This chart from the Washington Post suggests that on a national level we are flattening the curve. New daily cases of the Coronavirus are trending down. We have bought ourselves five minutes of air, nothing more. The virus is not going away. It will come back with a vengeance if we do not use our five minutes wisely.
Make no mistake, the impact of the Coronavirus to-date is staggering. More than 80,000 dead and projections are that we will pass 100,000 dead in early June. For those people and their families, the virus is far more than an inconvenience or temporary disruption; it is life altering; it is life taking. The lives we have saved by closing businesses and staying home matter. We must not lose sight of this.
At the same time, millions are out of work and reports are emerging that businesses are closing for good. One estimate suggests that over 100,000 businesses have already closed for good. The pain and loss for these people and these business owners is real, too. And, the depth and severity of these economic impacts are not likely to be understood for months, if not years, to come. There will be hardship and suffering even for those not directly infected by the virus. The urge to start getting back to normal, to reopen our economies, is strong and we owe it to those who are sacrificing economically to find a way to reopen to the greatest extent possible and as soon as possible.
The lessons of this chart are simple. The first part shows that if unchecked, the virus will spread rapidly and it will cause great harm. The second part shows that if we take the right measures, we can slow the virus’s spread and minimize the loss of life. Shutting things down and staying home is working. Unfortunately, until we have a widely distributed vaccine (or perhaps some form of effective anti-viral treatment), our options to slow the virus are limited, but not zero.
Although our current tactics are working, it is not realistic to be shut down indefinitely. So, what we do with the five minutes of air that our shut-downs have bought us matters. Whether we turn those five minutes into hours depends on what our government does to manage the situation. Will they put efforts on developing plans, solutions, and resources to manage the spread of the virus on a sustained basis? Or, will they whipsaw us by pursuing haphazard policies of opening-closing-reopening our economies? I fear it will be the latter, but know that we can do better.
The coronavirus will not just go away. We will not get past this moment with ad hoc responses to outbreaks as they arise. The markets will not solve this problem or eliminate this threat. We do not leave our nation’s defense to the markets nor to local governments. We do not leave homeland security to the markets nor to local law enforcement. Just as we have done for these threats, we must have a national response that includes well developed strategies and initiatives to manage the virus. We must tackle the problem on multiple fronts including finding a vaccine, improving treatments, developing rapid testing and screening, establishing contact tracing, creating solutions to keep critical businesses like food processing operations open, and enabling social distancing while at the same time reopening businesses. We can find ways to make all of these a reality; we can find a new normal, but only if we work together as a nation and if we put our best minds to it.
Unfortunately, there are few signs that our government is not squandering our five minutes of air, which means we all remain at great risk of being the next to sacrifice a loved one, a business, or job to this pandemic. We must demand more from our elected leaders. Failure is not an option.
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