Horse 2675 - Do Not Judge People For Continuing To Go To Work

As many of you are self-quarantining because you work in an organisation and environment which is usually full of people, I have continued to go to work; which has been based upon the guidelines from the NSW Department of Health. As someone who works in a firm which is still going about its business in relative normality, I am still very much spooked by the world at present.
I do not know if you have watched any of the British Public Information Films which were produced in preparation for a post apocalyptic nuclear scenario but what we are currently going through seems like a shadow of what might have been and perhaps what still might be.

I think that I might very well be one of the few people in the world for whom day-to-day life may have actually improved (albeit marginally) during the current Coronacrisis. As someone who works in an office of only two people, where we are separated by partition and where the amount of nominal working office space under normal circumstances is 9m², we already met the statutory requirements to remain open.
I am incredibly grateful for the fact that I work in an occupation where practically nothing has changed except for perhaps the expected hand-washing and santisation of surfaces.
I think that I might be one of the exceptionally lucky people in the world who can maintain a 1.5m distance from everyone simply by just going about my business; as practically everything that most normal humans would normally visit as part of their normal day is closed,

I found it really eerie last week when towards the end of the week, the first person who got on the train in the same carriage as me, got on at Redfern. When I came home on Monday the 23rd, standing on Wynyard Station was like being there at 3am. The train carriage that I got on was completely empty until two people got on at Seven Hills.
I am making 44km journeys across a city of five million people where the number of people per train carriage or on the bus, barely gets into double digits if at all. This is the current state of a typical train carriage, both in the morning and the afternoon:

I do not wish to take this flippantly at all. All of the businesses which rely on the congregational nature of humans are currently suffering and will continue to suffer through this to the point bankruptcy and closure in a lot of cases.
All pubs and nightclubs have been closed. One of our clients who is a nightclub operator now faces the very real possibility of closure because the landlord will certainly not extend any form of rent commutation or forgiveness, and with a projected income of literally zero for the indeterminate future, the only outlook is grim. She has already sent notices to her entire workplace staff, that they have been let go. Imagine that you are one of those people for a second and have been dumped out of work and into an economic climate like this.

Restaurants will have to close. Unless restaurant's kitchens can work out some kind of online delivery service, then I don't see any sensible future for them either.
Some restaurants have coping strategies for the impending buspocalypse but I don't really see that this is remotely viable for the vast majority. Take-away places will more than likely do better than expected and places with drive-through may also be able to survive. For instance, I went past McDonald's in Cremorne at lunch time yesterday while walking down an empty pavement back to Mosman (I went to the bank); all the lights were out inside the McDonald's restaurant and instead there was a line of cars which snaked out of the drive-through queue and spilled out on to Military Road and across an intersection with traffic lights.
That might be very well for a drive-through business but for food courts, this is current situation:

I have no idea of the numbers of people who work in retail who are being affected but it must be massive. The Federal Government has thrown some crumbs to people on various government pensions and allowances and it has promised that it will give cash to businesses but relying on the generosity of business owners to continue to employ people when they have literally zero source of income, is either gloriously ignorant, or as I suspect with the announcement that they expect the poorest and most precariously employed people to burn through their superannuation, insipidly malevolent.

I might very well be practically the only person in the world for whom the practicalities of life have improved. The distinct lack of people out and about has meant that I am no longer crammed into public transport with humanity but my own personal level of small comfort has come at the price of potentially millions of people out of work.
That is of course the tip of the iceberg because millions of people being out of work, businesses going into bankruptcy and national economies tanking, is also a small price to pay when you consider the impending magnitude of the Coronacrisis which may include the deaths of millions of people.

I work in a small business. There literally two of us in the office. Both of us working on the assumption that there could be a complete lockdown at any point and I am personally working on the assumption that the absolute worst could happen and that my boss might get jack of the whole thing entirely and simply close the doors permanently. Then what?
I am not going to jump on the bandwagon of people demanding that everyone simply just stay at home for the simple reason that the people who are still going to work are generally those people who are even closer to the cutting edge than anyone else. If anything goes wrong, I do not have a team of people who can help me sort it out.

Or suppose that we do go into sudden and immediate lockdown. I have the luxury of of having annual leave. If you are a casual or on a zero hours contract, you do not have that luxury. What happens then?
Landlords aren't going to forgive anyone their rent and if you have been made unemployed, then the clock has already started on you missing rent payments and the countdown to eviction. I have already seen landlords actually choosing to plan their rent increases now, specifically to put pressure on people to leave.
The Morrison Government in its generosity has said that it will allow people to burn through their long service leave if it in fact exists and have access to $20,000 of their superannuation which means that they can burn through their retirement now as well. I have already fielded questions about this at work.

As a society, it seems that we are generous up until the exact point where any kind of community sacrifice has to be made. We are currently making the economic choice to burn through the livelihoods and future of poorer people, for the protection of the incomes of the rich.
If we're all suddenly asked to stop playing the magic piano, whose only song is 'Ka-Ching', then the symphony stops. If the everything stops, then the people who pay the biggest prices are the people who can least afford it.

Of course I realise the seriousness of what is going on. I will even go so far as to say that the economy (praise be) along with money are ultimately all just made up. The only things that have existed since the beginning of time, is the stuff in the world and the people who live in it. People's lives are valuable, but it seems patently unfair to me that the people who are being asked to sacrifice the most in order to protect people's lives are the poorest of society. Society is three square meals away from anarchy. If you cut off people's work, they do not eat. Cut it off for long enough, and they will be turned into the streets, literally.