Trump doesn’t get to decide when the economy restarts

US President Donald Trump’s assertion that he has the power to “open up the states,” presumably by lifting the restrictions on movement and commerce, is disturbing.

“It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons,” Trump tweeted, adding, “With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the governors and input from others, will be made shortly!”

Oh please. Trump has a lot of influence over the country’s response to Covid-19, for better and worse. But thankfully, one thing he cannot do is order states to change the restrictions they’ve put on the public to safeguard health and safety – a core function of state and local governments.

As UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explained in the Los Angeles Times last month, “no federal law gives the president power to order businesses to close or, for that matter, to open.” Nor is this Congress going to give this president that power.

There’s no question that the coronavirus-fighting measures have flattened the economy as they’ve flattened the curve of Covid-19. The restrictions have taken a huge toll on businesses and their workers, especially at retailers, services and manufacturers whose employees can’t do their jobs from home. Unemployment has climbed at unimaginable speed, and as workers have lost income, the pain has spread across the economy in the form of shrinking sales, unpaid bills and cancelled outings.

Some critics of the social distancing measures are pushing Trump to act because they believe the damage being inflicted to the economy is greater than the potential harm from the coronavirus – an argument that has only gained steam as the restrictions have slowed the disease’s march. Meanwhile, Trump has his own political motives for wanting to get the country’s commercial engine up and running again: It’s hard for a president to win re-election in the midst of a recession.

Yet the hard medical reality is that we can’t keep the virus from exploding again until we know who has it, where they have been, whom they come into contact with and who has become immune – and only then if we have an adequate supply of an effective treatment for the disease it causes.

That means being able to test for Covid-19 at a scale we’re not even approaching today. That means having a widespread ability to screen people regularly for the antibodies that demonstrate immunity. That means having technologies and protocols to identify, notify, quarantine and test all the people who’ve recently come into contact with each person newly diagnosed with Covid-19.

A much more realistic announcement about the path back to normalcy was the one on Monday by the governors of California, Oregon and Washington, three early adopters of tough social distancing rules that have dramatically slowed the spread of Covid-19. The governors said they would work together to develop “a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that identifies clear indicators for communities to restart public life and business.”

It’s more a statement of principles than a blueprint for action at the moment, but the priorities laid out are the right ones. Pledging to be guided by “health outcomes and science,” they articulated four goals: developing their own system for “testing, tracking and isolating” the disease; protecting vulnerable populations, such as nursing home residents; ensuring an adequate supply of hospital beds and protective equipment; and mitigating the disease’s indirect effects on people who need other forms of medical care. Inevitably, moving back toward life before the coronavirus will require decisions about how much risk to take and who will be most exposed to it. That’s a political decision, not a medical one, even if it is informed by medical experts (as it should be). And it’s a decision best made by officials closest to the people whose lives and livelihoods are at risk, not one man in the Oval Office.

“No federal law gives the president power to order businesses to close or, for that matter, to open”