What will it take for big companies to reopen?

  

For those of you who are following daily changes (and I’ve noticed more are doing that, from the comments I’ve received), you’ll see that the number of new deaths jumped by a couple hundred yesterday, after a big drop the day before. So the daily rate of increase went up to 3%, although the 3-day rate dropped from 10 to 9%. Since the latter is what I base my projections on, this means all of the projected deaths numbers fell again.

Of course, that’s good news, but it needs to be tempered by the fact that all of the risks now are on the upside, since there’s a lot of movement to ease up on the lockdowns, even though almost none of the states meet the criteria for reopening that the White House announced about three weeks ago (e.g. only a few states with small populations could possibly be meeting the criterion of having an adequate supply of tests available now. And no state can meet the criterion for having a two-week drop in total cases, since there’s no state that’s tested a large enough sample of its population – not just the sick ones – to determine the real number of infections. And the real number is without doubt a huge multiple of reported infections).  

But there’s another big barrier to fully reopening the economy: Almost no large companies are interested in reopening now (for example, I don’t believe any large companies in Georgia are planning to reopen offices even though they will be able to soon, and very few are reopening factories, although some factories never closed), and that’s for two reasons. First, their workers don’t want to come back yet. I’ll look at this issue tomorrow.

The second issue is that the companies themselves don’t want to reopen. And why don’t they? Well, if their workers don’t want to come back, they can’t exactly go to each worker’s house and hold a gun to their head to make them come back. On the other hand, if they declare that the company has opened up, I think that most of those workers would then be ineligible for continued unemployment insurance compensation, and they’d be forced to return (although I hope I’m wrong. If anybody knows about this, I’d appreciate your letting me know).

So why don’t they do this? There are several reasons for that. One is that, at this early stage, companies want to wait until there’s more sentiment in favor of reopening among their workers than there is now (of course, if the company can be run close to entirely by people working from home, there’s no question of reopening, since they never “closed” in the first place). But in a month things may change – whether or not it’s a majority, at least a much larger percentage of their workers will want to come back, since even with the extra $600/week from the feds at the moment (expiring at the end of July, I believe), unemployment insurance benefits are hardly the road to riches.

More importantly, I think employers do generally care about their workers’ health, although it might not everywhere and at all times be their number 1 consideration. They generally want to make sure they have the right social distancing, etc. measures in place, before they would even ask them to come back. 

However, one very important reason is liability. If people come back to work and then get sick – and especially if a few of them die – there will probably be huge liability costs, either as a result of a negative judgment in a lawsuit or just a settlement to prevent a lawsuit. Companies will want to make sure this isn’t going to happen (or at least that it will be very manageable) before they feel comfortable reopening.

There is currently a move among Republicans in Congress to provide industry a blanket immunity to lawsuits for Covid-19 infections – in theory, these would be lawsuits filed by workers and lawsuits filed by customers (in the case of walk-in businesses like stores and restaurants). Any sort of total immunity is definitely not going to pass, but it would be worth considering some high limits on damages (of course, any limits at all are certain to be challenged in court, so it may be years before it’s known whether this approach would stick). With those limits, at least companies could put an upper limit on what their liability will be. As it is, they have to consider there will be no upper limit, other than their entire net worth, and perhaps the net worth of their managers who decided to reopen.

If this idea is adopted, the federal government would need to do a couple things. The first is make sure that testing and contact tracing – plus isolation of all infected or possibly infected individuals (if at all possible away from their families, as was done in Wuhan) – are as ubiquitous as water. I can see some workers requiring that every worker in their office be tested every week and probably more often than that, in order for them to feel safe to return.

Fortunately, there’s a good model for this already: There’s one office I know of that today requires all people, workers and visitors, entering it to be tested whenever they come in - using one of the Abbott Labs 15-minute testing kits. That’s the Oval Office. All we need to do is expand that approach to every worker in every workplace, and there shouldn’t be a problem in opening up the country at all!

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into these numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 9%.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Pct. Change from previous week/month
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5	111%
March 21	244	35	542%
March 28	1,928	275	690%
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889	223%
April 11	12,126	1,732	95%
April 18	18,434	2,633	52%
April 25	15,251	2,179	-17%
Month of April	57,733	1,924	1422%
May 2	11,311	1,616	-26%
May 9	13,968	1,995	23%
May 16	18,277	2,611	31%
May 23	20,390	2,913	12%
May 30	25,180	3,597	23%
Month of May	87,224	2,814	151%
June 6	32,948	4,707	31%
June 13	36,757	5,251	12%
June 20	45,391	6,484	23%
June 27	59,395	8,485	31%
Month of June	196,785	6,559	226%
Total March - June	345,800

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 56,803

Increase in deaths since previous day: 1,388 (vs. 1,150 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 3% (vs. 2% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 9% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 10% yesterday)

II. Total reported cases

Total US confirmed cases: 1,010,507

Increase in cases since previous day: 23,185

Percent increase in cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in cases since 3 days previous: 9%

III. Reported case mortality rate so far in the pandemic in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 139,162

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 56,803

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 29% (vs. 32% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 29% of them have resulted in death. Compare this with the comparable number from South Korea, which is 3%. Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that they had fewer than 250 deaths, while we had over 55,000 deaths as of April 27?