Hang tight, we’re a long way from the finish line
Get used to this.
The schools will not reopen soon. Neither will restaurants. The Hartford Yard Goats will not play in front of large crowds this summer. Grocery stores will not look the way they used to anytime soon. Masks will be the order of the day in many places for many weeks and probably many months.
I’m truly sorry, but that’s the way it is.
These are not the thoughts of an anti-capitalist liberal weenie (though I do answer to that description). These are the thoughts of, you know, business.
President Donald Trump had a series of phone calls Wednesday with business leaders he appointed to something called the Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups. Let me pause to say: That’s a crazy name. “Great American” ordinarily precedes “Baking Contest” or “Songbook” or “novel.”
According to multiple accounts, including a detailed report in the Wall Street Journal, many of the great American business leaders on the great American council were caught unawares when the great American president announced their names Tuesday night, which occasioned a flurry of phone calls from CEOs to their government affairs veeps, none of whom knew about the council either.
The following day brought a series of conference calls. The first one featured, according to the Journal, executives from “banking, financial services, food and beverage, hospitality and retail industries.”
The executives did not even discuss with Trump a date for reopening the economy, even though the nation had just been smacked in the face with over-the-cliff plunges in consumer spending and manufacturing numbers.
Instead, they told Trump the nation needs a dramatic expansion of diagnostic testing before people will have the confidence to return to what Wordsworth called “getting and spending.” Duh.
Here’s where we are right now. Diagnostic testing seems to have plateaued at 120,000 to 140,000 per day for a couple of weeks. That’s a mid-air stall. We lack (and desperately need) a national consensus on how many tests per day would be adequate, but that conversation seems to start at 750,000 to 1 million and rise from there.
The most exotic proposal comes from Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer who says we should aim for 22 million tests per day. That has the disadvantage of being nearly impossible, but it has the advantage of being the quickest path back to semi-normalcy. You’d essentially be cycling through the entire U.S. population every two weeks, pulling the infected people out of line and quarantining them. You’d break the back of the virus pretty quickly.
That 22 million seems out of reach for a nation that can’t even do 220,000. Matthew Harrison says that to mirror the testing rate of
South Korea (the most widely cited testing success story), the United States needs to test 1 million people a day.
Harrison is a biotech analyst for Morgan Stanley. He’s one of the leaders of the company’s COVID-19 research group. Once again, these are business people. They have been saying for two weeks that the American workforce won’t be going back to work until the summer months, on a phased-in basis, with a maximum of 50 percent of employees back at work by summer’s end.
All of this research and lots more, I might add, was available last weekend when Republican legislative leaders staged a mild uprising against Gov. Ned Lamont after Lamont extended his shutdown orders until May 20. The Republican response to Lamont was breathtakingly devoid of information, data, benchmarks or insights. It was, in several senses of the word, a spitball.
May 20 is an incredibly optimistic date for reopening anything. Note to Connecticut Republicans: Who do you think Lamont talks to? Who do you think dominates his network of friends and acquaintances? Business people. Do you think that, if there were a business-driven argument for an earlier reopening, Lamont would be deaf to it because he spends so much time with pot-smoking beatnik public health experts?
The problem with a free society with an open flow of information is that stupid people have the same rights as everybody else, and it takes way longer to beat down their ideas than Oliver Wendell Holmes, may he rest in peace, ever imagined.
Case in point, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who last week jumped onto Sean Hannity’s ludicrous Fox News program to talk about “things we could open without getting in a lot of trouble.”
Oz continued, “I tell you, schools are a very appetizing opportunity. I saw a very nice piece in The Lancet arguing that the opening of schools might only cost 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.” Oz went on to acknowledge that “any life is a life lost,” whatever that means, but it might be worth it to get children safely back in school, improving their destinies.
Sidebar: Can you think of another prominent person whose market value has declined as much in the last 10 years as Oz? He used to be the peppy, competent medical expert on “Oprah,” although there was that weird thing where he dressed in hospital scrubs, like he had just arrived on set after performing a thoracotomy. And then, in common with Oprah Winfrey, he displayed a growing predilection for hokum and quackery. And now he’s the thing under the rock next to the rock that Hannity’s under.
Meanwhile, what did I have to do? Read the freaking study. I guarantee you Oz only read the summary. It’s actually what’s called a “meta-analysis,” which pulls together a whole group of scientific studies which may contain data related to its question.
The authors mainly lamented the “remarkable dearth of policy-relevant data” about what school closures do or don’t accomplish in these situations. That’s why, they wrote, they relied on nine published studies and seven non-peer-reviewed studies. It was from one of the latter that they derived the statistic that school closures may reduce deaths by only 2-to-4 percent, which Oz then misstated in multiple respects.
The authors called all the findings “equivocal” and stressed that no real apples-to-apples studies had been done.
The nonsensical interpretation leaps like a salmon onto America’s TV screens, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Look. Schools and the economy can’t reopen until people aren’t scared. They’re not going to stop being scared until we know — just for starters — the size of the problem, and we’re a long way from there.
So get used to this.