At a recent White House Coronavirus briefing Donald Trump stated, “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. America will, again, and soon, be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. Lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
When asked if his administration’s medical experts agreed with that proposal, Trump said: “If it were up to the doctors they may say, ‘Let’s keep it shut down, let’s shut down the entire world,’ because again, you’re up to almost 150 countries, so let’s shut down the entire world. And when we shut it down, that’d be wonderful, and let’s keep it shut for a couple of years,’ you know we can’t do that.” Let me translate what Trump said for you, “No, of course the doctors don’t agree”.
Trump is not the only conservative voicing the opinion that less vulnerable younger people should be allowed to go back to work as normal so that the economy can recover. However, it is obvious in Trump’s case he is more concerned about what the shutdown of the economy is doing to his election chances. He has long bragged that the strong economy was his doing. In fact, with his job approval numbers in the low 40’s, it was about the only factor propping up his chances of reelection.
One of the problems with that solution of “opening up the county’s economy again” is that for some reason here in the United States more young people are being seriously sickened by the virus than was evident in other countries. According to CDC data of the earliest case of the virus in this country, while people over the age of 70 are more likely to die from the disease, 38% of the patients hospitalized were between 20 and 54. Nearly half of those who required intensive care were under the age of 65.
It is not understood why these statistics vary from those of counties hit early on by the virus. Maybe younger people in this country are not as healthy as those in China or Japan. Regardless, if these statistics are representative of the population as a whole, if restrictions are lowered and young people go back to work, a large number of them are going be occupying hospital and intensive care beds which are predicted to be in grossly inadequate supply to handle this pandemic.
It is probably even more important to understand why restrictions on close human interaction are being put in place in the first place. Even if younger people were totally or at least partially immune to the symptoms of the virus, they certainly can contract the disease and pass it on to others. The more they have physical contact with other people the quicker that will happen. As more and more of the younger people contract the virus, the possibility that they will infect the more vulnerable older population increases exponentially.
Let’s remember that restrictions on human interaction are not only designed to eventually stop the spread of the virus completely, that’s for later. The immediate need is to “flatten the curve”, to slow the spread of the virus so our medical facilities and their doctors and nurses who staff them are not overrun with patients to the point that people are dying needlessly because they couldn’t get the medical treatment they need.
To put this into perspective, let’s say we decide that quickly restoring the economy (and Trump’s chances of being reelected) is our top priority. We could achieve that very simply. All we have to do is allow and encourage everyone to go back to work and carry on their lives as if the coronavirus doesn’t exist. The virus would spread rapidly within our population; both the young and eventually the vulnerable would get sick or contract the virus with few or no symptoms. Within a month to six weeks those who got sick and recovered will have rejoined those relatively unaffected in the work force. The economy would be humming again.
The only downside would be that most of our medical facilities would have been overrun with patients. A number of the medical professionals staffing those facilities would contract the virus due to the lack of adequate protective equipment; that would only exacerbate the situation. The lack of hospital and intensive care beds, ventilators and other essential medical equipment would force doctors to decide who would get lifesaving medical treatment and who would not. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people would die who otherwise would have lived had the restrictions been left in place and observed.
However, let’s be clear, even if strict restrictions are put and kept in place as long as necessary to try to flatten the curve of virus spread, the scenario described above is still possible, even likely in some locations in our country that were hardest hit early on. In those locations the horse was probably already out of the barn before we tried to close the barn door. All we can do now in those locations is to try to keep the situation from getting much worse by keeping the restrictions in place as long as necessary. For the rest of our country we might still have a chance to keep that worst case scenario from becoming reality.
Meanwhile what else should we have expected from the Trump administration which dismantled the provisions put in place by the Bush and Obama administrations to try to identify and stop new viruses from becoming an epidemic or pandemic well before this coronavirus first appeared in China. What else should we have expected from a man who was briefed daily by his intelligence organizations that this novel virus represented a serious national security threat to our country, yet did nothing to prepare us for the advent of the virus on our shores while downplaying the seriousness of the situation and calling it a Democratic hoax.
Every day the situation is getting exponentially worse, both on the medical and economic fronts. The number of new cases and deaths are doubling every few days despite the restrictions being put in place. I just learned that in the last week alone almost three million Americans applied for unemployment insurance. The hardest hit were the hotel and travel industries. Regardless of what comes out of the White House, most people are not going to travel unnecessarily under these circumstances.
Maybe the events of the next few weeks will convince Trump that it would not be in his selfish self interest to proceed to try to open up the economy again and encourage everyone to go back to work, but don’t count on it. He hates to admit that he was wrong. And a true narcissist like Trump can always be depended on to put his welfare above everything else. Think of how difficult it would be for someone “perfect” like Trump to be thrown out of the most important in the country because the majority of the people no longer believed he was capable of handling the job.
Trump being Trump, chances are that we are going to have to rely on our governors, local governments, corporate leaders, and everyday people to make the hard choices that the President of the United States can not bring himself to make. National leadership is generally regarded as absolutely essential in the midst of a crisis, but we are going to have to prove as a people that it is not absolutely necessary to prevail in this situation until this danger to our country can be removed from office.
Cajun 3/27/2020