Why do some people seem so comfortable with having the coronavirus shutdowns drag out for as long as possible?
I give the benefit of the doubt that no one wants to see more death, but just look at the frustratingly useless questions the national media keep putting to officeholders and health experts. Monday on CNN, anchor Jim Sciutto noted that beaches in Jacksonville, Florida, had been reopened before asking Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala, “Are orders like this at this stage to reopen putting people’s health at risk?”
Hmm, what might she possibly say to that? No, everything is fine now! Go out and enjoy yourselves!
The very question suggests that the “order” in Florida was for everyone to go out and hold hands while surfing. It wasn’t. It was just one step toward relaxing the extreme measures that virtually the entire country has undergone in hopes of softening the blow from the coronavirus on our health system. Florida reopened an outdoor area, which is supposed to be the safest place to be anyway. Parks elsewhere have remained open. So what’s the difference?
Shalala, of course, said that reopening the beach was “reckless.” In her answer, she set up unrealistically high thresholds for testing without any clear limits. And it’s unclear how contact tracing could work if potentially millions would test positive.
“We don’t have testing,” she said. “We haven’t tested all of the first responders … We’re not testing the people in grocery stores at this moment.” She said every single positive case should then be effectively tracked down to the one person who may have infected others.
That’s the same standard that liberals in the media are trying to set. Unless we have the perfect conditions under which everyone gets a test — not just everyone who wants or needs one, but everyone — we’ll have to remain indefinitely closed. Oh, and they say we absolutely have to have the capability to trace the chain of infection for every positive case.
Taxicab blind-items writer Thomas Friedman of the New York Times said Saturday that without those guarantees, we’re all being asked by the Trump administration to risk our lives for the sake of restoring the economy.
Sure, it would be fantastic if we could test everyone and retrace every positive case to its source, quarantine the infected, and treat them all in their own homes. This won’t be happening any time soon.
It bears repeating that the novel coronavirus results in mild symptoms for around 80% of people who get infected. Out of the remaining 20%, most recover after a visit to the hospital, which might mean some oxygen to help with breathing or maybe some assistance with hydration. The official death rate in the United States is oscillating between 3% and 5%, but there are strong indications from multiple studies that the infection rate is actually much higher, meaning that the real death rate is much lower.
The only thing that’s going to kill off this virus is medicine. Though full clinical trial results aren’t yet available, there are some encouraging signs that some treatments may be effective. One of them is the anti-viral drug remdesivir. A recent study showed that most severely ill patients diagnosed with COVID-19, the diseased caused by the virus, quickly recovered when treated with the medicine.
I hope the president doesn’t come out in support of remdesivir like he did when hydroxychloroquine showed some signs of promise because we all know what the media did after that. They actively worked and campaigned against it, possibly causing harm to patients.
Public health is of utmost importance. But our survival also depends on the economy. Some people are showing no sense of urgency when it comes to repairing it quickly.
If they did, the questions might be less about whether all forward-looking measures are “putting people’s health at risk” and more about what we can practically do right now to make a resumption of life as safe as possible until a proven treatment is available.
You won’t hear those questions much in Washington, but they might aid in wrapping this mess up more quickly.
