Michael Hiltzik writes about the lack of progress, months after the country shut down, in battling the coronavirus. He quotes a physician on the faculty of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health:
We didn’t use that time to build up our testing capacity, we didn’t think about schools in advance … — Dr. David Eisenman
In short we squandered the time, failing to take advantage of the pause in infections, and in many respects we are back to where we were in April — with shortages of PPE and inadequate testing and tracing — but the number of infections, the rate of infections, and the death toll have all risen, and the fall school term is only weeks away.
In an ideal world, there would be a national strategy in place, but because of an absence of leadership in the White House, responsibility for defeating the coronavirus has fallen to 50 state governors (plus leaders in D.C., Puerto Rico …).
At this stage, leadership at the state level has not served the country well. Watching the various states embrace (and reject) a hodgepodge of policies, and watching individual governors pivot first this way, then that, has hardly inspired confidence. In fact, policies have often been confounding and, if a coherent rationale for specific decisions exists, it has not always been visible.
Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute, suggests (“Risks & Benefits Matrix”) that governors could clarify their decisions — and I’ll add, make better decisions — if they compared (and revealed to us) risks and benefits of various activities to be permitted or restricted by their policy choices.
There is room for disagreement about social value, so it’s possible to decide that, say, opening bars and sporting events is more important than opening schools. But, let’s hear that choice articulated, so we know that at least the governor has thought things through and is willing to cop to his/her preferences.
Professor Oster offers this graph of her personal policy preferences. Parks (in the upper left quadrant) provide high benefit at low risk. In contrast, gyms and bars find their places in the lower right quadrant (high risk and, on her evaluation, low reward) activities. Opening schools is risky, but may be regarded as providing large rewards (top, right).
In practice, of course, many governors appear to have valued bars and gyms more highly than K-12 schools. Other policy anomalies abound across the country.
I’m with Oster (and just as angry): “In my wildest dreams, I’d like to see each of our Governors give a press conference with a picture like this behind them which reflects their policies. It’s not that these policies aren’t defensible, but I would like to see people say: bars have a sufficiently high benefit that I’m prioritizing that over in-person schooling.“
(Emily Oster provides the link to “COVID-19 Be Informed” image from the Texas Medical Association.)