"Horror is when you turn into an alley and see a fiend slashing someone to pieces. Terror is when you realize that you're next." Forrest J. Ackerman
We had plenty of warning. First came rogue videos from Wuhan warning of overwhelmed hospitals. Then Italy and Iran gave us previews of what would happen when the COVID-19 tidal wave hit the United States. We watched in horror for weeks, but somehow terror never kicked in. We just kept walking down this alley.
In matters of personal health, almost every American defers to health care professionals. Sure, you have your occasional Church of Christ Scientist outlier group, but on the whole, Americans tend to follow doctor's orders. So what is different now?
I'm not sure what it is about the word "pandemic" that Americans don't quite grasp. Pandemics take their time. They aren't finished in a couple of months. People, however, evidently believe what they prefer to believe.
Dealing with COVID-19 has never been about the false dichotomy between shutting down and being open for business. It's been about seeing what's happening ahead of us in the alley, acknowledging it, and acting. If necessary, copy what has worked for other countries. South Korea has 270 deaths from the virus. That is about 1/45th the fatality rate of the United States. Let me repeat that. The U.S. has 45 times the per capita fatalities of South Korea.
The U.S. was trailing Italy and Spain by five or six weeks in terms of COVID-19 impact. But just as these countries, which instituted more stringent shutdowns than the U.S., begin to open up, the United States decides it will leapfrog those five or six weeks and re-open the same time as Italy and Spain. With this in mind, I tried to boil the re-opening debate down to a few basic questions:
1) Given the success of Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand, why would the U.S. not adopt their strategies as much as possible?
2) What makes the U.S. think that lopping off a month of shutdown should yield a result commensurate with other countries?
3) Given that U.S. rules were gentler than these other countries, shouldn't we have implemented a longer, as opposed to a significantly shorter, application of these shutdown rules?
4) Given the size of the U.S. and its disparate urban/rural texture, shouldn't we have expected that a longer, not shorter, shutdown would be required?
5) If the U.S. leadership recognizes that U.S. results will necessarily be worse than Italy or Spain because we are leapfrogging a month of shutdowns, why are we doing it?
6) Is the U.S. economy so fragile compared to Italy and Spain that we simply cannot handle the same shutdown length?
I do not understand the rush to re-open without testing and contact tracing in place. I don't understand it at all. We are not leaving this alley anytime soon. In fact, I'm not sure that we know our way out.
Bob Dietz
May 17, 2020
