Just as the fast and broad spread of the coronavirus across the United States is largely due to President Trump’s catastrophic failures of leadership, our country’s path out of this pandemic and attendant economic collapse threatens to unfold in a parallel arc of ineptitude and chaos. As hard-hit parts of the country seem to be moving through the peak of the coronavirus, a critical mass of public thought and critical inquiry is beginning to focus on next steps, and a frightening picture is quickly emerging of cluelessness and chaos at the top. The Washington Post reports on plans to move the nation forward, but they are originating from “a collection of governors, former government officials, disease specialists and nonprofits [. . .] pursuing a strategy that relies on the three pillars of disease control: Ramp up testing to identify people who are infected. Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before. And focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.” Together, these three strategies can “shatter” the transmission chain.
At the same time, the Post notes, the Trump administration is “fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month, though they haven’t detailed how they will do so without triggering another outbreak.” This is very much a problem, since even if enough states were to move forward with coordinated plans, they will need federal funding to succeed, such as for hiring thousands of workers to perform contract tracing to locate people who may have come into contact with those infected with the coronavirus. And even then, there’s a question of whether such a strategy would work if a critical mass of states were not involved. As a Liberian doctor involved with ending the Ebola epidemic in his country puts it, “America must not just flatten the curve but get ahead of the curve.” Yet without a national plan, the United States will remain behind the curve. Not just incompetence but political calculation have entered into the president’s approach: administration officials tell the Post that “the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead.” This is a staggeringly cynical strategy, on top of being a complete abdication of duty on the part of the president.
But as Ezra Klein discusses at Vox, even the plans that various think tanks have drawn up along the lines that the Post describes will require daunting organization, resources, and patience. Unless the United States is willing to rely on mass surveillance to augment testing for the virus, the testing necessary to control and defeat the virus may require something on the order of 22 million tests per day, which the country is far, far from being able to do currently. Yet plans short of this would result in a “yo-yo between extreme lockdown and lighter forms of social distancing, continuing until a vaccine is reached.” Under such circumstances, Klein notes, a rapid economic recovery simply will not happen — according to a former FDA commissioner involved with drafting one of the plans Klein reviewed, only 80% of the economy would return while the proposed regimen was underway, which would leave the United States in “an economic collapse of Great Depression proportions.”
Reading these accounts of how we might move forward helps bring the size of this catastrophe more into focus. In order to prevent a resurgence of the coronavirus once we’re past this first wave, we’re going to need a degree of organization and initiative that is clearly beyond the skill set of Donald Trump and his administration — and that’s assuming that the president will even consent to the consensus strategies that are emerging, which will be certain to confound his monomaniacal goal of getting the economy racing again. Yet even under the best case public health scenario, with mitigation strategies enacted and a vaccine developed in a year’s time, it appears the U.S. economy will remain crippled. In order to prevent mass suffering, we’re going to need hugely broadened legislation that funnels money to businesses and workers — such as this plan proposed by Representative Pramila Jayapal. And so the major axes of political conflict for the foreseeable future come more sharply into view — between those willing to sacrifice American lives for the sake of re-starting the economy and those who prioritize public health, as well as a related debate over the degree to which the government should cover the lost income of businesses and employees as they remain sidelined due to the coronavirus.