That sounds like loser talk to me. We can beat this virus with TTI (Test/Trace/Isolate). Let's get to it, like real red-blooded Americans. It's absolutely possible to suppress it so community transmission is no longer an issue.
Influenza is not equal to coronavirus. Coronavirus has RNA proofreading mechanisms in its polymerase, which mean that the mutation rate is much much slower than influenza.
While the fatality rate is extremely high, and unacceptably high, it isn't quite that high. Most experts believe it is between 0.5% and 1.5% IFR. Anywhere in that range is terrible. It's almost certainly not 2.4% unless the hospital system collapses, or you're talking about a different demographic than the US.
The ~1% number - that's where the 2.2 million dead number came from (in an unmitigated epidemic).
More to the point for this thread, I don't understand WTF Elon is doing with all this tweeting. It's terrible, not a good look, he seems to be mostly wrong, and it's not good for Tesla.
I think there's plenty of room for legitimate debate about HOW to best execute a lockdown, and which activities to limit. I think it's fine to discuss how to prevent hospitals from collapsing due to lack of elective procedures. I think it's tragic that there is a lot of excess mortality because some people are NOT GOING to the hospital when they should be (appendicitis, infection, heart attack, injury, etc.). There are lots of problems with a lockdown - no one wants it. But Elon's not helping his case here, and he's NOT putting these legitimate issues front and center. He just seems to want his factory open, which is awful.
Most of these problems are fixed by building Testing, Tracing, and Isolation/Quarantine infrastructure. We MUST have rapid, widely available testing for all medical professionals, and anyone interacting with the health system, to be able to keep it clean. Otherwise those people going in for elective procedures will be dying of coronavirus. Or the people with appendicitis or other medical issues will be dying of coronavirus.
Elon is also wrong about people not being allowed out of their homes. That completely mischaracterizes the limitations. You're basically allowed to do anything you want do do, as long as it is safe for you and others.
Anyway, none of these issues are fixed by going back to work and pretending the problem doesn't exist. It's a huge problem. It's not some fabrication of politicians. There are very few winners in this debacle. We should have acted 6 weeks earlier, when it was obvious the virus was spreading in the US in late January, and we'd be done now. But we didn't, so here we are.
I don't know what is wrong with Elon, but he is probably on the spectrum.
Amazon is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars just on testing this quarter, and about $4 billion in total on making sure their workers and customers are protected from coronavirus. How much is Tesla planning to spend? Why don't they start working on spending tens of millions to acquire rapid testing equipment and test kits, for on site test, purchasing PPE, establishing robust infection control procedures, etc. This virus is not f**king around. You can't have 10k people in a factory practicing social distancing and wearing PPE, and that's all you do. It'll spread like wildfire.
Elon's time would be better spent investing in protecting the lives of his employees. It's going to be a very bad look if any of his employees die (there are probably about 10-20 of them at the factory who are in mortal danger). And not just a bad look - it'll be tragic, and totally preventable.