It is May 7, 2020, three months after the first American death from the novel coronavirus. More than 76,000 Americans have died since then. Yet the Trump administration has no plan to keep us safe. Instead, it is focused on revving up economic activity, while acknowledging that infections and deaths from coronavirus will continue to increase as a result.
On Tuesday Andy Slavitt, former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (during the last two years of the Obama administration), offered observations about this rush to reopen the country, which put things into a clear, well-grounded perspective:
The truth is we`ve done a very good job over the last couple of months staying inside, slowing down the infection rate. That has saved people`s lives. But nothing`s happened to the virus in the meantime. There was no magic act where that virus became less infectious. And so as soon as we go outside again and start interacting more, if we`re not testing and tracing and wearing masks and taking really profound steps, then the infection rate`s just going to grow again dramatically. And where we sit today is much, much higher than every other country in the world.
Without testing, tracing, PPE, and social distancing, the situation will grow dramatically worse. And we lead the world with the highest rate of infection.
Slavitt argued against the simplistic view that we must put aside concerns with public health for the sake of the American economy, since:
… we`re not choosing between either a good economy or fewer deaths. The truth is that for us to have a better economy, we have to fix the public health crisis. Nobody`s going to start spending money at stores, buying cars, investing in small businesses, signing leases until they feel this crisis is behind us.
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas says, “there are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us.” Like Donald Trump and Mike Pence, though, he is far from the assembly lines at meatpacking plants, checking out customers at the local supermarket, attending to sick patients in an ICU, or anywhere else where the risks are especially high.
Slavitt noted we are still learning about the virus:
But we know it`s a novel virus. We know none of us have immunity. At best there may be a couple percent of the population that have gained immunity. We know that it infects people and keeps – and while it infects them they`re asymptomatic, or a good bit of the time, if not the entire time. And so it goes from person to person until it finds a host where it can become lethal. And it takes just a small speck through the air for that to happen. And if it gets into a nursing home or a meatpacking factory or a prison or a public housing unit or any place where people congregate and multiple generations live, it can wipe out large communities.
And so we`re seeing death tolls now on a daily basis that are soon to approach the number of people that died on 9/11. Continually. We have to ask ourselves how we reverse course from where we are – and we can. But we can`t if we don`t admit the facts, if we don`t face the facts.
Slavitt suggested – contra those urging us to accept a higher death count in return for a humming economy, or those guys with guns in Lansing, Michigan, or the crowds clamoring to reopen the beaches – most of us want to protect ourselves and our families from harm [my emphasis]:
… I think that people want to be safe first. I think they want – we all want our lives back. But people don`t want to endanger their selves or their families. They don`t want to endanger others. I actually think that a lot of this, “economy opening” – yes, there are scenes of people at beaches on TV, and yes there`s scenes of people rallying with guns, but the lion’s share of people, I think, want a plan to open up the country safely. And that is not too much to ask. Germany has done it. Japan has done it. New Zealand has done it. I mean, this is not impossible. We just want to open up safely. And safely means we have to do things. We have to have testing and tracing in place. We have to have masks in place. The Czech Republic has done it. Greece has done it. Italy is doing it. Why are we the country that decides we`re going to open up unsafely?
Why have we given up defeating the coronavirus and decided to sacrifice tens of thousands of Americans whose lives need not be shortened by this pandemic?
Because doing things – conducting widespread testing and tracing, providing PPE to our medical personnel, giving the public clear guidance at each phase – would require leadership at the federal level: a strategic plan and energetic executive action. And the Trump administration doesn’t have a plan, much less the will or the capacity to carry out a plan.
Virtually every public health authority has put testing at the center of a strategy to defeat the virus and protect American lives. Why not focus on doing this – to achieve the victory? Because, increased testing would increase the number of identified cases of infection, and that would make Trump’s numbers look bad. As he put it yesterday, “The media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do by far the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So in a way by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”
A month ago – on April 5 – David Wallace-Wells (“There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis”) noted that testing and tracing was the ideal path to containing the pandemic, and that, in the absence of tracing, an aggressive testing program could lead to success. The country’s lockdown provided the opportunity to implement a plan:
buying the country time to ramp up a comprehensive testing regimen. We would shelter in place until such a program was ready to go, then reenter “normal” life through that portal of medical surveillance.
Sadly, he added: “the complete absence of federal leadership … is especially conspicuous.”
Today, as infections and deaths mount, the federal government continues to abdicate its responsibility to protect us.
Jay Rosen has concluded (“The plan is to have no plan”):
The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.
Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default.
Donald Trump hasn’t succeeded — or even tried with any conviction — to defeat this virus. He continues, however, to muddy the waters (“flooding the zone with shit”) to escape blame for the carnage.
(Image: U.S. Department of State.)