Politics & Government
State of Virginia in for the Win! Stay at Home Order until Jun 10
April 15th, April 30th, June 10th! When to open the economy? Economy vs. Health! Fighting coronavirus to win!
The Koch brothers and Trump wanted to reopen the country and the economy to ensure that the stock market shot back up and everyone went to mass on Easter Sunday. But is that really what the country needs right now? First Governor Cuomo of NY extended the NY PAUSE directive through April 15th. Then Trump finally agreed that the earliest we can start trying to reopen is April 30th. Today, Governor Northam of Virginia lapped them for the win with a stay at home order through June 10th .(https://www.governor.virginia.gov/media/governorvirginiagov/executive-actions/EO-55-Temporary-Stay-at-Home-Order-Due-to-Novel-Coronavirus-(COVID-19).pdf )
At some point however, we will have to start considering what it will take to reopen the country not so much in terms of date but in terms of process. One of the proposals has as its lead author, Scott Gottlieb, a former Trump FDA commissioner.
https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/national-coronavirus-response-a-road-map-to-reopening/
Find out what's happening in Redwood City-Woodsidefor free with the latest updates from Patch.
The report lays out four phases:
Phase 1: which we are all in right now and has as its goal providing an increase in hospital critical care beds and an increase of testing to 750,000 people a week to track the epidemic.
Find out what's happening in Redwood City-Woodsidefor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Phase 2: A state sees a sustained reduction in new cases for at least 14 days, and its hospitals are able to provide care without being overwhelmed.
Phase 3: The nation has a vaccine or drugs to treat covid-19 in place and the government launches mass vaccinations.
Phase 4: The nation starts rebuilding its capacity to deal with the next pandemic by building up its scientific and public health infrastructure.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/29/coronavirus-strategy-economy-plan/
Sounds reasonable enough until you realize that getting to Phase 2 could be very easy to achieve by simply no longer reporting the true numbers. When Chinese officials faced pressure to reopen the economy, magically the numbers improved almost overnight which is why informed people had trouble understanding them.
As the NY Times has noted in China:
“Hospitals could input patients’ details into a computer and instantly notify government health authorities in Beijing, where officers are trained to spot and smother contagious outbreaks before they spread.
It didn’t work.
After doctors in Wuhan began treating clusters of patients stricken with a mysterious pneumonia in December, the reporting was supposed to have been automatic. Instead, hospitals deferred to local health officials who, over a political aversion to sharing bad news, withheld information about cases from the national reporting system — keeping Beijing in the dark and delaying the response.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/world/asia/coronavirus-china.html
If we want the same thing to happen here, this is the way to do it. Incentivize public officials and hospital administrators to stop telling the truth.
Think this isn’t going to happen. We already we have the following articles
Dr. Fauci has explained and Governor Cuomo has stated that right now we are behind the eight ball. In other words, the virus is setting the timeline. Essentially Governor Northam acknowledged that by setting a more realistic timetable ten weeks out. Thinking that we can set a shorter timeline assumes we have answers to a lot of questions. The reality is that we still don’t know how to stop the virus. Maybe we will get lucky and the virus will turn out not to like warm weather. However, if that is not the case; the Chinese example not to mention the Italian example would lead one to believe that Governor Northam’s order is the most appropriate. It will surely be quickly adopted by a lot of states.
Our ability to get to phase 2 depends on whether we are able to test enough people to make quarantine and isolation decisions based on tests but even more importantly on whether or not getting the disease once really provides immunity to the disease for the individual going forward. I don’t think we really know enough about either aspect. The first assumes that the person cannot test negative even though he/she is a carrier. The second assumes that antibodies will remain in an individual and protect that individual going forward. The newspapers are full of cases of someone who tests negative first and then tests positive. The assumption is that the individual got the virus between the two events. However, that is really only an assumption and it may prove to be wrong. In addition, there have already been cases of reinfection in China which is why China closed its borders. It is hard to know whether in the cases of reinfection, the body hadn’t produced enough antibodies or whether the virus mutated enough to work around the former antibodies.
As Governor Cuomo noted this morning, healthcare workers are our soldiers in this fight we need to support them in any way we can through this first critical phase 1. We need to get them sufficient personal protective equipment so that they do not get infected. We need to get them more support as in more healthcare workers so that the ones on the frontline don’t collapse from exhaustion. And just as importantly, we need to admire and thank them for their efforts.
At this point moving to Phase 2 is the goal. When we can get there we can then start trying to get ahead of the virus with proper planning for Phase 3 and Phase 4.
E pluribus unum!
