On Monday, the Washington Examiner ran an editorial making the point that we need to lay the groundwork for moving beyond the current lockdown strategy in a responsible way at the appropriate time. But President Trump, unfortunately, has been signaling in recent days that he is going to reevaluate current strategy once the current 15-day period of aggressive social distancing guidance ends next week. This would be a grave mistake.
As the editorial argued, the current level of shutdown is unsustainable — for businesses, individuals, families, and kids. We can hope, but we cannot count on a medical breakthrough. A vaccine is at least 18 months away, but it would probably take longer for one to be widely available. We cannot expect the country to be shut down for that period of time. It would kill otherwise healthy businesses and otherwise destroy lives.
However, right now, we’re in the rapid spread phase of the virus. New York City’s hospitals are on the brink of collapse. Other cities are in danger of going down the same path. Because the nation was caught off guard by this thing, we’ve had to move to aggressive social distancing as a last resort.
There are certain strategies that we could eventually employ to return to some semblance of normal life while limiting the spread of the virus. One would be to have everybody wear masks whenever they go out. Another would be to follow the South Korean model of widespread testing coupled with isolating cases and tracking down their close contacts.
But the United States is not in a position to do either at the moment. There is a shortage of masks among medical personnel, so public health officials certainly cannot issue guidance that everybody in the country should be wearing masks on a regular basis. And the strategy pursued by South Korea would provide a lot of technology that we don’t have, as well as require Americans to give up some degree of privacy.
As Avik Roy explains, not only does Korea test more than the U.S., “Korea takes the GPS data from an infected patient’s phone and notifies everyone who was physically near that patient of that fact.” If we’re unwilling to give up that level of privacy, then we’d need to test even more widely than they do.
Trump is right in the sense that we cannot sustain the current state of affairs and just sit around for the next few years waiting for a vaccine. But it would be an egregious error for him to change federal guidance and lean on state and local governments to prematurely open things up at a time when the virus is spreading rapidly and is nowhere near its peak.
So what he should do, instead of saying that he’s going to open things up, is say that his administration will be moving on a parallel track to put the system in place so that we can return to some semblance of life as soon as possible, and in a responsible well-thought-out way.
Reopening prematurely will not only make the virus spread more rapidly, but it also wouldn’t solve the economic problems. With bodies piling up, regardless of government guidance, people won’t suddenly be eager to start flying on airplanes and going out to bars and restaurants again. Some might, but business will still be down considerably. Just last week, Trump seemed to finally get that there was no way to help the economy and markets without beating the virus. “The best thing I can do for the stock market is we have to get through this crisis,” Trump said just eight days ago. “That’s what I can do. That’s the best thing we can do. That’s what I think about.”
We are in one of the most difficult periods in U.S. history, where we’re faced with a brutal trade-off between severe economic pain or an unconscionable number of dead Americans. Those arguing in favor of the lockdown strategy have to recognize the legitimate concerns of people who are eager for the country to reopen. No government action is going to make up for all of the lost paychecks or rebuild the recently thriving and perfectly healthy businesses that are being destroyed by the response to this pandemic. But just stepping back and letting the disease run its course, a strategy no other nation that has gotten control of the virus has pursued, could end up costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives without stopping the economic devastation.
Everybody needs to come together and focus on a strategy that allows us to start easing things up in a responsible way once we’re (hopefully) on the other side of the hump. Offer the population some path to return to daily life and it will be much easier to get buy-in for the current necessary restrictions.
