It does not actually tell you how fast a disease will spread. Photos: Wuhan under quarantine "People make the mistake of thinking that a high R0 means that you're inevitably going to end up with a pandemic, and that's not what it means at all, " says Maia Majumder from Harvard Medical School, who published one of the seven estimates for the new virus. In her view, if the number is higher than 1, we should take the disease seriously. But exactly how high it is beyond that threshold isn't very informative at this stage. Why? Because third, R0 is an average. Let's say the virus has an R0 of 2. This could mean that every single infected person passes the virus to two other people. It could also mean that one infected person is a "super-spreader" who infects 100 people, while 49 infected people infect no one. These two scenarios have radically different implications for what will happen during an outbreak. Super-spreader events are dangerous for health-care workers, but counterintuitively, they can sometimes be a good sign.
Who knows what business will even look like? Social distancing will continue into the fall or even later, which means that seat capacity will be cut in half and revenue overall will decrease by the same proportion. Read: Our pandemic summer The PPP is a Band-Aid for a wound that needs surgery. What happens after the eight weeks are up and the PPP funds have been used to pay employees but sales haven't returned to a healthy level? Businesses will have no other choice but to significantly cut employees' hours or entirely terminate them to stay afloat. Restaurants won't have enough sales to justify the staff the government wants them to protect. One unintended consequence we've already noticed is that landlords are pushing back on rent negotiations as if the PPP is a miracle cure for all of a restaurant's financial obligations. In fact, most people who use the PPP won't have money left over to apply to rent. All these issues considered, many in the hospitality industry will decide they can't take the risk of a PPP loan.