Health, Then Business

It appears that American discourse regarding the pandemic has broken into two sides, one of which believes that public health is a priority and one that believes that the economy is a priority.

In reality, all of us want both of those things. None of us want to die, or want our neighbors to die, or our families, and none of us want to be evicted, to lose our jobs, to go hungry. It isn't really a binary choice. We have always had pretty good levels of both health and prosperity, well the distribution of each could be improved but that is not the question right now. The US has not led the world in healthcare but we have mostly managed to get by, and our prosperity is mostly controlled by a handful of billionaire oligarchs but most people have been able to find a job and a place to live.

Everyone wants to reopen the economy. We want kids to get back to school, workers to get back to their jobs, we want to produce and consume like normal. We want to go to a game or a concert and socialize with friends and strangers. And many countries around the world have recovered economically from the pandemic and are living pretty normally, with perhaps occasional emergency restrictions. Reopening the economy is entirely possible, an entirely reasonable thing to hope for and expect. Honestly, it is shameful that we have not reopened by now.

But you cannot open the economy while a highly contagious, deadly virus is spreading through human contact. Maybe most people don't die from it, but lots do, and there seem to be long-term health consequences of COVID-19 infection. Even if one person survives or has a mild case, they can pass the virus to someone else who will die.

Good example right now, an August 7th wedding in Maine and now, a month later, 147 cases of COVID-19 are tied to this one event. Three people have died -- and none of the three were people who attended the wedding. Cases have spread to a nursing home and a prison, both more than 100 miles away from the venue. The wedding reception at the Big Moose Inn had 65 people, and at least one of them was a coronavirus carrier.

Without getting into details, these kinds of examples, which are numerous, can be combined with the observation of many other countries that have controlled their epidemics, to lead to one simple and obvious conclusion: we need to beat the pandemic before we can restore the economy. It is simply a matter of doing them in the right order: public health, then the economy. The reverse is literally, logically and practically, impossible.

We know what needs to be done, it is not a secret and not even that hard, but this requires everybody in the country contributing at the same time. People need to wear masks, they cannot congregate indoors, they should maintain social distance, sick people should be isolated and exposed people should be quarantined. Nonessential businesses, sporting events, concerts, and crowds should be shut down. Hand-off deliveries of market products, work-from-home where possible. We know the drill, we just need to implement it nationwide. With these precautions we can get the virus prevalence down to a level where we can resume normal living and open up a normal economy. You just can't have a way of life where going to work or shopping for groceries is a matter of risking your life. That is simply suicidal. We cannot reopen the economy before we have control of the virus.

We cannot practice these restrictions if we fear we will lose our homes, our jobs, and our future. And that means that the government -- the federal government -- needs to do some of the things that other countries have done. Clear guidelines need to be publicized and enforced, and businesses need to be subsidized so they can keep their payroll going even if their employees are huddled in their homes. Testing needs to be ramped up, and treatment needs to be available to everyone who needs it. This is not a time to be cheap, and not a time for billionaires and corporations to siphon more money out of the public's treasury.

Health experts think that six weeks of this kind of lockdown might be sufficient to get the virus under control. I would read that as eight weeks. We are now eight months into this pandemic, where the citizens initially thought that the government would manage it in the first few weeks and months and that did not happen. Our next opportunity to get on top of the pandemic is late January, about five months from now. By that time we will be near a half million Americans dead, and hopefully a new administration will issue strict and inflexible orders. People will groan and complain, but we can practice some discipline for two more months, and by next spring things can be back to near-normal again.

Again, the simple fact: the economy cannot restart until the pandemic is controlled.