The hard lessons of this pandemic were discernible very early on.
The hard lessons of this pandemic were discernible very early on.
O n Monday, March 16, 2020, the White House advised all Americans to avoid gathering in groups of more than ten and urged older people to stay at home in a set of new guidelines designed to fight the coronavirus outbreak, labeling the effort “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
That set of restrictions later was summarized as “two weeks to flatten the curve,” a slogan that grew more bitterly ironic as the pandemic and its quarantine restrictions dragged on and on — now for more than a year. That call for a voluntary avoidance of large groups quickly morphed into far-reaching restrictions upon the most basic rights and normal activities of American citizens: Forty-three governors issued orders directing residents to stay at home and nonessential businesses to close.
But one year ago, our leaders in government and public health spoke as if we were entering a severe but short-lived irritation.
“If everyone makes this change or these critical changes and sacrifices now, we will rally together as one nation and we will defeat the virus and we’re going to have a big celebration altogether,” President Trump said. “With several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner and turn it quickly and a lot of progress has been made.”
If “two weeks to flatten the curve” wasn’t a deliberate lie, it wasn’t exactly the most honest and realistic assessment, either. This wasn’t just a Trump-devised unrealistic promise; at that press conference, Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci echoed the same terminology and perspective.
Dr. Birx said, “If everybody in America does what we ask for over the next 15 days, we will see a dramatic difference and we won’t have to worry about the ventilators. We won’t have to worry about the ICU beds because we won’t have our elderly and our people at the greatest risk having to be hospitalized.”
Dr. Fauci added, “The guidelines are a 15-day trial guideline to be reconsidering. It isn’t that these guidelines are now going to be in effect until July. What the president was saying is that the trajectory of the outbreak may go till then. Make sure we don’t think that these are solid in stone until July.”
Trump suggested the pandemic would be contained that spring. “It seems to me that if we do a really good job, we’ll not only hold the death down to a level that is a much lower than the other way had we not done a good job, but people are talking about July, August, something like that.”
In hindsight, “two weeks to flatten the curve” was either a wild miscalculation or an attempt to soften the blow of bad news. In March 2020, the notion of Americans getting vaccinated against COVID-19 by December seemed spectacularly over-optimistic. “Have everyone quarantine at home until cases go down” was not a long-term answer for a modern society or modern economy, or the psychological, social, or educational needs of Americans.
After two weeks, we hadn’t “slowed the spread.” Two weeks after March 16, the number of U.S. cases had increased from 4,945 to 199,353 — but even that measurement is highly questionable because of the lack of available testing in the early months of the pandemic. We thought 30,000 new cases a day in April was bad — until we started hitting 60,000 new cases a day in July, 100,000 new cases a day in November, and more than 250,000 new cases a day in December.
This was a really contagious virus, and while governors would like to pretend their executive orders and emergency laws made the biggest difference in lowering transmission rates, it looks like population density and size were among the biggest factors — the more people living closer together, the easier the virus could spread. A year on, Hawaii ranks the lowest of the 50 states in deaths per million; being a far-off, isolated island with minimal interstate travel helped. Vermont, the 49th-most populated state and 30th-most dense one, ranks second lowest in deaths per million. Alaska, the 48th-most populated state and least densely populated one in the union, ranks third lowest in deaths per million residents. Living in places with lots of wide-open spaces offered a lot more than six feet for social distancing.
Back on March 16, 2020, there were plenty of signs that normal life wasn’t coming back quickly. The same day as the White House announcement, the CDC urged Americans to cancel or postpone events with 50 or more attendees for the next eight weeks.
More than a month earlier, the Chinese government had put Beijing and Shanghai into partial lockdown. While the Chinese government is secretive and duplicitous, their actions were clearer than their words. Authoritarian regimes don’t enact such sweeping restrictions on their capital cities and urban economic powerhouses unless they are terrified of what they see.
The same day the White House held that “15 Days to Slow the Spread” press conference, I wrote:
The coronavirus is here, and it has sentenced most of us to anywhere from a few weeks to several months of a situation we’d much prefer to avoid. No classes, no hanging around with coworkers, no PTA meetings, no Little League or youth soccer, no going out with buddies to the ball game or concert, never or rarely going to the movies. Visits to Grandma and Grandpa’s house are becoming calculated risks. Few of us will be experiencing the joys and inconveniences of air travel. No family reunions, no in-person conferences . . . Perhaps we’ll once again go to the beach as summer approaches, but maybe we’ll still be keeping our distance. By the time we get through all of this, we will have started to miss all of that social contact, warts and all.
Separately, I also wondered about the long-term consequences of the schools being closed, attempts to jury-rig a system for “distance learning” over the Internet, and how long businesses that required in-person contact could keep their doors open:
Some of us might feel a little satisfaction from an interruption to the current regime of standardized testing. But how well will our children be learning in this new system? When we do get the kids back in schools, will they have backslid a bit on their knowledge and skills? Will colleges look at kids’ transcripts, see a dip in grades in 2020, and say, “Ah, yeah, coronavirus, everyone’s performance was off back then”?
. . . Putting large swaths of American life on hold is going to be an economic beat-down the likes of which we’ve never seen. The only good news is that once we get through it, we’re going to have a pent-up demand for goods and services that will make up a chunk of the damage. But the owner of a restaurant or coffee shop or shoe store has to get to that point with either no income or minimal income. (I suppose we could see a giant explosion of take-out food orders . . . but that still leaves the bars without their drinkers.)
Separately, I also picked up early on that eventually it would be impossible to adequately balance the needs of public health and the needs of economic health:
Lawmakers are in this bizarre Catch-22: The harder they restrict Americans’ movements, the more lives they save, at the cost of the economy. But if they loosen the restrictions to help ameliorate the effect on the economy, they risk the virus’s spreading more and becoming a greater risk to the elderly and the immunocompromised.
Leadership means making tough decisions — maybe even impossible ones. Being an elected leader in the United States is not just giving speeches and holding rallies and smiling in photo opportunities. It means communicating bad news to people in a crisis because they need to hear the truth. It may even mean explaining to people, “We are about to endure a hopefully brief but very intense recession in order to help protect the most vulnerable among us.”
(Man, I wrote a lot that day.) But maybe the most farsighted observation was:
We are in this mess in large part because of the decisions of the Chinese government. And once it’s safe to come out, we’re going to face some extremely consequential decisions about how we choose to treat the Chinese government after their catastrophic secrecy, coverups, blundering, and disregard for human life around the globe.
It’s starting to become safe to come out. Which means we’re due — overdue, really — for those extremely consequential decisions.