No one in Washington wants to say the thing that at least some people have already figured out, and that’s that the only way through the coronavirus pandemic is, well, through it.
For public officials, that means allowing the economy to completely reopen, with the exception of certain hot spots such as New York, New Jersey, parts of California, and a few other cities so as not to overwhelm healthcare providers.
We’re still waiting for a reliable treatment for COVID-19 (and hopefully, at some point, a proven vaccine), but the public policy portion of grappling with the spread of the virus on a national scale is more or less finished. State and local governments, perhaps with some assistance from the federal level, still have a role to play in mitigating financial hardship, but by and large, the responsibility for overcoming the pandemic is going to rest on the shoulders of individuals.
Everyone will have to decide for themselves the level of risk they are willing and able to take in getting back to work and assisting in the restoration of the greatly wounded economy.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said essentially that late last month. At a press briefing on March 28, she acknowledged the “tremendous job” that her state’s citizens were doing to cope with the virus and limit its spread, but she said, however, that it’s “the people themselves that are primarily responsible for their safety.” They’re the ones, she said, who are “free to exercise their rights to work, worship, and to play or to stay at home and to conduct social distancing.”
True. The national implementation of social distancing appears to have played a role in keeping the coronavirus at bay and easing up the crush on our healthcare system caused by an influx of infected patients. But now that we’ve seen the “flattening over the curve,” it’s time to reassess and move further toward reopening the economy — lest we find ourselves in a permanent state of paralysis and unlimited welfare that will assuredly decimate the country.
The only way to do that is by facing the inevitable: There is no stopping the spread of the virus. Early indications, in fact, suggest that far more people than we realize likely contracted it, perhaps without ever feeling any illness, and then recovered.
There is absolutely no sign from the government that mass testing and tracing of individuals exposed to anyone who’s been infected is a realistic goal. There are simply too many people living in the United States and too many laws that would need to be passed, stripping everyone of an untold number of freedoms.
And yet scientists from Yale University are saying things in the pages of the New York Times such as, “If we can’t prevent the spread of COVID-19, the economy will not be able to reopen.”
Stopping the spread of a freak virus that afflicts the vast majority of people with flu-like symptoms before normal recovery was never the goal, and it’s too late to pretend that it can be.
We’re perpetually scolded to “listen to the experts” on the coronavirus. Well, here’s one: “There will never be a perfect amount of protection. It’s a personal risk assessment. Everybody has to decide, person by person, what risk they’re willing to tolerate.”
That’s a quote in the Associated Press from Joshua Santarpia, a microbiology expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who specializes in the transmission of viruses in aerosols.
He’s right.
