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All the best to you and your colleagues, friends, and families during this challenging and unsettling time. —Henry Blodget ([email protected]) and David Plotz ([email protected]) SUMMARY: Georgia and other states relax their lockdowns, possibly too early. President Trump returns to first principles and says he's ending immigration — then backtracks. More cash for small businesses, but still not enough. Miserable homebound parents realize it's about to get even worse. Is it really smart to start reopening? Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced he's reopening gyms, massage parlors, hair salons, and other small businesses on Friday, with restaurants and movie theaters to follow next week. Tennessee and South Carolina plan similar rollbacks. Everyone wants to reopen as soon as it is smart to do so, and the situation is different in each state, city, and community. But Georgia's announcement was met with skepticism and fear, partly because Kemp is the same governor who learned that asymptomatic people spread the virus only in early April, weeks after everyone else did. Also, gyms, massage parlors, and tattoo parlors don't seem like the safest businesses to pick for the start of the reopening process. The major reopening plans from government and various experts — including Trump — have as a first criterion a "downward trajectory" in the number of cases. Georgia's total cases continue to increase, but the number of new confirmed positive cases per day is, in fact, declining, though not for the "two weeks" that some plans call for. Georgia also still falls short of other criteria that the White House put in place for reopening. According to The Washington Post, the state has not seen a declining number of flu-like illnesses, and the percentage of tests coming up positive is still high. The biggest concern with reopening too early is that the spread could reaccelerate and drive a "second wave" of infections that end up being worse than the first. For a historical example, Insider's Katie Canales describes how a second wave hit San Francisco when the city lifted restrictions too early during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Most experts agree the US does not yet have enough testing and tracing capacity to spot new outbreaks, much less control them. Georgia's governor acknowledges the testing concern, but thinks the state has enough to react appropriately. Many other states are understandably chomping at the bit to reopen. And many governors are likely relieved to have Georgia and other states go first. In support of modestly loosening restrictions, it's worth noting that lockdown approaches aren't binary, open or closed. Closely watched Sweden has taken a more relaxed approach to lockdowns, and it still seems to be doing OK —worse than neighboring Scandinavian countries but as well as other countries with tighter lockdowns (see the chart below). So perhaps Georgia's foray will pave the way for more and earlier reopenings. We should know in mid-May. It will take that long for transmissions that occur in the next couple of weeks to become confirmed cases. Here are daily new cases in Sweden, which has taken a more relaxed approach by keeping schools and stores open. Sweden's deaths show a similar pattern: Trump's ending immigration? The president tweeted he was going to suspend immigration to protect American jobs while we fight the "invisible enemy." This grandiose announcement followed the model of Trump's previous immigration squeezes — a sudden announcement of major policy change that was modestly constrained after blowback. The day after Trump's tweet, the plan had been narrowed to suspending the granting of green cards for permanent residency for 60 days. We know Trump wants to restrict immigration: It's practically his only consistent position. But why announce a ban now? As with so many of Trump's moves during this pandemic, it seems more about electoral strategy than anything else. After a brief surge, the president's poll numbers are tanking, and he may believe his reelection depends on telling a story that he's fighting to save the economy while the elites let it wither. The immigration ban — pushed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News — advances that story. So does his liberationist rhetoric from the weekend. On the other hand, the presidential tweet could go the way of other Trump tweets and assertions. Namely, never be seen or heard of again. —DP PPPlease, baby, PPPlease Congress and the White House just completed yet another emergency spending package. This one is nearly $500 billion, and most of it — more than $300 billion — will go to shore up the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses. The PPP exhausted its original $349 billion fund in less than two weeks and assisted only 1.6 million small businesses, a tiny fraction of those that are eligible. What's unsettling about the new PPP funds is that they, too, will likely last only a few days because banks are giving out $50 billion a day. It would take about $1 trillion in rescue funds to meet demand. So this is a treacherous moment: There's resentment toward the big businesses that loopholed their way into PPP funds, frustration that banks prioritized certain customers — causing others to miss out on funding — and fear among companies that didn't get initial PPP funds that it may be too late to save themselves. What happens in the next few weeks will determine if the PPP is one of the success stories of the shutdown or an economic and political disaster. —DP We've stopped going places Business Insider's Aaron Holmes reports that maps and dashboards made by Facebook, Apple, and Google show how much our behaviors have changed since the lockdowns. For example, we're driving 63% and walking 66% less. Walking is healthy and low risk. So go for a walk! —DP Where's Biden? He's still at home in Delaware. He's also already $187 million behind Trump and the Republican National Committee in election fundraising: $57 million to $244 million, according to numbers released Monday. Not an easy spot to be in when grassroots donors are getting squeezed by the pandemic and Democratic super PACs are squabbling about which should get to work most closely with the campaign. —DP While you're only paying attention to the pandemic The Trump administration plans to suspend or eliminate a swath of labor, healthcare, environmental, and worker-safety regulations. More bad news for parents miserable at home with their kids: Summer's coming School systems have scrambled to slap together distance-learning programs — some digital packets, some just paper, a lucky few with real-time online classes — and parents are grateful. The distance learning is at best mediocre, mostly terrible, but at least it occupies children for a few hours a day. But this is the week that the parents we know came face to face with the horror of what will happen this summer. The school year is almost over and, in our obsession with it, we failed to notice the void that comes when it ends. The entire structure of the American summer depends on physical proximity and travel: camps, vacations, group sports, idle hours at the community center. Your kids won't be hanging out for hours at the pool; your teens won't be working summer jobs at the mall. Families are facing months of unstructured time, without even distance-learning make-work to fill it. So here's an idea: Just as public-school teachers pulled lessons together, let's assign parks-department workers to develop at-home camp curricula: online courses teaching bird-watching or fishing or gardening that desperate parents can use to fill handfuls of hours. —DP Thank you for reading! Please let us know what you think. ([email protected]; [email protected]) | 