ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - The head of the St. Louis Federal Reserve outlines the expense of the COVID-19 quarantine.
"It's costing us $25 billion a day to have this quarantine policy in place, in lost household income," St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard told participants in a Tuesday webinar hosted by the St. Louis Regional Chamber.
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Bullard says the quarantine policy is appropriate for now.
He stresses the U.S. should avoid returning to widespread quarantine measures in the future.
That's why he says coronavirus testing is key to reopening the economy, "we can't test them at the scale we would like to but widespread testing of everyone in the economy would put an end to this crisis."
Bullard says ramping up testing is the most important investment the US can make because we need to know where the virus is so it can be managed going forward.
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He's calling the second quarter the "pandemic adjustment period." He says the US economy usually creates $5 trillion in goods and services a quarter -- that will likely be cut in half the second quarter.
He doesn't consider federal assistance programs "stimulus."
"The idea that you want to bring production into the second quarter doesn't make any sense in this situation. We're not trying to get people back to the baseball game, or back on airplanes, or meeting in large groups," Bullard says. "We don't want to that in this environment while we're trying to invest in public health. What we want to do is have people stay at home, try to keep them with enough income to get through this period and then hopefully we'll be able to open up with good risk management going forward, of this disease."
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