Trump doesn’t get it
Soon it will be obvious to most Americans that politics don’t mean much in a pandemic, especially one like the coronavirus that is about to burst forth exponentially in this country with greater levels of infection and death.
Our trend lines compared with other First World nations tell us our healthcare system is headed for trouble. Growing numbers of sick people are about to overwhelm those who can care for them.
There is one tool proven effective at blunting these trends:
Shutdown.
The only way to ease the demand on our hospitals and health-care workers is to significantly end economic and social activity and isolate from one another to stop the disease spread.
A pathogen like today’s novel coronavirus feeds on social networks. Just one sick person spreading the disease to another person outside their social network can trigger the infection of hundreds, if not thousands, of other people. We have to stop that.
This is not a forever solution. It’s an emergency measure urgently needed to preserve our health-care system and to save lives. It comes at a steep price. It means we limit our economy to the most essential services to preserve life and well-being.
In the past week, the president of the United States has talked as if he doesn’t understand the moment.
Speaking in a Fox News town hall on Tuesday, Trump said, “I give it two weeks.”
He seemed to imply he is ready to end the 15-day self-isolating guidelines he had issued, CNN reported. “I guess by Monday or Tuesday, it’s about two weeks. We will assess at that time and give it more time if we need a little more time. We have to open this country up.”
Trump has made other comments that tell us he is moving from a shutdown strategy just as virtually all other advanced nations are battening down.
“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” Trump said at a White House briefing. “America will, again, and soon, be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. Lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
If the president decides sometime in the coming weeks to tell business to ramp back up and Americans to return to their normal lives, he will find himself a leader with fewer and fewer followers.
Governors are telling their people that we need to hunker down in the high-intensity moment of this disease to protect the elderly population, which is most susceptible to COVED-19.
The states are following the recommendations of our own U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, the leading epidemiologists in the world and the dire warnings of nations in western Europe, including Italy, Spain and France.
If Trump rejects the predominant national and global strategy of flattening the curve, he will own the consequences. Ultimately it could mean older Americans, a cohort that largely supports him, could die without the critical care they need to keep them alive. This is not idle speculation, but backed by evidence playing out in Italy and Spain.
Without self-isolating in the first surge of this emergency we could crack the spine of America’s health-care system. Even now the news cameras are moving through hospitals in Spain where desperately sick people are curled up on floors in hallways without enough beds and doctors to care for them.
The chorus of coughing and hacking is infecting and reducing the ranks of health-care workers in their moment of highest demand. Italian doctors and nurses describe it as a “disaster.”
Emergencies are unfolding in Washington State and now New York City, which have become the beachheads for COVID-19 in this country.
In King County, Washington (Seattle), where 1,277 people have been infected and 94 have died, Jeffrey Duchin, a doctor, epidemiologist and public health officer has been working diligently to sober up Americans.
“This is one of the most serious diseases you will face in your lifetime, recognize that & respect it,” he tweeted on Tuesday. “It’s dangerous to you, to your parents, to your grandparents, and to society in general. You’re not an island, you’re part of a broader community.”
We are verging on economic recession, but we have no choice in this stage of the global emergency but to form a protective barrier around our healthcare system. A new virus unknown to man and more importantly to man’s immune system is very rapidly spreading from person to person, deeply damaging the lungs of especially older adults.
In Europe the deaths are described as agonizing. Senior citizens who were healthy only days earlier find themselves gasping for breath, trying not to drown in the fluids that fill their lungs. Many die alone in hospitals where family members are not allowed because of the mortal threat of infection. Doctors and nurses have described how those sick patients call out names of loved ones in their last hours with only hospital staff around to hear them.
The first order of American government and health-care leadership now is to prevent a similar medical breakdown happening here. And no one is more important to that effort than the president of the United States.
One hundred years ago another president, Woodrow Wilson, became so consumed with winning World War I that he neglected to take the urgent steps necessary to protect the American people from the Spanish flu pandemic, wrote Jonathan D. Quick, former director of essential drugs and medicines policies at the World Health Organization, in the Wall Street Journal. “The U.S. ended up losing 675,000 lives to influenza, compared with 53,000 killed in combat in World War I.”
If Trump hasn’t figured it out, the experienced people around him must have. We’re living in a new world. The political calculations of pre-virus 2019 are over. Gone.
Trump was ready to ride a robust economy and a soaring Dow Jones Industrial Average to re-election, but that won’t happen. And no one will credibly blame him for the economic swoon – not when every other nation in the world is shuddering in the face of COVID-19.
There is one issue in the country right now and that is surviving the pandemic. The president will be judged on how he manages it.
He is right to consider the economic dimensions of the crisis, because a wrecked economy will bring its own torments. Even the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, recognizes that:
“You can’t stop the economy forever,” Cuomo said Monday. “So we have to start to think about does everyone stay out of work? Should young people go back to work sooner? Can we test for those who had the virus, resolved, and are now immune and can they start to go back to work?”
The first order of business, however, is breaking the fever – the steep upward trend lines of coronavirus infection. That’s not happening in two weeks. Maybe not in two months.
Only then can we start to carefully turn the dial back up on the national economy. Doctors understand this. “A national lockdown is no cure,” wrote Jeffrey Duchin in King County. “… At some point we will need to adjust our strategy. But not now. Stay home.”
In an emergency, the American people expect their leaders to put political considerations aside and protect the country. Our Republican president needs to understand that. And his Democratic opponents need to realize it’s in none of our interests right now to see our national leader fail.