President Trump’s bid to reopen the economy after weeks of anti-coronavirus shutdowns comes as many states report increased hospital capacity and testing availability, despite loud objections from congressional Democrats, and many public health experts, that he is moving too fast.
But Trump’s actions are consistent with the initial justification for the lockdown. Avoiding hospital overcrowding during the pandemic was a major original rationale for the business closures and stay-at-home orders that have left millions out of work. Now that this has been accomplished in vast swaths of the country, some believe critics are moving the goalposts.
“We planned for the worst, and the worst did not manifest itself,” said Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a former Food and Drug Administration associate commissioner. “We’ve come from a killer virus that we have to stay at home to avoid, like the angel of death passing through Egypt, to a manageable health crisis.”
The Trump camp has been quick to highlight that many Democratic governors in blue states that have been hammered by the virus think it is safe to begin moving toward a reopening. “We have doubled the amount of testing in the last week,” Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont told MSNBC. “We’re gonna double it again in the next week.” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has alternated between praising and panning the White House response, said in a press conference, “We have abated the worst by what we’ve done, and now, we can intelligently turn towards reopening.”
Reopening skeptics counter that deaths are still rising nationally, and most states have not met the minimum White House guidelines, but many are relaxing their restrictions anyway. They cite one of the Trump administration’s own top infectious disease experts, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who warned the Senate on Tuesday that the gains made against the coronavirus are fragile.
“My concern is that we will start to see little spikes that then turn into outbreaks,” Fauci told a Senate HELP Committee hearing via video conference. “The consequences could be really serious.”
“It will look like a brilliant decision at first,” Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, told the Washington Examiner when Trump was still contemplating an Easter reopening. “But if done too quickly, things will come crashing down.”
Pressed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who campaigned unsuccessfully for the party’s nomination to challenge Trump in the fall, Fauci was equivocal about whether the coronavirus was contained. “It depends on what you mean by containment,” he said. “So I think we’re going in the right direction, but the right direction does not mean we have, by any means, total control of this outbreak.”
Still, many have noticed what journalist and political analyst Sean Trende has called a “subtle shift in the discourse” away from bending the curve to eliminating it. Major media outlets have compared phased economic reopening to human sacrifice and challenged readers to admit they would “let people die” for the sake of the economy.
Implied in this coverage is that the United States can remain largely quarantined until there is a vaccine — something many experts believe may not happen for a year or more. Polling suggests public anxiety about the virus remains high, especially among senior citizens — a voting bloc that is crucial to Trump in November — even as small-business owners and nonsalaried workers struggle to cope with the lockdowns.
“This isn’t going to be a ‘national open the economy day,’” Pitts said. “This is a very localized decision.”
“I don’t think you have to have everywhere closed or everywhere open,” said Jha.
Socioeconomic status, size of at-risk populations, and the local medical systems’ capacity to deal with outbreaks vary by state and region, which is why many advocate a decentralized approach to reopening subject to federal guidance.
“The way leaders like Trump and Cuomo succeed is by treating us like adults,” said Pitts. “We need enhanced personal responsibility — wearing masks, staggered work hours, enhanced personal hygiene. The crisis is going to be different depending on where you are and who you are. That doesn’t mean we can’t start to reopen the economy if we do so intelligently.”
