Are we opening too fast & causing unnecessary death, or opening too slowly causing unnecessary economic pain. The reality is that due to Trump’s failure to institute a national testing program, we may be doing too much of both. The worst part is we don’t really know. The resulting in-fighting, politicization, uncertainty, confusion, stress and either inaction or too much action is an absolute disaster for America.
There is an old saying that “The person with two watches never really knows what time it is.” American decision-makers are the people with 50+ watches right now. The outcome is a worst-case scenario of dis-information, misinformation, and turning what should be data-based decisions of life and death into at least partially misinformed opinions.
For every piece of data showing one thing, another state has other information. They’re not even counting cases and deaths the same. We have no common frame of reference, so we argue about the data, rather than use clear data to make decisions that will save lives and the economy.
When economies started shutting down, nearly every public health department around the world said there were two keys to managing this and being able to reopen safely, minimizing both deaths and economic harm:
- Begin social distancing and wearing masks, and isolating those who are sick (different article)
- Create a massive testing, tracking and program to identify hot spots early and isolate those infected.
Four months later, every country that followed those two steps has a fraction of the cases and deaths and their economies and schools are now re-opening faster and safer than ours. How do we know? They all put in place a singular testing, tracking and isolating program that is now working well. Yes, the data they work from is imperfect – it is a pandemic after all. But at least they are all looking at a single set of data and making decisions based on agreed to criteria and a reliable system for measuring it.
Trump’s paralysis on this issue has left us all paralyzed now. He literally left the supposedly most advanced country in the world without the system and resulting data to be able to make good science-based decisions. The end result is that while we are using different data sets to argue whether there is necessary economic harm, or too many deaths, the reality is we likely have done BOTH, simply by not knowing which is right.
It is a failure so avoidable, so massive in scope and impact, that it is difficult to fully grasp just how utterly complete and devastating failure it is. Tens of thousands of lives and trillions in economic gains lost. All so Trump could have someone else to blame when it didn’t go well.
I’m no lawyer, but if this doesn’t fit the criteria for criminally negligent, I don’t know what would.
(480 words)
Patrick On Politics 