With last week’s jaw-dropping unemployment figures showing 3.3 million people applied for unemployment insurance, it is increasingly clear just how seriously Americans are facing abrupt and devastating personal consequences due to our prudent and necessary social distancing measures in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
This has led some leaders and commentators to ask if it is all worth it or if the cure, in this case, is, in fact, worse than the disease. We must balance not letting the illness spread and not letting it choke our economy, goes the argument, as if the economy could thrive with the virus still being transmitted.
Americans, for now, do believe it is worth it. They are making changes to their lives, often at great personal cost, because of the collective good. But if measures to fight the coronavirus are lifted too early, if reopening is pursued in haste, it puts at risk any progress being made by virtue of these sacrifices.
The changes to daily life and sacrifices being made by people of all walks of life today are astounding in scale and devastating in impact.
There are those who have been laid off, the servers, bartenders, theater staff, food service workers, and retail staff, who worry about making rent and paying bills.
There are those who are in the healthcare field who face exhausting and dangerous conditions to keep us all alive.
There are small business owners who have poured everything they have, economically and emotionally, into their store or restaurant, who now wonder if it will ever reopen or recover.
There are working parents who have had to, overnight, become home-school teachers to their children all while trying to continue doing their day job.
There are students who will never get to walk across the stage for graduation, and worse, will enter a job market where employers are either furloughing staff or no longer looking to hire.
This is not “sitting home on the couch for your country.” This is massive sacrifice. For now, most people think it is worth it. But they will not forgive our leaders if those sacrifices wind up being all for naught.
And yet, in the face of all of this, our leaders have received generally positive marks. President Trump’s job approval has reached its highest point since he was first inaugurated, and majorities approve of the president’s current response to the crisis. Governors and government leaders such as Dr. Anthony Fauci are generally getting rave reviews from those of both parties, an astonishing shift from our generally hyperpartisan climate.
This, despite the fact that people are nonetheless critical of the initial response from the federal government, where a majority say that the spread of the virus would be less if we had acted faster, with only a third saying nothing really could have prevented our current situation. People generally do not think the response has been perfect, but that the measures in place at the moment are necessary and, if anything, ought to be tighter, with 46% saying they think Trump is “not taking the outbreak seriously enough.” Only a quarter of the country views our current response as an overreaction, and those people are among the most likely to take cues from Trump about what we should and shouldn’t do.
Thankfully, this weekend Trump backed off his initial comments that he had hoped to reopen the economy by Easter, instead allowing his health experts to guide him to a later April 30 target and with the important caveat that the data would guide his future decisions. This is absolutely right. A loosening of lockdown measures will give the disease more opportunity to spread, reach new communities, and further exhaust our health system. Loosening too much too soon can wipe out any progress that has been made in these last few weeks, which will only begin showing up in a leveling off of numbers weeks down the road.
The pain Americans are feeling now will only intensify during this time, as people’s savings begin to dwindle, as they become more exasperated with the mental toll of the changes to daily life, and as the costs to us all become greater and greater.
These sacrifices should not be minimized. Instead, they should be honored — honored by making sure they were truly worth it.
