There is, for example, an extraordinary global demand in protective gear for health care workers. But he said that shouldn’t lessen the importance of the roadmap.
“What I wanted to do with this was set out very clear measurable milestones and very clear objectives of what can improve when those milestones are reached,” he told STAT. “And give people something to shoot at. Because I think that reports that aren’t very granular aren’t very useful.”
Emanuel, who outlined his roadmap in an opinion piece in the New York Times, estimated that if spread of the virus isn’t slowed, almost a third of Americans will have been infected by early May. If Covid-19’s fatality rate is 1%, that level of transmission would lead to 1 million deaths, he noted. (There is much debate and no consensus on the fatality rate, though 1% is nearer the lower range of current estimates.)
Based on China’s response to the virus, he suggested that a national shelter-in-place order over the next eight to 10 weeks, excluding essential services workers, should, bring transmission of the virus way down.
In the interval, health officials will need to deploy “thousands of teams to trace contacts of all new Covid-19 cases using cellphone data, social media data, and data from thermometer tests and the like,” Emanuel wrote. “It would be easier to lift the national quarantine if we isolate new cases, find and test all their contacts, and isolate any of them who may be infected.”
Michael Osterholm, former state epidemiologist for Minnesota and director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said resource-starved public health departments do not currently have the manpower to operate at this scale.
He suggested if departments had the resources to hire and train thousands of newly unemployed people, perhaps this work could be done.
More broadly, Osterholm worried that neither of the new roadmaps adequately captured the impact supply shortages will have on containment efforts.
“I welcome these kinds of discussions. They need to happen right now. And I think they need to be aspirational, which I think both Ezekiel’s and Scott’s plans strive to be. But they also have to be based on reality,” he said.
While Gottlieb and Rivers believe testing in the United States is increasing substantially and that tests will be more available going forward, Osterholm has warned shortages of the chemicals needed for the tests loom.
Likewise, the report from Gottlieb and Rivers calls from nearly doubling the number of ventilators hospitals have at their disposal — moving from the current three per 10,000 people to a goal of five to seven per 10,000 — in its Phase 1. But every country in the world needs more ventilators now. Ramping up production of these complicated machines is not likely to be easy — and certainly not as easy as tweets instructing General Motors to start making them would imply.
Osterholm noted that Medtronic, a maker of the machines, sources 1,500 parts from between 14 and 20 countries for each ventilator.
Some of the recommendations from Gottlieb and Rivers could be easier to put in place. They suggest, for instance, that the public should be urged to start wearing fabric masks in public — not paper surgical masks that are already in short supply in hospitals, but masks that could be made at home or bought online.
“We did not and would not recommend the use of proper personal protective equipment” for the public,” Rivers said. But she noted that because people can transmit SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, before they develop symptoms, having them wear masks when they are out in public might slow spread of the disease.
“We don’t think they’re going to be very effective at keeping healthy people healthy, but what they would be better at is preventing people who are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic from spreading. They’re more useful for source control,” she said.
Why the Coronavirus Could Threaten the U.S. Economy Even More Than China’s
Why the Coronavirus Could Threaten the U.S. Economy Even More Than China’s
If people stop traveling and going to the dentist, the gym or even March Madness basketball games, the impact could be enormous, an economist says.
After a string of deaths, some heart-stopping plunges in the stock market and an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve, there is reason to be concerned about the ultimate economic impact of the coronavirus in the United States.
The first place to look for answers is China, where the virus has spread most widely. The news has been grim with deaths, rolling quarantines and the economy’s seeming to flat line, though the number of new cases has begun to fall.
Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than in China. That is because face-to-face service industries — the kind of businesses that go into a tailspin when fearful people withdraw from one another — tend to dominate economies in high-income countries more than they do in China. If people stay home from school, stop traveling and don’t go to sporting events, the gym or the dentist, the economic consequence would be worse.
In a sense, this is the economic equivalent of the virus’s varied health effects. Just as the disease poses a particular threat to older patients, it could be especially dangerous for more mature economies.
This is not to minimize the indiscriminate and widespread damage that the disease has caused by disrupting the global supply chain. With shortages of everything from auto parts to generic medicines and production delays in things like iPhones and Diet Coke, a great deal of pain is coming from the closing of Chinese factories. That proliferating damage has central banks and financial analysts talking about a global recession in the coming months.
Nor is it to discount the possibility that the United States will be spared the worst effects. Scientific and public health efforts might limit the spread of the virus or quickly find a treatment or vaccine. The warmer weather of summer might slow the spread of the coronavirus as it usually does with the seasonal flu. Many things could prevent an outbreak as large as the one in China.
But it is to say that an equivalent outbreak in the United States might easily have a worse economic impact.
As a baseline, several factors work against the United States. China’s authoritarian government can quarantine entire cities or order people off the streets in a way that would be hard to imagine in America, presumably giving China an advantage in slowing the spread of the disease. In addition, a large share of American workers lack paid sick days and millions lack health care coverage, so people may be less likely to stay home or to get proper medical care. And 41 percent of China’s population lives outside urban areas, more than twice the share in the United States. Diseases generally spread faster in urban areas.
Beyond those issues, however, is a fundamental difference in economic structure: When people pull back from interacting with others because of their fear of disease, the things they stop doing will frequently affect much bigger industries in the United States.
Consider travel. The average American takes three flights a year; the average Chinese person less than half a flight. And the epidemiological disaster of the Diamond Princess has persuaded many people to hold off on cruises. That cruise ship stigma alone potentially affects about 3.5 percent of the United States, which has about 11.5 million passengers each year, compared with only 0.17 percent of China, which has about 2.3 million passengers.
People may stop attending American sporting events. There have even been calls for the N.C.A.A. to play its March Madness college basketball tournament without an audience. But sports is a huge business in the United States. People spend upward of 10 times as much on sporting events as they do in China.
And if 60 million Americans stop spending $19 billion a year on gyms, that would be a much a bigger deal than if the 6.6 million gym members in China stopped spending the $6 billion they devote to gyms now.
That’s just a start. Who wants to go to the dentist or the hospital during an outbreak if a visit isn’t necessary? Yet health spending is 17 percent of the U.S. economy — more than triple the proportion spent in China.
Of course, not every service sector is so much larger than in China. Retail and restaurants, for example, have comparable shares of gross domestic product in both countries.
But over all, the United States is substantially more reliant on services than China is. And, on the flip side, agriculture, a sector not noted for day-to-day social interaction and so potentially less harmed by social withdrawal, is a 10 times larger share of China’s economy than it is in the United States.
So for all the talk about the global “supply shock” set off by the coronavirus outbreak and its impact on supply chains, we may have more to fear from an old-fashioned “demand shock” that emerges when everyone simply stays home. A major coronavirus epidemic in the United States might be like a big snowstorm that shuts down most economic activity and social interaction only until the snow is cleared away. But the coronavirus could be a “Snowmaggedon-style storm” that hits the whole country and lasts for months.
So go wash your hands for the full 20 seconds. And show some more sympathy for the folks quarantined in China and elsewhere. Because if it spreads rapidly in the United States, it could be a heck of a lot worse.
Bill Gates Is Really Worried About the Coronavirus. Here’s Why.
The debate is splitting into two broad camps: Call them the “growthers” and the “base-raters.”
Just how bad will the new coronavirus be? I can’t answer that question, but I have observed the debate splitting into two broad camps: Call them the “growthers” and the “base-raters.”
The term growthers refers to the notion of exponential growth, and indeed the number of Covid-19 cases appears (by some accounts) to be following an exponential pattern. Some scientists have estimated that the number of cases doubles about every seven days. If you play that logic out, it is easy enough to see how people might be complacent at first, then in a few months there is a public health crisis.
Of course, that process of doubling won’t go on forever. At some point, the number of people who have already been exposed to Covid-19 would become so large that their immunity could lower the subsequent rate of spread. Furthermore, society would adjust by having fewer large gatherings — many conferences already are being canceled — and by taking other precautions.
Still, the growthers find it easy to imagine that the number of cases might overwhelm the capacity of the U.S. health care system. Even if you think a speedy American (or more likely Singaporean) response argues against this scenario, it is harder to be equally sanguine about all the world’s nations, most of which are much poorer and have lower-quality public health systems than the U.S.
The growther approach seems most common among people trained in mathematics, finance, and those who work in technology. Finance is centered on the idea of exponentially compounding returns, where small initial gains turn into something quite large. So financial professionals understand the growther perspective.
In tech, the major companies have grown from nothing to very large fairly quickly, often by taking advantage of a (positive) network or contagion effect for their products. Tech people are also familiar with Moore’s Law, which says that computing power increases exponentially as its cost decreases dramatically. It is no surprise that Bill Gates recently suggested that Covid-19 may be the once-in-a-century pathogen the world has been worried about.
Overall, the growthers tend to be analytical people who work a lot with numbers and are used to modeling the problems they face. The mindset in Washington, by contrast — and indeed much of America — is much closer to the base-raters.
The base-raters, when assessing the likelihood of a particular scenario, start by asking how often it has happened before. That is, they estimate its base-rate likelihood. And history shows that major pandemics have lately been rare. The SARS and Ebola outbreaks largely petered out, HIV-AIDS was of a very different nature, and the 1957 and 1968 flu epidemics are now distant memories.
Base-raters acknowledge the exponential growth curves for the number of Covid-19 cases, but still think that the very bad scenarios are not so likely — even if they cannot exactly say why. They view the world as hard to model, and think that parameters do not remain stable for very long. They are less convinced by analytical and mathematical arguments, and more persuaded by what they have seen in their own experience. They tend to be pragmatic and rooted in the moment.
Political scientist Philip Tetlock, in his work on superforecasters, has shown that base-rate thinking is often more reliable than the supposed wisdom of experts. Most of the world, most of the time, does not change very quickly. So there is an advantage to considering broadly common historical probabilities and simply refusing to impose too much structure on a problem.
That said, there are some cases where base-rate thinking clearly goes askew. Base-rate thinking obscured the ability to foresee the highly unusual 2008 financial crisis, for example. If applied in, say, 2014, base-rate thinking would not have predicted the election of Donald Trump.
As for the health-care establishment, epidemiologists understand exponential growth rates very well. But many medical professionals think in terms of what are called “normal” statistical distributions. If someone visits your office with what appears to be a typical flu case, it is usually exactly that. The result is that there is not much surge capacity in America’s hospitals and public-health institutions.
I still don’t know which of the two perspectives on Covid-19 is the wiser. But as someone who has studied exponential growth rates for economies, I confess that my concerns are rising.