Senate Democrat Gary Peters Lauds China’s Response to Coronavirus: ‘Thinking Strategically’

Appearing Friday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) praised China’s response to combat the coronavirus, despite the communist regime’s attempts to cover up the spread of the deadly illness.

A transcript is as follows: 

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Senator, is our system up to this? You were talking about our system needing to be up to this. Bank of America, major banks, are calling this a recession right now. What is it that keeps it from careening into a depression?

SEN. GARY PETERS: You’ve got to keep people working. That’s important to understand that not everybody can necessarily go home and shelter-in-place. You still have to keep the economy moving. One thing that I’m particularly concerned about is when you think about critical supply chains, things like food, our grocery stores, we have to have people continuing to work. You got to continue to have some manufacturing going on. I think it’s important to realize, if you just shut down industries, it’s not like you can just push a button at some point in the future and start it back up again. It’s a lot more complex than that. And if you have a supply chain that’s been deteriorating, small businesses that close down and can’t re-open, some estimates say a very large percentage of these small businesses if they close, their not going to be able to re-open. That creates havoc in the supply chains. When we do get through the health crisis aspect of it, you can’t just turn on a switch to get the economy running right away. We’ve got to focus on that.

While we’re dealing with the healthcare crisis, which is first and foremost, you’ve got to deal with that, but you’ve got make sure you’re helping families, you make sure unemployment insurance is there, you make sure families aren’t losing their homes or can’t buy food. At the same time, you’ve got to keep other elements of the economy going to work. We saw that in China. Outside of Hubei province, a lot of the factories continued to work. They separated their employees, they had partitions, they found ways to continue to keep some of the economy going in other parts of the country that weren’t impacted as much as it was in Hubei. We’ve got to be doing that same kind of thing here. Thinking strategically on dealing with the disease, but also maintaining our economy so that when we do get through it, it can come back up fairly quickly.