President Trump has unveiled his plan to open the economy again. While I strongly support ending the lockdown, it does raise one interesting question: what the hell was the point of all this?
There is no vaccine for COVID-19. If one is successfully devised, it probably won’t be available for another year or two or more. Of course, staying locked inside for that long was never an option, which means we are going to emerge back into society with the virus still out there and making the rounds. And this against a backdrop of a ruined economy and a healthcare system crippled by mass layoffs.
So again: what was the point?
As the lockdowns are lifted from state to state, it seems two outcomes are possible. On the optimistic end, we might return to our jobs and our lives while remaining cautious, practicing social distancing where possible, washing our hands frequently, wearing masks when necessary, and keeping nursing homes and other vulnerable populations isolated. Perhaps if we take this route, we can avoid an uncontrollable and widespread resurgence of the virus.
The more pessimistic possibility is that we throw caution to the wind, social distancing and hygiene go out the window, the doors to nursing homes are flung open once more, etc., and soon the virus has killed many thousands of additional people.
I don’t know which of these we will choose, though I’m hopeful that we’ll walk through Door Number One. But in either case, the lockdown is rendered pointless. If we can successfully stave off a cataclysmic outbreak while opening the economy, then we could have staved it off without ever shutting it down in the first place. If we can’t, then the uncontrolled outbreak was always inevitable, and all we accomplished with the shutdown was a temporary delay of the bloodbath, which we bought at the price of an economic collapse.
It will be argued that the shutdown “flattened the curve” and saved us from overwhelming the hospitals. But if there is a strategy to open the economy now while avoiding that scenario, we could have utilized that strategy from the beginning. If a shutdown is the only way to flatten the curve, the curve will become curved again whenever the shutdown ends. If the curve stays flat after the shutdown, that would seem to indicate that we could have flattened it without a shutdown.
The pro-shutdown crowd, when faced with this dilemma, has begun to argue that these measures gave us time to learn about the virus and educate the public. But “learn and educate” is very different from “save millions of lives,” which is what we were originally promised. And “we must destroy the economy in order to learn and educate” is a much tougher case to make than “we must destroy the economy to save millions of lives.” I suppose that’s why nobody attempted to make the former case until the latter had proven itself untenable.