Consider this a shoutout of empathy for all of you desperate for a “happy medium” in response to the coronavirus.
On one side, we keep hearing from what might be called the “deniers,” who still insist this pandemic is barely worse than the flu. Some of them bombard us with charts and graphs of cherry-picked and misleading numbers — for example, failing to acknowledge that they are comparing five weeks of COVID-19 statistics with a full year of flu stats. Others act as if “total deaths” is the only number that counts, completely ignoring the greater prevalence of hospitalizations and the far greater extent of suffering, even agony, that many COVID-19 victims experience — some of whom come far closer to death before recovering than most flu victims do.
On the other hand, even among many of us who understand that this is a horrendous pandemic unprecedented in the Information Age, there is a feeling — I hear it all over — that perhaps authorities are overreacting. The sky-has-fallen/shut-down-everything response seems to do too little to account for the deleterious effects, including on health and perhaps even life, that near-universal shutdowns can cause. We wonder why, at least after the first two or three weeks, the responses can’t be more specifically targeted, with more attention to managing the effects without keeping healthy people from being productive in ways that make the situation worse for everybody.
In this sense, the “happy medium” we seek isn’t even close to halfway between the two extremes described above. It’s more like somewhere 80-85% toward the “take this very, very seriously and risk a little overreaction” side of things, rather than the “denier” side. This desire for a happy medium is partly psychological, perhaps, and partly an assertion of what seems like common sense. It’s certainly not an assertion of epidemiological expertise. It is in line, however, with what at least once was thought of as an American character trait: a “nose-to-the-grindstone, let’s get to work and solve this thing” mentality.
Even if President Trump expresses it inelegantly (or worse, dangerously overstates the chances of a quick back-to-normal recovery), he is giving voice to this part of the American character when he pushes medical experts to move beyond their “shut-it-all-down” prescriptions.
It is not the intention here to prescribe how to do this, other than to recommend thoughtful pieces by Phil Klein, Yuval Levin, and an American Enterprise Institute team led by Scott Gottlieb. Instead, it is a plea for perspective. It just seems wrong to say that the medical experts should dictate policy, almost as if in a vacuum, and that policymakers better versed in economics have no good reason to consider the downstream consequences, including health consequences, of shutdown orders that may save lives now but increase the long-term toll of death or suffering.
This particular happy medium would acknowledge the need to have widespread stay-at-home orders now, while insisting that the time also is now to start planning to expedite moves back to normal.
What we want are balance and context. What we want is openness to different sorts of reasoning. No single professional discipline has all the wisdom. There’s a danger in a herd mentality. Questions and independent judgments or suggestions should be encouraged. It’s not denial to want, and to sense that there may be, a better way out of this mess.
