Here’s a plan to get America back to work
These are days that test every leader — local, state and national. They are each being asked to make huge life and death decisions, while driving through a fog, with imperfect information and everyone in the back seat shouting at them. My heart goes out to them all. I know they mean well. But as so many of our businesses shut down and millions begin to be laid off, some experts are beginning to ask: “Wait a minute! What the hell are we doing to ourselves? To our economy? To our next generation? Is this cure — even for a short while — worse than the disease?”
I share these questions. Our leaders are not flying completely blind: They are working off the advice of serious epidemiologists and public health experts. Yet we still need to be careful about “group think,’’ which is a natural but dangerous reaction when responding to a national and global crisis. We’re making decisions that affect the whole country and our entire economy — therefore, small errors in navigation could have huge consequences.
Of course, because this virus is potentially affecting so many Americans at once, we need to provide more hospital beds, treatment equipment for those who will need it and protective gear like N95 masks for the doctors and nurses caring for virus-infected patients. That is urgent! And we need to immediately rectify the colossal failure to supply rapid, widespread testing. That is urgent!
But we also need to be asking ourselves — just as urgently — can we more surgically minimize the threat of this virus to those most vulnerable while we maximize the chances for as many Americans as possible to safely go back to work as soon as possible. One expert I talk to below believes that could happen in as early as a few weeks — if we pause for a moment and think afresh about the coronavirus challenge.
Indeed, if my inbox is any indication, a thoughtful backlash is brewing to the strategy the country has stumbled into. And stumbling is what inevitably happens when you have a president who goes from treating the coronavirus as a hoax to a war in the space of two days. A lot of health experts want to find a better balance to the medical, economic and moral issues now tugging at us all at once.
Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, an epidemiologist and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, pointed out in a March 17 essay on statnews.com, that we still do not have a firm grasp of the population-wide fatality rate of the coronavirus. A look at some of the best available evidence today, though, indicates it may be 1% and could even be lower.
“If that is the true rate,’’ Ioannidis wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.” Is there another way?
One of the best ideas I have come across was offered by Dr. David L. Katz, founding director of Yale University’s CDC-funded Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and an expert in public health and preventive medicine.
Katz wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on Friday that caught my eye. He argued that we have three goals right now: saving as many lives as we can, making sure that our medical system does not get overwhelmed — but also making sure that in the process of achieving the first two goals we don’t destroy our economy, and as a result of that, even more lives.
For all these reasons, he argued, we need to pivot from the “horizontal interdiction” strategy we’re now deploying — restricting the movement and commerce of the entire population, without consideration of varying risks for severe infection — to a more “surgical’’ or “vertical interdiction” strategy.
A surgical-vertical approach would focus on protecting and sequestering those among us most likely to be killed or suffer long-term damage by exposure to coronavirus infection — that is, the elderly, people with chronic diseases and the immunologically compromised — while basically treating the rest of society the way we have always dealt with familiar threats like the flu. That means we would tell them to be respectful of others when coughing or sneezing, wash their hands regularly and if they feel sick to stay home and get over it — or to seek medical attention if they are not recuperating as expected.
Because, as with the flu, the vast majority will get over it in days, a small number will require hospitalization and a very small percentage of the most vulnerable will, tragically, die. As Katz argued, governors and mayors, by choosing the horizontal approach of basically sending everyone home for an unspecified period, might have actually increased the dangers of infection for those most vulnerable.
“As we lay off workers, and colleges close their dorms and send all their students home,” Katz noted, “young people of indeterminate infectious status are being sent home to huddle with their families nationwide. And because we lack widespread testing, they may be carrying the virus and transmitting it to their 50-something parents, and 70- or 80-something grandparents.”
“OK,” I said, calling Katz by phone at his home in Connecticut after reading his article, “can we make lemonade out of this lemon — and not destroy our economy?”
I don’t see why not, he answered. “Now that we have shut down almost everything, we still have the option of pivoting to a more targeted approach. We may even be able to leverage the current effort at horizontal, population-wide, interdiction to our advantage as we pivot to vertical, risk-based, interdiction.”
How? “Use a two-week isolation strategy,’’ Katz answered. Tell everyone to basically stay home for two weeks, rather than indefinitely. (This includes all the reckless college students packing the beaches of Florida.) If you are infected with the coronavirus it will usually present within a two-week incubation period.
“Those who have symptomatic infection should then selfisolate — with or without testing, which is exactly what we do with the flu,” Katz said. “Those who don’t, if in the low-risk population, should be allowed to return to work or school, after the two weeks end.”
Effectively, we’d “reboot” our society in two or perhaps more weeks from now. “The rejuvenating effect on spirits, and the economy, of knowing where there’s light at the end of this tunnel would be hard to overstate. Risk will not be zero, but the risk of some bad outcome for any of us on any given day is never zero.”
I share these ideas because I am certain that we need to broaden the debate — I am certain that we need less herd mentality and more herd immunity — as we come to terms with our hellish choice:
Either we let many of us get the coronavirus, recover and get back to work — while doing our utmost to protect those most vulnerable from being killed by it. Or, we shut down for months to try to save everyone everywhere from this virus — no matter their risk profile — and kill many people by other means, kill our economy and maybe kill our future.