Experience over hope

If second marriage is “the triumph of hope over experience,” then the COVID-19 crisis has proved to be the triumph of experience over hope. For much of March and April, there was broad agreement among pundits, wonks and public health researchers that the United States needed to “cancel everything,” as Yascha Mounk put it in The Atlantic. Initially, the idea was to “flatten the curve,” spreading out the number of cases over time so that hospitals never got overwhelmed. But as death rates in Italy and Spain reached horrifying levels, the consensus began shifting toward a tougher goal.

Instead of trying to manage the pace of infections, some of those experts started talking about limiting the total number of cases. They wanted to use lockdowns to reduce infections to something like the low levels seen in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong — and then keep them down with the kind of aggressive programs those countries use to keep their economies open without triggering an epidemic.

That would mean a combination of hygiene measures in public spaces (masks, temperature checks, capacity reductions and profligate use of hand sanitizer) and a robust public health operation. Those health efforts would involve testing widely to identify new cases, tracing an infected person’s contacts over the preceding weeks, and isolating those infected and exposed through some combination of in-home or central quarantine.

For about a month, I was hopeful that we could achieve a “South Korea solution.” Unfortunately, it’s become clear that we’ve failed. The metric set early on for ending lockdowns — 14 days of declining caseloads — was probably not aggressive enough to make a test/trace/isolate strategy viable in a country with such widespread outbreaks. But that’s moot, anyway, as states have begun opening up without hitting even that weak target or having built the kind of public health tools needed to hunt the virus to extinction.

I should have predicted this. I am a libertarian, and libertarians expect large government efforts to fail. I have written previously about the peculiar inability of American governmental institutions to do things that seem to work abroad. Obviously, it’s possible for a government to keep COVID-19 at bay, if not entirely under control. But I allowed my hope to overwhelm my natural skepticism.

Mine aren’t the only hopes dashed: Experience has triumphed over hope almost everywhere. Look again at the countries widely applauded for preventing an epidemic despite trade with China that should have seeded many outbreaks. What do Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong have in common? They are close to China, and they lived through the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s.

The countries that survived SARS had a playbook ready to haul out when the next epidemic hit. The countries that SARS bypassed also relied on experience, in a way, but that experience had taught them to hope that pandemics were something peculiar to Asia or Africa or other places where Everything Is Different. Running that playbook against this coronavirus turned out to be disastrous.

To be fair, for all the problems with U.S. institutions, America’s outbreak thus far hasn’t been unusually bad. With about 250 deaths per million citizens, we’re solidly in the middle of the pack. The United States is underperforming Germany and Canada but roughly on par with Switzerland, and we’re doing significantly better than France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Britain.

However, it’s not quite an excuse to say that everyone is bad at learning from the experience of others and that our country had a lot of company in this particular cognitive error. For there are countries that learned from the experience of others, notably Germany. Like us, Germany is large and rich and has a bustling trade with China. Moreover, Germany’s political framework also gives local governments significant autonomy. Yet Germany’s death rate is only about a third of ours, and declining, while the United States seems stuck on a high plateau.

In fact, death rates are declining sharply in most of the countries I mentioned, except for Canada and us. And here is America’s real problem with hope over experience: Many places are rushing to reopen without having done the work to control the disease. It’s understandable if a country that hasn’t weathered a serious pandemic in a century needed to learn what to do from hard experience. But it’s starting to look like we still haven’t, and won’t, unless that experience gets harder still.