Noah Smith, Columnist

The U.S. Is on the Verge of Lockdown 2.0

Governments will have no choice but to ban behavior that spreads Covid-19. The public will do the rest by shutting in again.

July 22, 2020 at 2:30 PM UTC

By Noah Smith

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

Play dates are verboten until further notice.
Photographer: Anthony Devlin/Getty Images Europe

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After two months of what looked like a nascent recovery, the U.S. economy is faltering again. Restaurant reservations, one of the most commonly tracked indicators of local business activity, are stagnating:

Americans are also a bit less mobile in July than in June: