OK folks. So now that we Americans are pariahs, and can’t travel anywhere in the world, and our economy is completely crippled, are we finally going to get real about this and stop talking about opening schools and opening this and opening that, and instead finally take care of it by shutting down NATIONALLY for four weeks, mandating masks NATIONALLY, and doing serious contact tracing NATIONALLY after the shut down like every other country that has managed this effectively?
Just wake me up when we as a nation are ready to come out of our stupor, and get serious about ending this.
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Oh, and by the way, Dr. Redfield should resign in disgrace from the CDC for suggesting that he would be comfortable with his grandchildren going to school in the middle of a spike like this. (Nice that he has such concern for all of the people who work in the schools.)
Why we will never get a NATIONAL response from the COVIDIOT?
SELFISHNESS. STAGGERING SELFISHNESS.
Not just from the EVIL MONSTER. But from his selfish “don’t want to inconvenience” myself sycophantic enablers who mistake inconvenience for oppression when they say: “I will let you die rather than wear a mask.”
Or : “If my cell phone needs a charge, I’ll unplug your life support.”
MADNESS!
I’m profoundly uncomfortable with this line of criticism because I fear it obscures a terrible reality with a barrage of personal insults (“SELFISHNESS. STAGGERING SELFISHNESS“, “EVIL MONSTER”). It isn’t that I don’t feel the same. It is because I fear they miss the point.
So far as I can tell, Donald Trump and the GOP are actively working to harm the nation. This doesn’t seem like selfishness or evil — it instead seems like following orders.
With Donald Trump and GOP, all roads lead to Vladimir Putin.
That, and I still don’t think a national one-size-fits-all makes sense.
It made sense a few weeks ago. The choice to close or reopen should never have been left up to states and local officials to begin with.
Krugman goes into depth how Italy, a country worse off than the US economically and starkly divided regionally and politically, is far better off now than we are.
The key difference is their safety net was stronger, their national lockdown was stricter, and it was truly national. Southern Italy never experienced a Covid wave, but it was shut down both to protect it from Northern Italy and ensure it did not on its own become a vector for the spread. What we saw in the US is that the states with low cases to begin with now have high cases and vice versa. It’s whack a mole, rather than sealing the country off from the virus and hot zones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/opinion/us-italy-coronavirus.html
I’m not sure that reality is that clear-cut.
There is strong evidence that the pandemic takes a certain amount of time to get from its origin to somewhere far removed. The increase that we now see in the southeast and southwest might well have happened anyway.
I’m reminded of the decade or so that Rudy Giuliani and his ilk proclaimed “Fix Broken Windows” as model police behavior because they claimed it stopped the violent crime wave in New York City.
It turned out that the actual cause was the removal of lead from gasoline 15 years earlier. The reduction in violent crime was observed in cities across America, including those that made no change in police behavior at all.
I agree that the nationwide lockdown was our only tool. I think that tool was about as effective in the northeast as it was in Germany or Italy.
This article helpfully lays out the 3 options. Keep doing what we are doing and let more people die and more uncertainty linger in the economy. Do a renewed round of national shutdown for 4-6 weeks, stricter than the first, until cases drop below the community spread threshold, or whack a mole. Isolate hot zones and protect people from interacting with people coming from them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/21/toll-covid-19-worsens-us-has-three-options/
I’m contemplating a full diary along these lines, perhaps over the weekend.
My starting point is to compare how America balances risk and reward of military service during wartime to how America balances risk and reward of education and liberty during a pandemic.
A key factor in that comparison is the way that the compulsory draft of the 1960s impacted minorities and the poor and to observe how quickly the Vietnam war ended after the imposition of the 1972 draft lottery caused middle-class young men to start coming home in boxes or without limbs.
A key question that the piece you cited doesn’t address is what, if anything, will be different a year or five years from now.
There is growing evidence that COVID-19 immunity is shortlived (30-90 days). That means that even if a vaccine is developed, boosters will be required either every quarter or even every month.
The long and short of it is that COVID-19 will be with us for the foreseeable future. I think that rules out a nationwide shutdown as a viable plan.
Simplistic solutions and binary choices are not going to work — we can and must do better than that.
I’ve long thought that a focus on hotspots should have been our first strategy. From what I’ve read that would have contained the vast majority of cases.
I thought you had agreed in the past that based on the data one-size-fits-all makes no sense.
I’ve said all along that we desperately need a data-driven approach to this pandemic. That is only possible if and when there is data to drive the approach.
The one-size-fits-all tool that we applied earlier this year was the only option, because we had no data.
The absolutely appalling reality — and the KEY difference between America or the northeast and Germany is that Germany very quickly developed the data needed to guide strategy.
The US, on the other hand, is explicitly and intentionally going in the opposite direction. The federal government interfered with the ability of states to get tests. The federal government silenced scientists, punished them for sharing their data, and is even now doing all in its power to block the availability of COVID data.
We have a LITTLE BIT more data in the northeast than we had in early April. There is every indication that we’re losing even that — the White House has, for example, ordered hospitals nationwide to stop sending data to the CDC. That data is instead being sent to systems under the control of political appointees of the White House.
We still have no data, and so a one-size-fits-all approach is still pretty much the only option.
I assume states could ask/require that hospitals send data to them. They all have Departments of Public Health.
I’m not sure that one state can demand data from another. More importantly, it is vital that the data be available outside of government.
The most reliable aggregators and curators of data are outside of government — for the same reason that audits of accounting records are most reliable when done by outsiders.
I wasn’t thinking about trying to get data from each other, but from their own hospitals, if the CDC is no longer doing it at the federal level. This would mean unfortunate disparities in the efforts the various states took to collect and distribute such data, but still better than nothing.
The absence of shared data makes crucial planning decisions impossible.
It means that the hospitals in each state would have to invest in resources to have spare capacity to handle whatever surge happens in that state — yet when those surges happen, they will hit only a few states at a time. With shared data, states from quiet regions could send resources to state having a crisis. Without shared data, America would waste billions of dollars building thousands of respirators that would then sit unused in warehouses most of the time.
We’ve already learned this lesson. When hurricanes devastate one region, power companies from across America send crews to repair damage. The free and public accessibility of real-time weather data is absolutely crucial for public and private supply-chain management. That’s why Home Depot stores in New England generally have ample supplies of ice-melt in winter, while Home Depot stores in the southeast coastal regions have ample supplies of plywood (for storm preparation).
America discarded the Articles of Confederation because we learned the hard way that certain things MUST be provided by the federal government. The data we’re talking about is one of those things.
Absolutely, but if the CDC can’t/won’t then if the states do I assume they post the data publicly and other states can find out what’s going on.
This is not what Fred said. Fred did not say Trump was selfish (by the way, that is a given to any rational observer).
What he said was that THE AMERICAN PEOPLE are selfish.
That being said, I prefer your point: all roads lead to Putin.