Plan for long haul in this very surreal coronavirus crisis
The Bay Area this past week set the national standard for home sheltering to slow the rapid increase of coronavirus cases. With days, the rest of California and the states of New York, Illinois, Connecticut and New Jersey followed suit.
Now, settle in for the long haul.
Unlike Monday’s order from Bay Area health officials that was set to last 22 days, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide directive issued Thursday night for all of California has no end date. He’s just being realistic. We don’t know how long this surreal coronavirus crisis will last.
The reality is that the state and nation are looking at a health threat not of weeks but of months, perhaps a year or more. We’re looking at a scenario of 1 million or more U.S. deaths unless we take serious isolation actions.
That’s why we’re huddled in our homes with our spouses, partners, kids, housemates and, in some cases, our parents. We’re doing it for them. We’re doing it for our neighbors, and everyone else across the Bay Area, the state, the nation and the world.
We must slow the spread of COVID-19.
We don’t know how many cases we already have in the United States because of the lack of adequate testing — because of the slow response by federal health officials, President Donald Trump and his administration.
The opportunity has passed to identify cases, and quarantine patients, while the outbreak was young. We must move forward with the cards we’ve been dealt.
That means rapidly ramping up testing and finding equipment and spaces in coming weeks to treat the onslaught of patients needing hospital care. That means presidential orders to the private sector to immediately start producing the swabs, masks, gloves, gowns and ventilators that are essential for health care providers.
For those unclear on what that could look like, consider Italy, where people are dying because of a shortage of medical care. We may be only eight days behind Italy. We must flatten the coronavirus exponential growth curve. This could get real bad, real fast.
How bad and for how long, we just don’t know. There are so many unknown variables, including the effect of warmer weather on the virus, how it mutates and the potential for treatments and the timeline for a vaccine.
In an excellent overview, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof presents the best-case outcome — and the worst. “The nightmare is a surge that overwhelms the hospital system,” he writes. That’s why Newsom is rushing to secure thousands more hospital beds and associated equipment.
As the governor made clear in his announcement Thursday night, the state, like most of the country, faces a severe shortage of patient spaces if we don’t curb the growth rate of coronavirus cases. Experts have been telling us the same for weeks.
Most of us can’t control those factors. But there are things we can do. Most importantly, we can distance ourselves from each other. Stay home. If you must go out, maintain social distancing of 6 feet or more. And wash your hands — a lot.
By now we know all this, don’t we? Newsom expressed confidence that Californians will use common sense and do the right thing. But his order includes provisions for police enforcement.
Sadly, that might become necessary. Even after the president finally woke up to the danger, some elected officials, perhaps most notably Rep. Devin Nunes, continued in recent days to minimize the threat of COVID-19.
We’re better than that, aren’t we? The next weeks and months will be tough. But we can rise to this challenge. We can do our part — and look back someday able to say we did our best.