Some states are formally ending them, and people are going out more regardless.
Some states are formally ending them, and people are going out more regardless.
O n April 14, I asked if we were finally turning the corner on the COVID-19 crisis. Deaths were holding steady, and experts said we were at or near the peak.
“In the coming week or two,” I prayed, “we’ll hopefully see deaths decline.” I further guesstimated that “mass lockdowns can last at most about a month longer, until mid May.”
One out of two ain’t bad, I guess, especially when the one you got wrong was the one you set up with “hopefully.” Deaths have not come down even three weeks after I wrote, but there are many signs the lockdowns are starting to give way. And it’s anyone’s guess what will happen next.
Hopefully, policymakers and the public will get back to something resembling normal in a deliberate and intelligent way. Hopefully, we’re capable of controlling this thing without the extreme measures we’ve resorted to these past couple of months. And hopefully, the economy will bounce back quickly.
On the death front, we’ve seen 70,000 and are still adding about 2,000 a day. A tentative internal document from the Centers for Disease Control leaked yesterday; it projected that the daily number could rise to 3,000 or so over the next month. Also yesterday, the University of Washington radically overhauled its much-watched and much-criticized model, roughly doubling its first-wave death projection to 135,000 in the process. I’m still wishing for the numbers to start falling, but we absolutely cannot count on that happening, even if we continue current policy.
Meanwhile, many Americans, myself very much included, are getting sick of this. Cabin fever is setting in. The outdoors are warming up and beckoning. The economic damage of idling businesses is mounting — and the hopes of a fast bounceback are fading, with the Congressional Budget Office predicting that we could see 9.5 percent unemployment at the end of 2021. Doctors, hospitals, and individual patients have been choosing to postpone important medical care. Opioid overdoses may be rising. All this creates a lot of pressure to get to the next step, and rightly so.
As a result, some states are pushing forward with plans to reopen. And, as first noted at Forbes, data from Apple devices suggest that people are going out a little more — not as much as they were before all this went down, but a noticeable rise from a few weeks back:
So, the COVID situation is only holding steady, and the lockdown strategy we used to get to this point is becoming untenable. What now?
On the bright side, we’ve learned some things that can inform our efforts as we reopen. The virus doesn’t seem to spread much outside, fortunately, and there’s some evidence that kids don’t spread it much either. We’ve long known that the elderly and sick are the most vulnerable, and that viruses spread more easily in dense environments. These facts should allow us to target our efforts where they’ll do the most good: Reopen the outdoors, let the kids go back to school in the fall with some restrictions, advise the vulnerable to keep themselves safe, and be very cautious about crowded indoor environments such as meat-packing plants, offices, and nursing homes. Have different policies in different jurisdictions, because there’s no reason every rural county needs to be locked down as tightly as New York City.
We’ve also ramped up some alternative means of controlling the virus, though not as much as one might hope. Testing has roughly doubled in the past two weeks, but we could still use a lot more tests — and faster tests — if we want to identify new outbreaks promptly, frequently check people in high-risk occupations, etc. (As the economist Paul Romer has pointed out, the $25 billion Congress has ponied up for testing is less than the U.S. spends on soda each year.) Google and Apple are still working to enable apps that notify phone users when they’ve been in contact with a sick person. We could also stand to hire a lot more people to trace the contacts of those known to be infected so that they can quarantine.
Or we could hold out for a deus ex machina. Most drug treatments have proven mildly helpful at best, but an Israeli team just announced it has developed a COVID-19 antibody that neutralizes the virus. We also might get a vaccine sooner than the 12- to 18-month timeframe many predicted before, though even if that pans out, the rollout will be slow and won’t begin for months.
There’s no good option here. We can’t keep locking everything down, yet there’s zero guarantee that we can control COVID-19’s deadly spread through other means. Hopefully, things will work out.