Done With Coronavirus Magical Thinking

“Never will get these guy to explain what exactly the economic shutdown is supposed to accomplish.”

Tom,

Was this my and Doug’s shutdown?The last time I checked, Republicans control two and a half branches of the federal government and many of the worst hit states right now. I don’t remember anyone asking for my opinion, but maybe they called Doug. You act like there has been some kind of National “plan” and that somehow Democrats are exclusively responsible for making that plan and then changing It. You’re like the guy who gets bit by his own dog, so he kicks his neighbor’s cat.

How did the country close down? I just read newspapers and magazines. It seems like a year ago, but I think it was really only April that I called you and the rest of our siblings with what I hoped would be a wasted warning.

Over the centuries China has seen famines and repression like we can’t even imagine. They have the most people under strict totalitarian control in the history of mankind. They can impose and put up with a lot of suffering without so much as a peep out of the population. After SARS, the Chinese are also now world class when it comes virology and epidemiology. And yet, after covering it up for a month or two, the Chinese Communist Party had become so terrified of this virus that they essentially shut down trade and travel out of their major industrial and commercial hubs, and voluntarily imploded the second largest economy in the world. Other countries in Asia, who had been through the SARS epidemic and had prepared responses afterward, soon followed suit.

Next, I read that Washington State had had its first case of community spread (meaning that they could not connect the sick person to anyone who had been to China. To me that meant that the virus was loose in the country now and we no longer had any idea where it was. Given the thousands of flights nationally and long haul truckers, it’s was probably everywhere. Finally, one of the CDC doctors (while Trump was in India) warned the country to start preparing for schools and businesses to close and for family life to be severely disrupted.

That’s when I called you and said that it might be a good idea to stock up on food, drugs and other essentials because I thought that we were about to be locked down just as China and other Asian nations had locked down.

Remember, I had been an airline pilot for the past 20 years. AIDS patient zero was an airline flight attendant. The airlines are economically sensitive to pandemics, and mine was effected by SARS and H1N1, and others. For years, I had been telling the Survivalists who I flew with (don’t ask, it’s an Alaska thing) that they could have their year’s supply of guns and ammo in the woods, but they were the ones most likely to bring Armageddon home to their family bunker in the form of a deadly pathogen. (No, they didn’t believe me either, but it made for great conversation on long flights).

Within a month, my fears came true, but it has been different from what I expected. The bug determines the game. The virus is the one “moving the goal post”. Mostly the governors of red and blue states are just badly trying to keep up with the virus, and without a coordinated strategy, successes and failures are spotty and short lived. As we have learned, the states have adapted their strategies. But we still don’t actually have a national “plan” and it doesn’t look like we will until we get rid of Trump.

We can argue about mortality versus lethality rates until we are blue in the face and neither one of us knows what we are talking about. We simply do not have the social safety nets to actually isolate fragile communities, even if it were just 78 years olds, which it is not. I do not believe millions of people unnecessarily dead or severely ill and permanently injured will be a politically or morally acceptable sacrifice for any state leadership faced with it, red or blue, and the economy won’t come back until people feel safe regardless. (Although it seems that one of the reasons that Trump and Moscow Mitch were so ambivalent about the virus early on was that they erroneously thought this would just be an urban blue state Democrat virus, so why worry -they aren’t “real” Americans).

I don’t know why one anti-malaria drug foments such snake oil conspiracy mongering by people like the good Reverend who should know better because there actually are several other Therapeutic drugs that are working and there is no one out suppressing them, Democrats or Republicans. These new treatments are lowering mortality rates. There just isn’t “a cure” and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend a couple months in intensive care, permanently ruining my health and abandoning my wife who has her own health problems, just to roll some dice with a little better odds. Do you? And, if you really think that there is “a cure” and Dems and elite experts are conspiring to keep it from the world, then you really do need to get off the internet and get some fresh air – Democratic politicians couldn’t keep a secret to save their lives. Nobody could keep such a secret. Get a grip people.

Notwithstanding all that, I have read that, if we can work together as communities, as a country and then as a world to get the virus spread rate below an R factor of 1, then the virus rather rapidly ceases spread and practically disappears. It’s quite possible that masks and simple social distancing could (again “could”) do that. Even if the R factor is greater than one but less than the exponential rate of 3 to 5 (meaning each infected person on average infects 3 to 5 others) then we could slow spread and save tens of thousands of folks from severe sickness and/or death with these mitigations until we can get adequate testing, tracing and isolation going or or we actually get a cure.

Does that answer your question, or if you have to blame one of us for Trump’s dithering, I say let’s throw Doug under the bus.