Hay Dude you make a lot of good points. 20 years from now we may still be talking about how COVID-19 is affecting us.
Like in the Great Depression people may come to realize there can be rainy days, weeks, months and years in one's life time. The middle class has been gutted and if we keep outsourcing jobs there is no way to rebuild the middle class. The family farm use to be a store house of value for future generations. Often the parents would build a new house and one of the kids would move into old farm house and if the size of the farm was growing there would be houses for other of the kids. The equipment would be shared as well as gardens, beef and hogs were shared and they would swap work, etc.
The family farm is gone for the most part. The government is the safety net until it is not the safety net. Now even in rural America the 30-50 year old age group often do not even know the families living near them. Small communities and its store(s), school and churches are about to be gone.
We know the small mom and pop businesses like the country store, eating places, dealerships will be closing because there is no market or young generation interested in something that is dead end. If we live in our homes for months and told not to get out that just drives more and more people to Amazon and other on line sources that we may just keep using. Movies are being streamed during the lock down, people are working from home on line, remote medicine is going main stream, etc and I can see high rise office buildings in NYC begging for people to come back. A company with 200 employees may wind up only needing needing space for a staff of 20 and even if there is no down sizing of the staff (down sizing can be expected) the other 180 may just decide to work from home. College continues but from home for my daughter and both summer semesters are going to be online. She is not putting miles on her truck like before so the new tires are not wearing like before. Car insurance carriers are refunding a % of premiums for people not driving like before. Fewer cars will need to be replaced as often as people become more home based.
I do not remember her name but will look up the interview from the other day with a lady with 4 kids in TX that was on Wall Street then at the TX based Federal Reserve Bank so she knows high finance and motherhood. She points out how this virus is much more than a speed bump because it is going to change us like the Great Depression did her grandparent's generation. She talks about how her grandparents saved to buy things and did not borrow money because they saw debt was a way one could lose everything.
Economist Destroys China - Calls Coronavirus An Act of War - YouTube
You will know in the first 60 seconds if her gatling gun speed and subject is of interest or not then you can just stop watching the interview. She is all American and like other women that I have met from Texas. She thinks the virus impact to our financial future is all already huge even if we went back to work next Monday. She is very professional and due to the content I am going to have my kids and staff watch it. I do not know the interviewer but I thought he was professional in that he did not do most of the talking. I was trying to learn more about the corona virus pandemic when I ran across the interview.