BRACE FOR THE WORST, PRAY FOR THE BEST

America and the globe appear to be in for months of disruption because of the spread of coronavirus. In what sounds like a line from a zombie movie but is all too real, Gov. Gavin Newsom has said that as the number of infected grows, it may be necessary to impose martial law to keep the state functioning. In Washington, D.C., public health officials have repeatedly pushed back at notions that the virus will disappear when the weather heats up. In Great Britain, secret government documents viewed by The Guardian predict the outbreak will be a public health nightmare through spring of next year.

If this is going to be the norm for an extended stretch, than our institutions need to adapt, starting with K-12 education, which Newsom doubts will resume in normal fashion for months to come.

School officials are adjusting, slowly. Districts statewide are continuing to play their vital role in providing meals to children from poor families.

But more can and should be done. Students who can’t go to school should still learn online. San Diego Unified and other districts that are still paying teachers and administrators should repurpose their efforts toward distance learning. Newsom and the state Legislature should consider an emergency program to provide inexpensive laptops and basic Wifi access to the millions of low-income households which now have no online access. The state’s much-ballyhooed cash reserves are likely to be eyed for many coronavirus-related needs, but few if any are as important as educating our children.

Local, state and federal officials also should start to plan how they’re going to get food to people when the money runs out in households led by laid-off workers or owners of bankrupt small businesses.

The logistics of a food distribution system that maintains social distancing need to be addressed as soon as possible. Drive-through food banks? Sure.

And while the health-care system is sure to be strained going forward, perhaps overwhelmingly so, some thought should be given to efforts to help stressed-out Americans of all ages deal with this crisis. Perhaps the religious leaders who no long have services and their followers can help take on the challenge of phone therapy for all those who already suffered from loneliness and depression even before the biggest national crisis since 9/11.

But even so, people should find some hope in the wall-to-wall coverage of the pandemic from people with credibility. Dr. Walter Ricciardi, a member of the World Health Organization’s executive council, said he could conceive a scenario in which the coronavirus crisis faded by summer. A team of University of Hong Kong academics, who have had broad acccess to patient records in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began, believe the death rates for individuals with symptomatic COVID-19 is significantly lower than is now assumed.

What should ultimately give the world the most hope is human ingenuity. The idea that tens of thousands of experts will have as their singular focus coming up with a vaccine for the coronavirus threat — and that many are likely to have all the resources they need for their research — is like the global, mass-sourced version of the Manhattan Project, the secret World War II effort to ensure the U.S. developed an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany.

It probably isn’t reasonable to expect a quick breakthrough given the projected timeline for a vaccine. But don’t underestimate human brilliance.