No, the Cure is Not Worse than the Disease.
- Mar 24, 2020
- 6 min read
Look, I said it in my last blog before any of the rumblings even started. It hasn't even been a week and now Fox and the businesses that control it is disseminating word to the President and his followers: "The Cure is Worse than the Disease." Trump and is administration is strongly hinting that after this "15 day" run of shutdowns (of which he never actually ordered and simply let each state decide), we will declare victory and start the economy back up.
“We can’t have the cure be worse than the problem,” Trump told reporters at a briefing Monday, echoing a midnight Sunday tweet. “We have to open our country because that causes problems that, in my opinion, could be far bigger problems.”
“Life is fragile, and economies are fragile,” Trump said, insisting he could protect both.
While he acknowledged there were trade-offs — “there’s no question about that” — he claimed that, if closures stretch on for months, there would be “probably more death from that than anything that we’re talking about with respect to the virus.”
His top economic advisor agrees with his sentiment:
“We can’t shut in the economy. The economic cost to individuals is just too great,” Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, said in an interview Monday on Fox News Channel. “The president is right. The cure can’t be worse than the disease, and we’re going to have to make some difficult trade-offs.”
What Kudlow and others are hinting at when they say "make some difficult trade-offs" is that we need to be ready to just accept that this virus will run its course and we are powerless to enact the measures necessary to curb it. Look, if you didn't read my last post, here's the raw numbers of "trade-offs" we'd be looking at if we scale down the social distancing, according to a modeling study of the virus from the Imperial College of London:
"In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months (Figure 1A). In such scenarios, given an estimated R0 of 2.4, we predict 81% of the ... US populations would be infected over the course of the epidemic."
"For an uncontrolled epidemic, we predict critical care bed capacity would be exceeded as early as the second week in April, with an eventual peak in ICU or critical care bed demand that is over 30 times greater than the maximum supply"
"we would predict approximately 2.2 million (deaths) in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality."
Ok, so I know some people, and I struggle to even call them people at this point, are looking at that 2.2 million dead number and thinking "Eh, its probably overblown. And even if it's true, it'll be worse if the economy stays shut down! We need to take the lesser of two evils."
Fine, OK. You're cool with 2.2 million preventable deaths because you cannot possibly imagine any sort of alternative. This country can't figure out how to survive and care for its citizens without that GDP pumping for even two weeks. Greatest country on earth, indeed.
But, you need to dig a little deeper into it. It won't be like we get 2.2 million deaths, the hospitals are a bit packed for a few weeks, and we all just hunker our shoulders, pull up our bootstraps, and keep soldiering on and juicing up that sweet sweet economy. No, reread the other quote from that study as to why ending social distancing is absolutely an unviable option, even if you are comfortable with over 2 million dead Americans;
"For an uncontrolled epidemic, we predict critical care bed capacity would be exceeded as early as the second week in April, with an eventual peak in ICU or critical care bed demand that is over 30 times greater than the maximum supply in (USA). "
Yes, over 30 times greater demand for hospital care. The study predicts that we will have over 30 million people needing hospitalization due to this. Even if their modeling is off by a factor of 2, that's still over 15 times the capacity of our healthcare system. And it won't be an even distribution across the country, nor is our hospital supplies an even distribution. Some places will be massively overwhelmed with very few hospital beds and care available. With our extreme lack of PPE across the nation for our healthcare workers, nurse and doctors will get completely overwhelmed, they will contract the virus, and some of them will be out of work for weeks while others will die, which will cause the overwhelmed healthcare industry to be even moreso.
This scenario will absolutely shut down this country. I don't understand why I have to explain this to people; You can't have an economy in an industrialized modern nation if you have no functioning healthcare. Do you think all the other things that hospitals and doctors do in a normal functioning society will take a back seat for months? No one will need emergency care from car crashes, strokes, pregnancies, cancers, or other somewhat routine procedures. Is that what we imagine will occur, that we'll all just soldier on while none of that is available and bodies are piling up in the streets? That's exactly what we are agreeing to if we want to lax these social distancing norms within the next few days or even the next few months.
Our Leader and others on Fox news are trying to sell the fact that there "simply is no other option." And that "we can't survive without an economy." What they really mean is those top executives and all the trading brokers and CEOs on Wall Street want their funnel of money turned back on, even if its just going to be a very short term gain before it all crashes back down when this country shuts down, for real this time. There are other ways out of this. The President has broad power to enact sweeping executive action to help Americans right now. He can actually use the powers of the Defense Production Act to nationalize businesses into making the millions of masks and tens of thousands of ventilators we will need (he hasn't).
He could be coordinating with the military to dispere supplies and assistance to the most hit states like New York and Washington (he hasn't).
He has the ability to pressure democrats and republicans in congress to negotiate a deal to help Americans right now, and for months to follow (he hasn't. And no, an angry tweet does not count as helping negotiating.)
Trump should be in meetings 24/7 this very second and for the entire past 3 weeks at the minimum to fight this pandemic. He should be talking to economy, policy, and healthcare experts at all times to find better options and to make them reality right now. He isn't doing any of that. The man bragged about never reading books, and couldn't get through daily security reports without his aides mentioning his name every few pages to keep his attention. He can't make it through a single Coronavirus meeting in one entire day without nodding off:
This is the man you all think is fighting for us, exploring every option for the American people to keep this country afloat? He's been twiddling his thumbs on Twitter this whole month, and hasn't lifted a finger personally to help. He's actively doing more damage in his speeches, telling everyone it'll be gone soon and we'll all get back to work, and spreading dangerous lies about completely untested "miracle cures". Say what you want about George W Bush (and I have many things to say about him), that man at least would be working day and night and surrounded by a competent staff by now to get this crisis resolved. All Trump wants to do is give up and get his stocks back up.
It's absolutely horrifying to me the depths that some of our leaders and a good portion of our citizens are sinking to. That they're ready to, at a minimum, sacrifice over 2 million Americans for the almighty dollar. That they cannot fathom any other way out of this. That they cannot comprehend that the actual data suggests that because our hospitals will be completely overrun, the death toll could be much much higher than that. That we as a country, and therefore the economy, cannot function without hospitals and healthcare.
At this point, I have absolutely no respect or empathy for you if you are ready to make that choice, in the face of all the data. You are ignorant and small and you deserve the fate you are willing to send a good portion of this country to; Scared, alone, feverish, gasping for breath. No family to comfort you in your dying hours. 2 million dead should be an unacceptable figure in any circumstance. We should try anything before resorting to that. We can't even make it a week so far without our resolve cracking. The fact that it will actually be much worse for the entire country than simply those 2 million dead when 30 million people need hospitalization shouldn't factor into your decision. But, since you are callous and lack all empathy, I hope the fact that our entire country potentially collapsing and therefore affecting you personally as a result will make you change your mind. If you even have one left at this point.
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