There is no good time to read a Bret Stephens column, but if you had to pick one, now is that time.
The Trump-hating New York Times columnist wrote Friday that, with the exception of his own state, it’s time for the country to resume normal programming.
“The curves are flattening,” he wrote. “Hospital systems haven’t come close to being overwhelmed; Americans have adapted to new etiquettes of social distancing. Many of the worst Covid outbreaks outside New York … have specific causes that can be addressed without population-wide lockdowns. Yet Americans are being told they must still play by New York rules — with all the hardships they entail — despite having neither New York’s living conditions nor New York’s health outcomes.”
Plenty have been saying this exact thing for some time now. Here’s one:
That was actually just me on April 17, but you get the idea.
The vast majority of the United States is not going through what New York is going through, which is likely a matter of population density. Regardless, this country cannot survive an indefinite shutdown, wherein servers, cooks, custodians, flight attendants, mechanics, plumbers, and electricians are told they have to put their lives on hold or give up their jobs entirely until we can reach some unrealistic goal of zero new COVID-19 virus hospitalizations and the national capability to trace every single infection.
The national media had made it completely taboo to so much as even mention getting people back to work so that they can support themselves.
But we’re not all New York. They should listen to Stephens and the rest of us who have been making that point for weeks.
