In the stupid wars between Team Open Everything Up Yesterday (which, in practice, seems to have few adherents) and Team Stay Locked Down Until All Vital Services Are Closed And Everyone Dies Of Starvation Or Cholera, it seems to me the message needs to be something like:
Once containment was no longer possible, we switched to mitigation. That meant "flattening the curve" to prevent overloading our hospitals and (hopefully) allowing them to treat patients not infected with COVID-19. We have largely achieved that.
However, we can't stay locked down forever. The economy is the means by which we survive. The plan from Team Lockdown appears to keep it throttled indefinitely until ... what? Until we get a vaccine? What if we never get one? What if it takes four years (a typical vaccine development-to-deployment timespan)? What if it takes a decade? What is our goal then? In that light, indefinite shutdown is a demand for impoverishment if not outright death. We cannot print money forever without consequences. As the slow-motion closures of the meatpacking industry show, there are real and even mortal threats to society if the *only* weapon in our arsenal is the shutdown.
Simply put, we have to stay open, in some wise. Cellphone data makes it clear that people are leaving home in large numbers. Not all will participate with a reopening, even if given the clearance to do so. Restaurants particularly will be brutalized by the coming months: it is unlikely people will patronize them as they did before, and with restaurant margins being so thin to begin with, a reduction to half or third capacity is simply business failure by another name. We could say much the same of many other personal services requiring close contact (nail salons, hair salons, massage parlors, etc.).
There will be deaths. We must be frank on this point. And, we cannot dismiss them lightly, as do the people who say, "COVID-19 kills fewer people than heart disease did last year (and is unlikely to reach that total), so why are we so concerned about it?" It has already killed nearly as many people as suicide in all of 2019 last year*. Should we take these presumptive (but unknown) deaths more seriously because of that?
Parting thoughts:
- Everyone should wear masks in public, no exceptions. If you're asthmatic and can't wear one, you're already in a high-risk group for COVID-19 complications and shouldn't be in public to begin with.
- Keep the most vulnerable quarantined.
* 47,173 deaths by suicide as of 2020-05-09 from the CDC website, versus 47,128 from COVID-19 (provisional).
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