There is frustration with the consequences of brute force social-distancing, because it's enormously difficult and disrupting. But every not-quack epidemiologist and economist says this is the thing to do, despite the harm it's causing. This is because we still lack the capacity to implement the widespread testing that would enable a more targeted approach. And having blown the chance for a more targeted approach, we're now doomed to a brute force approach, or according to reliable projections, the Coronavirus could kill more than 2 million of us.
I don't understand how anyone could imagine that The Economy (a mystical being that in some minds exists separate and apart from the humans who actually buy, sell, provide, and do every single thing that constitutes The Economy) could possibly survive a pandemic that sent 2 million workers/consumers to a dirt nap. During a pandemic, any sensible economic policy starts with a sensible public health policy, because the public health problem won't go away. If we don't fix it, it will come back and we will still have a cratered economy, plus many more dead, and we'll just have to restart from an even more devastated position after we f#ck up.
Everyone who wants to get the economy running again ought to be screaming for easy widespread and universal Coronavirus testing. We can't practicably quarantine the entire vulnerable population without causing a severe recession, even under the dumbest notion of what constitutes the vulnerable population. To target our responses we need data. Lots and lots of data. The data will tell us who is infected and where the hotspots are. Only the data can tell us when and where to put people back in contact with one another. If we don't get the data before we take people out of isolation, we're sending people to their deaths, and after enough people die and blow up the health care system, even the Trump supporters will figure this out. If we get the data we can quarantine only the infected people and send everyone else back to work. As we modulated efforts to get people back into economic circulation we could have a check on how and when and where to adjust for public safety without shutting down entire states or regions when the virus inevitably surges back.
Otherwise it's all the stupid false choices that people have been discussing about how to sacrifice the old and vulnerable so the lean and mean will survive. Ugh. Why are people so eager for The Lord of the Flies? Have you no better imagination than that? Seeing good people thinking so small depresses me.
But not only are we mobilizing no national effort to develop the data that could save both ourselves and our jobs, we're not even mobilizing to produce the ventilators that will keep people alive in the meantime. The virus is a natural disaster, but the unfolding of our incompetent response is a disaster of our own making. It's like no one in this modern age has ever heard of horses and barn doors.
I wonder why that is.
I don't understand how anyone could imagine that The Economy (a mystical being that in some minds exists separate and apart from the humans who actually buy, sell, provide, and do every single thing that constitutes The Economy) could possibly survive a pandemic that sent 2 million workers/consumers to a dirt nap. During a pandemic, any sensible economic policy starts with a sensible public health policy, because the public health problem won't go away. If we don't fix it, it will come back and we will still have a cratered economy, plus many more dead, and we'll just have to restart from an even more devastated position after we f#ck up.
Everyone who wants to get the economy running again ought to be screaming for easy widespread and universal Coronavirus testing. We can't practicably quarantine the entire vulnerable population without causing a severe recession, even under the dumbest notion of what constitutes the vulnerable population. To target our responses we need data. Lots and lots of data. The data will tell us who is infected and where the hotspots are. Only the data can tell us when and where to put people back in contact with one another. If we don't get the data before we take people out of isolation, we're sending people to their deaths, and after enough people die and blow up the health care system, even the Trump supporters will figure this out. If we get the data we can quarantine only the infected people and send everyone else back to work. As we modulated efforts to get people back into economic circulation we could have a check on how and when and where to adjust for public safety without shutting down entire states or regions when the virus inevitably surges back.
Otherwise it's all the stupid false choices that people have been discussing about how to sacrifice the old and vulnerable so the lean and mean will survive. Ugh. Why are people so eager for The Lord of the Flies? Have you no better imagination than that? Seeing good people thinking so small depresses me.
But not only are we mobilizing no national effort to develop the data that could save both ourselves and our jobs, we're not even mobilizing to produce the ventilators that will keep people alive in the meantime. The virus is a natural disaster, but the unfolding of our incompetent response is a disaster of our own making. It's like no one in this modern age has ever heard of horses and barn doors.
I wonder why that is.
