This will be the last column of 2020, a year like few others, and certainly unlike any in my lifetime. We have had pandemics before, and we have had presidential elections stolen by fraud and immense illegal votes, but not, you know, in the same year.
But when I say that "it didn't have to happen", I'm referring to the coronavirus pandemic and the aftermath thereof.
We have to set aside the gargantuan role of China and the Communist Party there, in allowing the virus to spread outside Wuhan and its borders, without allowing the world to come in and figure out how bad it was and how to contain it. I hate to "set that aside" because they are criminally accountable, but that's not the point.
Donald Trump, as president, had an extremely difficult balancing act to handle, and I may be the only one giving him appropriate credit for the dilemma he confronted. By that I mean the dual problems -- the medical problem and the economic problem.
We all understand that the two factors, medical and economic, were not only at unrelated ends, they were often at opposing ones. The president had to oversee the actions of the medical community and the CDC and, at the same time, oversee the social and economic reality of the everyday, healthy American.
Lest anyone rewrite history, let us be very clear as to what he did: President Trump chose to delegate the responsibility for the social and economic effort to contain the spread of the virus to the states via their governors, and turned his personal oversight to the medical side, working with the CDC, the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry to accelerate the development of treatments and vaccines to stop the morbidity and mortality of the virus.
This made sense, both at the time and in hindsight -- an organized medical response should be centralized to get therapies and vaccines out to the populace far quicker than ever before.
At the same time, not imposing Federal guidance but letting each state's governor oversee the social and economic steps seemed the sensible choice -- the states are very different animals, from the urban to the suburban to the rural (often all three widespread in the same state). Moreover, with 50 separate "laboratories", the success of various steps and various efforts at constraint and freedom could be (or could have been) compared and the more successful ones emulated.
In as less political environment, with fewer governors determined to reject anything from President Trump's White House, the better and more successful programs would have been emulated. And early on, even staunchly anti-Trump governors like those in New York, New Jersey and California were profusely thanking him for helping them with support -- such as the hospital ship that the president sent to New York City.
Of course, the freedom granted the governors to handle their economies with the flexibility needed was promptly abused, with the newfound power to control people's lives and livelihoods a crisis not allowed to go to waste, such as New York's Cuomo actually putting COVID-19 patients in nursing homes and killing thousands of patients. Thereafter, to save face, he tried to blame President Trump for his own mistakes, and the rest of the Democrat governors took it from there.
And yet, it didn't have to happen.
We know now, although we didn't then, is that the statistics were extremely deceptive. COVID-19 proved out not to be as deadly as first thought; many deaths of people with co-morbid diseases -- cancer, heart disease, Type 1 diabetes for example -- were attributed to the coronavirus, when the patient was dying already. Test positive? OK, must have died from COVID. There were even reports of hospitals being instructed to maximize the death toll attributed to the virus.
We know now that, given reasonable treatment, about 99.5% of all people infected with the virus (i.e., testing positive) survive, some 40% without even any symptoms. COVID-19 infections are in that way, very similar to the annual flu.
We know now that COVID-19 is an opportunistic virus, preying particularly on those with compromised immune systems, such as diabetics and heart patients, and those under therapies with immune system suppression as a side effect or goal (like transplant patients). The rest of us? For the healthy (and particularly the non-elderly), it's anywhere from nothing to a bad cold with a rare fatality. At one point, more people in Minnesota over 100 years old had died from reported COVID infections than people under 50 years old.
Knowing that, we have to look at the gargantuan cost of the shutdown, severe in most states. Small businesses were closed, a high number permanently. Extremely hard-hit were restaurants and bars, leaving literally millions unemployed. Schools converted to the utterly ineffective Zoom class. Brick-and-mortar stores closed; a great boon for Amazon but not nearly so good for mom and pop. And oh, by the way, we're on our way to $3-4 trillion, with a "t", in Federal debt that will ultimately get borrowed from places like China. Ironic, right?
And while the governors grabbed their new power to control the economy and lives of their people, others took the low road, from the media blaming the president for things the governors had done, to teacher unions agitating for their dues-payers not to have to go to work.
If we had it to do all over again, weighing the cost of the shutdown and understanding the medical nature of the virus and the disease, and if I were president, I would do this.
(1) I would let the population know that this will be painful; sick people are going to lose their lives as they do in any pandemic. It is the inevitability of epidemics.
(2) I would explain to them in as simple language as possible, that the cure -- the economic action -- cannot be allowed to be worse than the disease. It is terrible that 300,000 people died from COVID-19, yes, but many of them were going to die of their underlying disease in 2020 regardless, and to cause severe economic pain to 200,000,000 or more of our population is unsustainable.
(3) I would therefore explain that the safest course of action is to allow the virus to run its course without closing society, schools and businesses, to where over a period of some months, the general population would have been exposed. At that point, the infection rate would decline sharply as immunity became widespread. During that time, those with high susceptibility as noted above should take applicable precautions (isolation, masks, etc.), as should also be done in nursing homes and the like.
(4) I would simultaneously implement a version of the wildly successful Operation Warp Speed to get the vaccine(s) developed (and also work rigorously on applicable therapies using existing drugs). It worked for COVID-19; in ten months we have five vaccines in at least human testing, and three of those are going to patients widely as this is written with a fourth imminent. That is incredible.
We did not have to shut down the economy in 2020. We would have had more deaths, yes, we understand. But the treatment was far worse than the disease. The massive unemployment, the massive business closures, coming after an amazingly successful 2018-19 in the Trump economy could have been, and should have been, avoided.
It is ironic that of the two sides to the effort, the one that President Trump took on, the medical side, was wildly successful. The one left to the governors was, for the most part, done poorly.
History should give proper credit, but it just seems like that won't happen.
Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
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