Are bailouts a good idea?

By Alex Promios (cropped) Creative Commons license

The people most hurt by this are the people at the bottom.  For the large number of people who are desperate, have the virus, and don’t have a severe case of it they will continue spreading the virus in our community.  They are not spreading it because they want to they’re spreading it because they have to just to survive. Your own health and the duration of this pandemic depends on taking care of the least fortunate.  If we don’t the less fortunately among us will be reservoirs for the virus which will just take off again. So money and aid needs to be pumped in from the bottom up not the top down. If you send money from the top it will take too long to trickle down and it will (optimistically) extend the crisis by months.

“Your own health and the duration of this pandemic depends on taking care of the least fortunate”

I will be very very impressed with my community if we flatten the curve so much that as in the case of Wuhan we go into exponential decline.  However I won’t believe that until I see it in the data (see graph x) in the meantime flattening the curve only buys us time (see the toy simulation) on the order of months.  Exponential growth is still exponential growth even if it’s at a slower rate. We as a community are going through a lot of hardship to flatten the curve so that the government can catch up (Governments are a collection of humans that think linearly and not exponentially.) What is our government doing with the time we’re giving them.  We as a community want feedback we want to know that our sacrifice is making a difference.