We could have saved lives

Beginning drivers need to learn to pay attention to their rear-view mirrors — not to watch where they’ve been, of course, but to see what’s coming up on them.

So it is with public policy. Yes, one reason we look back at how our system and its players have performed is because it’s the job of voters to hold officials to account. But a check of recent performance is even more useful in avoiding the mistakes of our recent history.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of last week’s release from Columbia University researchers, who analyzed infectious disease modeling to determine what would have happened if the United States had started to impose social distancing a week or two earlier in March than it did.

The results are both stunning and heartbreaking: Most of the deaths from COVID-19, the researchers found, could have been prevented.

It wasn’t until mid-march that most Americans started staying home and avoiding other people. If that had started a week earlier, the researchers found, about 36,000 fewer Americans would have died. And if it had started March 1, 83 percent of the deaths would have been avoided.

Each day that officials waited in

March cost American lives.

Much has been written about the Trump administration’s laxness and ineptitude in both planning for a pandemic and responding as COVID-19 spread worldwide. We watched President Donald Trump repeatedly lie about the availability of tests and scoff at concerns about the disease. “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” he said Feb.

27. Even after he finally declared a national emergency March 13, he deferred any action to limit Americans’ interactions.

Finally, on March 16, officials in six counties in northern California ordered residents to shelter in place, an order extended to the entire state March 19.

The next day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a similar order, and other governors soon followed suit. Within days, the president began pushing for the shutdowns to be lifted, notwithstanding the risk.

Now, as states begin to lift their shutdowns, experts warn that a surge in new cases will likely appear in about two weeks. A resurgence of the disease in the fall, which many predict, could be even more severe.

This is why we cannot ignore the cost of our delayed response in March. If the disease resurfaces powerfully, we know that officials can save lives by moving more quickly to again impose social distancing. They will be under enormous political pressure not to do so, of course, notably from a president who sees COVID-19 as more of a political concern than a lethal one.

So the burden is on our own shoulders as much as on our leaders’. How will we respond if we’re urged to again adopt the life-saving value of strict social distancing? Will we offer political shelter to officials who pretend the virus is more a bother than a calamity? Or will we pay attention to our rear-view mirror, where we now can clearly see what’s coming up on us?

the issue: research shows earlier social distancing could have saved thousands of lives. the stakes: if the disease is resurgent, will we be quicker to adopt smart defensive tactics?