Avoiding new waves can't be the standard for reopening the economy and our country. Surely you can't possibly believe we can mostly shut down the world until a safe vaccine is developed, mass produced, and used on us, can you?
The point of a shorter shutdown is to buy some time to help us be better able to treat new cases and contain outbreaks in an opened economy--no matter what the terms of an "opened" economy are (good luck with having Michigan Stadium seating post-Wuhan Flu so closely packed that not only can I tell if my neighbor has coins in her pocket, I can tell if they are heads or tails facing outward).
The Germans already decided to start the process. I wish them luck and hope we can learn from them.
And with luck and the weight of history, the virus could mutate into a less deadly form (tip to Instapundit).
I know there is a media theme that there is a partisan divide over the Wuhan Flu with conservatives dismissing the pandemic's seriousness while the left practices SCIENCE and concern (well, they only became concerned weeks after complaining that Trump throttled back air travel from China).
But I suspect that media narrative is built 90% on conservatives recognizing that there is more than one threat with the Wuhan Flu while liberals see nothing but the Wuhan virus (and they refuse to call it that and you have to know they are mere weeks from calling it the Trump Virus).
I won't pretend to know what pace we should reopen. And I haven't been shy about saying much of the issue is way outside my lanes. But don't pretend staying closed is an option.
Surely that much is obvious, isn't it?
UPDATE: I've worried that we can't just restart our economy as if it is a machine idling at our direction.
Yeah (tip to Instapundit):
It’s a foundational premise of macroeconomics that the only way in which this machine can malfunction is to be either under-fueled or over-fueled. Studying the details of the economy’s inner workings is the province of microeconomists. The best microeconomists have learned that the economy isn’t a machine. It is, instead, a complex and ever-evolving process of billions of human actions, each adjusting in real time to the signals—market prices—generated by the actions of consumers and entrepreneurs across the globe. Though the outcomes of this process can be tallied up in monetary terms and reported as GDP figures, to focus on only these aggregate outcomes is to miss the all-important details of the economic process.
This will be hard, I think. I hope I'm wrong.
UPDATE: When the pandemic crisis is serious and global, I'd have hoped that the Democrats would abandon their standard false charge that Republicans just want people to die because Republicans want to slow the rate of growth of budget item X. But no:
No, those who want to reopen the economy don’t want to kill old people. And those who want to maintain a rigorous COVID-19 lockdown don’t want to kill jobs. Sane people on both sides want to ensure our physical health along with our economic health.
It’s not either/or; it’s both/and.
If we could just start with that premise, it would be great. Okay? The virus is not the only variable to consider. Tip to Instapundit.
