CommentsONE MAN’S OPINION-I am not a medical doctor, nor do I play one on television, but I do watch a lot of TV. My favorites shows are Cuomo Live from New York, the Garcetti-Barger-Ferrer News Hour plus Dateline Newsom.
I have gleaned some principles about Covid-19. First, it is not a question of if you will get Covid-19, but when.
There Are Two Ways to Get Covid-19
Since no one has immunity to the new virus and it is highly contagious, everyone will get it until we reach herd immunity. The two basic ways to reach herd immunity are:
(1) in a potentially lethal form from another person, or
(2) in a life-affirming form from a vaccination.
Because we have yet to develop a vaccine, the lethal form is the only way for the population to achieve herd immunity today.
Public Health Officials Have Two Basic Goals
(1) Slow down the rate of infection so that our healthcare facilities can treat normal healthcare patients and the Covid-19 patients at the same time. To the extent more people get Covid-19 than the hospital capacity to handle both types of patients, the death rate will soar. The first undertaking to avoid this disaster was to greatly expand hospital capacity. California did that.
(2) Vaccinate enough people so that society has herd immunity. When there is no vaccine, the vaccination route does not exist. Thus, while the world works on developing a vaccine, the only moral public health strategy is to slow down the rate of transmission of the virus to the point that medical research can find, produce and distribute a vaccine to the entire population.
The only way to slow down the transmission rate is Safer at Home with strict social distancing when not at home. Social distancing is both spacial and temporal. “Spacial” means if you get too close to someone with the virus, you are likely to get it. Thus, it is necessary for people not to get near each other. “Temporal” refers to the fact that people shed the virus which lies in wait for non-infected persons to come along and then the virus infects them. This occurs at the grocery store or at the gas station when an infected person touches a handle and then non-infected persons come along 10, 15, 30 minutes later and touch that handle.
There Is a Third Route to Herd Immunity
There is a third approach, i.e. the Trumpian Approach. Because the Covid-19 death rate is highest among people who are not actively in the workforce, such as the elderly and people with serious pre-existing medical conditions, letting the virus spread rapidly through the entire population will kill off primarily non-workers. Under the Trumpian Open Up Now policy, it does not matter if everyone in the nearby convalescent home dies as long as the brokerage firm down the street is unaffected.
The young asymptomatic workers are the other end of the spectrum from the highly vulnerable elderly. Not only are younger workers less likely to die, the severity of the disease may be so mild that they can continue to work. So, the metric here is: non-workers die, workers live.
The Open Up Now Political Calculus Is Simple
Texas’ GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick first hoisted the trial balloon on this approach back in March when he declared that “lots of grandparents” are willing to die if that means young people can get back to work. A month later, his message is the same.
“There are more important things than living, and that’s saving this country for my children and grandchildren and saving this country for all of us,” he said Monday, April 20, 2020.
Under the Trumpian approach, herd immunity is most rapidly reached by infecting as many people as possible as soon as possible which means opening up everything now. It is a matter of which statistic is most important: The Dow Jones Industrial Average or the number of dead old people.
REALITY CHECK
Most states reject the Trumpian approach. New York, California, New Jersey, place human life ahead of quick business profits. While Texas now advocates for more dead old people, when Texas’ death rate triples in one week to over 3,000, while California’s drops to 25% of its high, Lt. Gov. Patrick won’t be so popular.
There is no gainsaying that a few yahoos will rush to the beaches and parks and hold protests, crowding together without masks. Within a week or two, the up-tick in Covid-19 hospital admissions will delay the sensible plans to open up based upon data and science. Hopefully, we will have enough sophisticated data to ascertain the extent to which Newport Beach’s impetuous folly of having 40,000 beach goers on Saturday screwed the rest of Orange County.
How to Morally Open Up
The hasty way we had to close down can help us understand how to safely open up. Because Trump had destroyed the national capacity for mobilizing to stop the initial wave, we had to act fast and we made mistakes. There was no time to prepare for the shut-down. One day Garcetti declared, everything is closing except “essentials.” There was no time to construct plexiglass in grocery stores. We did not have masks or PPE for clerks, we had not increased our supply of toilet paper or Lysol (no, not even the drinkable kind). So people rushed into crowded grocery stores, spreading the virus at mach speed.
Data, Science and Thinking
Simplistic people are ignorant that that their savior, as they see him, lacked the foresight for long range planning. Instead, they deny reality and call anything they dislike “fake” or a “hoax” or a plot against them. Jesus does not save the faithful from Covid-19 nor did he preach, “Verily I say unto thee, let the old people die and then divide their wealth among the young.”
Some governors, but no national leaders in either party, have thought out prudent plans, based on data and science, as to how to save both lives and the economy. But because the governors’ plans are complex, detailed, and flexible, as new data constantly calls for adjustments, they cannot be described here. Thoughtful planning based on data and science is how an intelligent and moral society functions. ”Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” Deut. 30:19
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams’ views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Cartoon: Scott Stantis/Chicago Tribune. Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams