“The trouble with not having a
goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never
score.” — Bill Copeland
“Without goals, and plans to
reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.” —
Fitzhugh Dodson
The United States has not articulated a goal for dealing
with the coronavirus that leads to COVID-19. Without clarity, we continue to mis-allocate
and squander scarce resources and to sow distrust with conflicting information.
In short, we will fail to reach our objective if we continue as a ship under
full sail with no destination or compass.
The medical profession has proposed that our goal must be to
flatten the curve of infection and provide extra resources so that our
healthcare providers are not overwhelmed by the disease. The Trump
administration has never accepted this objective.
Had that been the aim, the administration would have tried
to slow contagion to buy time and use that respite to prepare for the coming tsunami
of illness. It’s not that they didn’t know what to expect. Trump announced on January
31 that he was instituting some travel restrictions on individuals arriving from
China. We won’t argue here whether the restrictions were too early or too late,
too onerous or too lax. By the end of January, health officials knew the problem
was serious enough to recommend restricting travel and Trump did.
In a globally connected world, no one could imagine that
such restrictions would allow the U.S. to avoid contamination. By then, we already
had several cases. What it could buy was time to prepare, time to buy some insurance.
The thing about insurance is that you pay the premium and then hope like heck
you never have to file a claim. We chose instead to wish for the best and not
pay the insurance premium.
We should have ramped up production of masks. (One night of
news from China showed that we’d need them.) By the end of January, we knew
this disease required ventilators beyond our capacity. We should have ramped up
production and storage. China was already building two additional hospitals Why
weren’t we developing plans for providing more beds? So states and local
government could react quickly when novel coronavirus made its appearance, we could
have accelerated production of test kits and pre-distributed some portion to
state health departments. We could have developed communication policies to
educate residents on the danger, creating a language of short-term sacrifice
for long-term benefit. I have seen no evidence we did anything of the sort.
The travel restrictions and decent luck bought us a month,
and we pissed it away celebrating what a fine job we were doing and watching the
DOW reach record highs.
In January and February, we did not have a goal to be
prepared to control the novel coronavirus. Trump, on the campaign trail for
re-election, dismissed any concerns over a pandemic and promoted his running of
the economy: how low unemployment was, how high the stock market was.
Does that mean keeping our economy strong is the unstated goal?
For some, it is. Florida’s governor refused to close beaches during Spring
Break (although now he wants anyone visiting Florida from New York to
self-quarantine for fourteen days!). Just this week, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick
suggested that grandparents should willingly risk death by COVID-19 “in
exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and
grandchildren.” Obviously, healthcare is not something Patrick values as American.
He wants us to “get back to work . . .get back to living . . .and those of us who
are seventy-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.”
This idea that what Americans value most is commerce is not a
recent one. Calvin Coolidge said in a 1925 address to the American Society of
Newspaper Editors that “The chief business of the American people is business.
They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and
prospering in the world.”[i]
The question of the economic cost of saving lives is not
abstract. We’d probably all agree that we wouldn’t send most people home for
two weeks or longer to save one individual life. And we’d probably agree that if
100 million Americans would die because we didn’t shutter our economy, we close
it down and count the bargain cheap. Easy answers at the extremes don’t
eliminate tough choices in the middle.
That’s where having stated goals is useful. As many people have
noted, we drive automobiles even though their use causes thousands of deaths
and disabilities a year. Over time, Congress felt pressured and passed laws to
make vehicles safer, but the convenience and economic advantages of automobile
travel continue to be more important to us than the human toll of death and
dismemberment autos cause.
With COVID-19, we have no shared vision of the tradeoff between
economic well-being and increased mortality. If we agree that the only aim is
to flatten the curve, we should take the approach of China and South Korea,
test everyone and lock down the population. The hodge-podge of solutions at
state and local levels when travel continues between areas can defeat even the
best of intentions. Only national restrictions will work and only the federal government
may do that. We’ve made shared sacrifices in times of war, but it’s important for
leaders to demonstrate understanding. It does not help to propose social
distancing and then see the President gather his team in close proximity for
his daily update.
Despite Trump declaring himself a “wartime president” he has
been ambivalent about calling for shared sacrifice and defining what that sacrifice
must be. He declares that we will secure “total victory” over the virus without
defining a path to success. Had he set clear objectives, Congress would have shared
focus for its third try at bailing out portions of the economy, as it did with
its first two slices at the pie. Without it, politicians (and their supporters)
have retreated to their political tribal bunkers, squabbling over the same
issues: corporations or people, broad-brush solutions or targeted remedies.
Dithering as a strategy in the face of a crisis is a recipe
for disaster, and I fear we shall enjoy its bitter fruit. We cannot catch a
time-machine and redo the past; we can only change the present and its effect
on the future. I believe Americans will pull together if given a clear understanding
of their required sacrifices and a believable assurance that the government will
mitigate the damage as much as it can. Only one person has the positional power
to make this happen.
President Trump must tell us his intentions. In clear,
direct, unambiguous language, he must detail the goals he wants us to achieve.
In November, voters can decide the wisdom of his proposed course and either
reward him with four more years or vote him out of office.
[i] https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2019/01/when-a-quote-is-not-exactly-a-quote-the-business-of-america-is-business-edition/
James
M. Jackson authors the Seamus McCree series. Full of mystery and suspense,
these thrillers explore financial crimes, family relationships, and what
happens when they mix. False Bottom,
the sixth and most recent novel in the series is set in the Boston
area. You can sign
up for his newsletter and find more information about Jim
and his books at https://jamesmjackson.com.
Amen
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