One Size Fits All — Not
TIME for reopening? Let’s reframe the question. Time for what to reopen? With what precautions? In which states and counties? And who really decides? Governors, mayors, the president? Business owners or consumers?
Any effort to address questions yields the lesson that one-size-fitsall answers are ill-suited for a nation of 329 million people, half in million-plus metropolitan areas and the other half thinly spread out over a continent-sized landmass.
Nonetheless, much of the public debate assumes, Twitter-style, that there is just one decision to be made, presumably by President Trump. And partisan affiliation shapes many Americans’ responses.
Democrats, usually boastful of respecting alternative lifestyles, tend to insist that lockdowns stay in place. Republicans, sometimes depicted as deferential to traditional authority, tend to favor reopening.
Both sides operate from a position of massive and unavoidable ignorance. So do even the most respected experts. Epidemiologists’ projections of mass deaths have been far off; speculation about modes of virus transmission has been largely discredited; ventilators, initially considered vital, now seem ill-suited to the virus.
Lockdowns ordered by state governors and encouraged by Trump were premised on a need to avoid overwhelming hospitals and caregivers. But outside New York City, hospitals are half-empty and caregivers are being laid off.
They’ve joined the 22 million who had filed for unemployment by mid-April — Great Depression levels. Low-skill workers, whose wages have finally been rising more than average in the Trump years, have been hit hardest.
Polling shows majorities favor continued restrictions on reopening, especially if the question mentions the possibility of a second wave of infection. But there is also increasing evidence of people going out in public and chafing at restrictions.
The partisan tilt of responses reflects the incidence of the virus. It has struck hardest in New York and, though much less, in other large metro areas, and those able to continue working for pay tend to be white college graduates: mostly Democratic voters. Outside million-plus metros, it has caused few deaths, and those losing paychecks tend to be non-college grads: mostly Republican voters.
One-half of US coronavirus deaths have been in New York and New Jersey. Nearly a third have been in New York City, which, perhaps not coincidentally, has more than half of the nation’s rail-transit riders. In contrast, only 2 percent of US deaths have been in Florida, whose lockdown was less stringent and imposed later but whose concentration was put on isolating the elderly.
COVID-19 has primarily killed the elderly, mostly those with aggravating medical conditions. For children, it’s been no more deadly than the seasonal flu. This points toward reopening schools and colleges and universities. As Purdue University
President Mitch Daniels points out, COVID-19 “poses close to zero lethal threat” to young people.
It points toward Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ policy of isolating and providing masks for senior citizens, and away from New York Gov. Cuomo’s policy of sending COVID-19-infected patients back to nursing homes.
And COVID-19 isn’t the only threat to American lives. As Heather Mac Donald points out in The Spectator, “Lives are being lost to the overreaction,” including those of cardiac and cancer patients who have been avoiding hospitals, needed tests, chemotherapy and organ transplants. Job losses have probably led to suicides and opioid abuse.
No one knows, or can know, how high these losses are. Weighing the risks of the virus and the lockdown is a job for private-sector leaders and elected officials.
Officials — plural. Trump detractors have suddenly come to appreciate that the Constitution leaves the police power to impose quarantines and lockdowns in the hands of state governors, not the federal government.
Cuomo, facing a grim situation in New York, seems unready to reopen. DeSantis in Florida and Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, both with more people and far fewer COVID-19 deaths than New York, are moving ahead to launch a reopening.
The final say, however, goes to the American people. They may avoid restaurants but throng to churches and gyms, weighing risks against rewards. Sensible people will presumably factor in experts’ recommendations. But in a self-governing republic, they’re likely to come to their own conclusions.