Off the News: Restarting economy not so simple

The COVID-19 pandemic has been rough. As Hawaii’s U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz put it during Monday’s “Spotlight Hawaii” appearance, “We’ve never shut down the American economy, and then started it right back up. It’s kind of clunky.”

Appearing on “Spotlight” on Wednesday, University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization Executive Director Carl Bonham compared the COVID-19-precipitated economic shutdown to a traffic jam: “What happens on the H1 when there’s an accident and they shut down all but one lane? … It takes a whole day to get the whole thing moving again.” In Hawaii, he noted, “we shut down the freeway multiple times.”