I agree that it is sobering. That's for sure. I'm less of a fan of the metaphor of life-support. I think of it as stopping the clock.
As I said before, we stop the clock in as many respects as possible and just let everybody sit back. Then we're going to restart the clock. Of course, we're going to start it up in a few steps, because we can't just do everything overnight.
It's important for us to bear in mind that this is a temporary thing. We can watch what has happened in China, for example, or if you prefer, we can look at South Korea or Italy. Some cases are better than others, like ours, but they all have a cycle that they go through. This is not an open-ended situation.
Our scenario, which we describe as a best case, given where we are today, would have us looking at various places in the economy that could begin to restart sometime in late May, probably, and early June. They're not 100% restored, but.... Maybe lots of us will continue to work the way we are now, doing virtual work and working from home, until the testing is very widespread and the confidence builds that we have things under control. All that is to say, the economy should begin restarting before the third quarter starts and will for sure be doing so in the third quarter.
That means we're going to get a V-shaped trajectory that goes down very sharply and then back up, but not all the way—sort of a half V, like a cursive V—and then the rest of the cursive V curls up at the end. That's when it takes maybe another year for the economy to get back to the same path that it was on before all this started. When we look back at this, we'll say that it was more or less a full year's departure from our previous path. That will happen if we've done a good job of buttressing confidence and having people ready for that recovery period. I think the tools that have been deployed have the best chance of doing exactly that.