This Twitter thread is getting a great deal of attention, mostly for its dramatic crescendo.
Mmm hmm. Well, you can't say it's an outlier in the "reopen our economy" ranks. And it's an intriguing little thread, if only because it encapsulates so much of the “let it happen” thinking that the "reopen" demands are based on—and the frustration at being cooped up in a national emergency that keeps getting steadily worse, even as the attention span of many Americans is sorely tested.
Let's start with the obviously correct part.
The lockdowns, everyone surely recalls, were indeed to buy time to flatten the curve. They have been successful, except for one part: the part where the government was supposed to use the borrowed time to ramp up testing, develop contact tracing protocols, and stockpile needed equipment—as other nations did—in order to safely reopen even in an environment where the virus was still spreading.
That was the point: to buy time, and prepare for a proper reopening.
Instead, our government largely ... didn't do that. Though progress has been made, we're still in many areas near the same point we were a month ago, when we knew that shelter-in-place orders were necessary because we would otherwise be faced with innumerable hotspots that we could not contain because we did not have the tools for it. We still don't have the tools for it.
To most Americans, tests remain unavailable unless the person presents as obviously sick. In many hospitals, masks remain in short supply. The requirement for "safe" operations during a deadly pandemic is being able to track the virus, find where it is spreading from, and isolate those places and those patients. We can't. And with every passing week, the economic toll is increasing.
One new cry is that "we never had ventilator shortages" despite hospitals urgently requesting ventilators. Hooray! Shelter-in-place orders worked and states were able (when it became clear it was needed) to share supplies strategically to shore up local shortages. (This was once the intent of the national emergency stockpile before Mr. Kushner informed Americans that it was actually for federal use, not the states.) But masks, tests, and the supplies needed to run the tests are still in short supply, and contact tracing remains primitive.
And in many places in America, the curve is going up.
So we're still botching what OTHER countries were able to do in curbing the virus, instead muddling down what seems closest to an over-prolonged but Italy-like path. But we have to eat the loss and reopen anyway, say nonexperts, because businesses can't survive.
That would be terrible, but "businesses can't survive" is, in the end, a fixable problem. "One million Americans are dead" is not a fixable problem.
We can bring businesses back to life. The actual doctors, therapists, nurses, hairdressers, and day care workers—not so much. That is a magic not presently available to us.
Keeping those businesses on life support, however, would be (will be?) insanely expensive. Staggeringly. A true "survival" plan would be to pay all workers, pay businesses to stay closed, and make sure every small business can pay their bills until the reopening can happen. That would have been a superb—and even a relatively easy to accomplish—plan in March. With every passing week and month of screwuppery, however, it becomes exponentially more difficult and more expensive.
Americans have every right to be angry about that. The entire point of the shelter-in-place orders—the entire purpose behind shuttering businesses for weeks—was to limit the damage while the government bought a bit of time to react.
That is, and excuse the elevated voice here, the ENTIRE F-KING REASON THAT IT WAS REALLY IMPORTANT FOR GOV’T TO NOT FALL DOWN ON TESTING AND MITIGATION and to not CONTINUE TO WASTE TIME AS ENTIRE STATES CLOSE DOWN IN INSANELY EXPENSIVE ATTEMPTS TO BUY YOU JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE TIME.
You want a reason why the economy is going to collapse? It's because our government was too delusional and stupid to react with the required swiftness, as nations like South Korea did, and is also too pigheaded now to provide actual relief to the people/businesses impoverished by their incompetence. We are instead getting the usual dose of disaster capitalism, public-backed corporate welfare, senators burping out concerns that paying people unemployment will render them lazy, and outright cronyism of the sort that ensures Carnival Cruise Lines survives this crisis while the brick-and-mortar shops lining American streets get something between not much and nothing.
Yes, everybody needs to be really mad that the shutdowns are still in place and businesses are in dire straits and the federal government, or segments of it, seem absolutely uninterested in solving either the deadly contagion problem or the economic catastrophe problem.
Instead, the reaction of both Americans under pressure and, more significantly, people who own imperial craploads of stock in highly-leveraged public companies is to raise their arms in frustration, say "screw it, I am done," and declare that it's now giving-up time. It would have been nice if we could have followed through and saved people, but it's been weeks and the virus isn't going away. And the White House plan was that once the warmer month of April hit, the virus was going to go away.
No? That didn't happen? Damn. Well, we're all out of ideas. Sucks to be you, everybody.
There are a few flaws here, and all of them are important. If people like Mandel were under the impression that the "lockdown" was going to last only a few weeks, they were lied to and need to take that out on the dishonest near-criminals who lied to them. If people like Mandel are angry that it was not handled "responsibly," then they should demand the appropriate penalties for the people who were irresponsible and get responsible people installed in their places.
But "I am done" does not result in a reopened economy that saves jobs and businesses and everybody lives happily ever after except for the human sacrifices piled up in the economy's various closets and spare rooms. "I am done" results in exponential growth of the virus, the same overwhelmed hospitals and temporary morgues, the same struggles to find gravesites, and widespread public panic as every reopened public space and business becomes the site of a new potential hotspot that will be discovered only weeks after the fact, after a new wave of hospitalizations signals that something is amiss on 2nd Street, between the 4000 and 5000 blocks.
The American people are a resilient lot, but the notion that business owners and employees dropping like flies across the country will give the economy a much-needed shot in the arm seems to be missing a few of the middle steps.
Again, everybody should absolutely be angry that despite weeks of lockdown, there seem to be few visible signs of an "exit strategy" that does not involve just giving up and letting Americans die in the numbers originally estimated. A quarter million. A half million. Two million, depending on how eagerly governors jump to the giving-up part. And if the "grandma killers" wanted to take freedom-loving risks under the premise that it is their own lives being gambled with, then even most experts would resign themselves to that.
But asymptomatic transmission and exponential growth means every freedom fighter stands a greater chance of killing people who are Not Them than of dying themselves. Grandmas, for example. Or hairdressers. Or doctors. The people we’re most focused on saving, allegedly.
That's where demands for immediate and unobstructed liberty even during a national emergency fall short. If you want to believe that visiting "zoos" or "aquariums" or "hairdressers" in the very midst of a worldwide pandemic is not incomprehensibly selfish but instead is trickle-down patriotism of the highest form, you are welcome to those notions. Putting the same gun to everyone else's head is a less noble proposition no matter what arguments you may offer, and especially so for what amounts to a few weeks of short-term gain before—and pandemic experts near-unanimously agree—everything goes to hell again.