If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last week, it’s that there’s a strong consensus among medical professional that the United States lacks the coronavirus testing capability that we’ll need to contain and eventually eliminate this pandemic. The conservative figure I’ve seen is that we need 3 times as much testing as at present; others urge something many multiples of that, on the order of 22 million tests a day (this Vox article provides a comprehensive overview of the various testing strategies).
And yet, several states — including Tennessee, Missouri, Idaho, Georgia, and Florida — are now beginning to relax their social distancing restrictions, despite lacking the capacity to conduct anything near to the recommended testing. Though all these states insist they are taking proper precautions, you don’t have to be a medical expert to see that this is a potential catastrophe in the making, a squandering of the precious time we’ve bought through the sacrifices of the severe lockdowns to date. Without sufficient testing, not to mention mass availability of no-brainer measures like effective masks, premature relaxing of quarantine measures means needless deaths, and a possibility that the virus will come back as strong as ever.
The re-opening of barber shops and bowling allies in a state like Georgia makes a mockery of the necessity of these moves. Haircuts and bowling a strike are both profound pleasures of life, but they are hardly necessities, and at any rate not worth risking lives over. Far better for the government to bail out these businesses while they remain closed for the sake of public safety.
It’s the triumph of magical thinking over rationality: the mentality is that since we have already suffered, our suffering has redeemed us, and we will suffer no longer. The magical thinking pretends to root itself in data, but this only makes it more insidious. States are relaxing restrictions as they believe they are past the peak of new infections. But as a Columbia University epidemiologist tells the Washington Post, “those declines have come only because of sweeping social distancing rules, and [. . .] as the rules are relaxed, controlling transmission will become more difficult.” To the degree this loosening is driven by the president’s deranged quest to save his re-election, and by right-wing protests driven by stilted notions of personal freedom, fantasy is fueling these moves. We have already seen how in the early days of the pandemic, single or small groups of people ended up facilitating massive spread of the disease. As the mayor of Tulsa, OK remarks to the Post, his city “does not exist in a bubble [. . .] we should expect the illness to spread.”
Every state is affected when one makes the wrong decision, which brings us back to the over-arching truth of this crisis: as a country, we are in danger so long as imaginary thinking and incompetence prevail in the White House, and prevent the orchestration of a national strategy to navigate us through this crisis. Unfortunately, going by the president’s latest speculation that bright light and mainlining bleach might save us, what was already a tenuous grip on reality at the top has shifted further into the realm of make-believe and denialism.
It could not be any clearer that we are undergoing a political and societal crisis as much as a health and economic crisis. Politicians who balance public health and economic stability wrong will get people killed while causing the economy to backslide. It is not inspiring that a preponderance of the states relaxing the rules have Republican governors, who are more likely to embrace the fantasy thinking and political priorities of our disinfectant-addled president. Right now, it seems like citizens of states like Georgia and Oklahoma are unwitting subjects of a wild scientific experiment. I also suspect that those who can work from home in those states will continue to do so, which will skew the lab subjects to a disproportionately working class demographic.