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As the country tallies up the economic cost of its first week of fighting the coronavirus pandemic — potentially millions of job losses, a plunging stock market and apprehensions of another Great Depression — an unspeakable thought has become a whisper, and the whisper an all-caps tweet: What if we just didn’t?
WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2020
On Tuesday, President Trump said he wanted to lift restrictions by Easter despite the warnings of public-health experts, fueling a debate about the right balance between saving lives and saving the economy. Are we striking it? Here’s what public-health experts, economists and journalists are saying.
Is ‘the cure’ worse than the problem?
No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its overall economic health, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes. Resources to fight the virus aren’t limitless, the board says, and the costs of this national shutdown will soon cause “a tsunami of economic destruction” that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs.
We don’t have enough reliable data about the disease’s fatality rate to be making such drastic economic sacrifices, Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford epidemiology professor, argues at Stat. What would happen, he asks, if we simply let the disease run its course? Even in the most pessimistic scenario, the coronavirus would kill about 40 million people worldwide, roughly matching the 1918 flu pandemic. But afterward, he says, life would hopefully continue, as it did after the flu. Conversely, the short-term and long-term consequences of an economic shutdown are entirely unknown, and billions, not just millions, of lives could be put at stake.
A better way to fight the pandemic is to isolate the most vulnerable, Dr. David L. Katz argues in The Times. He suggests the United States focus its resources on testing and protecting the elderly, people with chronic diseases and the immunologically compromised. By keeping a smaller portion of the population at home, he contends, most could return to life as usual and prevent the economy from collapsing.
Between the economy and public health, a false choice?
Many find the idea of letting the disease run its course to save the economy not only morally unacceptable but also practically inconceivable.
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Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiology professor, writes in Stat that while Dr. Ioannidis may be right about the need for more data, we have already seen how the virus has ravaged China and Italy, where coffins of Covid-19 victims are accumulating in churches that have stopped holding funerals. Allowing the infection to spread is “unimaginable.”
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Sacrificing millions of lives for a strong economy wouldn’t be possible even if the country were willing to make such a gruesome trade-off, according to Will Wilkinson, the vice president of research at the Niskanen Center. (Jason Furman, a Harvard economist, echoed this point, as have many others.)
The idea that we could let the virus run its course while walling off the vulnerable is also naïve, a group of Yale health experts said in response to Dr. Katz’s Op-Ed essay, not least because we have no real way of identifying, separating and caring for such a large segment of the population. Jeneen Interlandi, a member of The Times editorial board, tweeted:
But Dr. Ioannidis is right that the economic toll of intense social distancing for months or years would be destructive, Dr. Lipsitch says. Just as a public health crisis threatens the economy, so too does an economic crisis threaten public health. “For the short term,” he writes, “there is no choice but to use the time we are buying with social distancing to mobilize a massive political, economic and societal effort to find new ways to cope with this virus.”
So, how do we cope with the virus?
China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have shown that the virus can be brought under control, according to The Times’s Donald G. McNeil Jr., who interviewed a dozen experts on fighting epidemics last week. Replicating those countries’ successes in the United States, the experts said, will take “extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens.”
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If all Americans could somehow freeze in place for 14 days and remain six feet apart, the pandemic would halt. The goal of a lockdown is to approximate such a freeze, with travel and human interaction reduced to a minimum.
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Testing must be done in a coordinated, widespread and safe way. In most cities in affected Asian countries, people also often get a temperature check before they enter public spaces.
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Finding and testing all the contacts of every positive case is also essential. Because the coronavirus tends to spread in clusters of family members and friends, the United States will need to put a system in place to ensure that the infected, once found, can be isolated and cared for outside the home.
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Production of masks, ventilators and oxygen must be ratcheted up.
The ultimate hope is to have a vaccine, but that will take 12 to 18 months. Until then, the country may have to go through rolling periods of social distancing to keep hospital caseloads manageable. But Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, the vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in The Times that if the United States intervenes immediately on the scale that China did, “our death toll could be under 100,000,” and “within three to four months we might be able to begin a return to more normal lives.”
In the meantime, what do we do about the economy?
Congress cannot repeat the mistake it made during the Great Recession of an inadequate stimulus, the economist Stephanie Kelton argues. Deficits will be large in any case, but she contends this is no reason to worry: The most fiscally responsible way for Congress to support the economy now, she says, is not short-term patches to the social safety net but ambitious, lasting improvements that will be felt by workers, not just Wall Street.
The only solution is to effectively freeze the economy in place, The New York Times editorial board writes. To save businesses, preserve the productive capacity of the economy and limit mass unemployment, the federal government must provide the money that companies are unable to earn, which will in turn allow companies to keep workers on the payroll.
Such a strategy will work in the short term, but the economy can be put on ice for only so long, according to Paul M. Romer, who received the Nobel prize in economics in 2018, and Dr. Alan M. Garber, an economist and the provost of Harvard. In the medium term, the tension between limiting the spread of the virus and restarting the economy will have to be resolved. For that to happen, the federal government must orchestrate and fund two initiatives:
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The deployment of widespread weekly or even daily testing to allow the uninfected and the immune to ease social distancing.
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A surge in the production of personal protective equipment, sufficient to cover 75 percent of the work force within four months, to prevent transmission of the virus.
With these interventions, people could return to work within a couple of months. Otherwise, they say, most Americans will survive the coronavirus, but the economy will die.
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.
MORE PERSPECTIVES ON THE PATH FORWARD
“How the Covid-19 recession could become a depression” [Vox]
“Trump Thinks He Knows Better Than the Doctors About Coronavirus” [The New York Times]
“Prepare Now for the Long War Against Covid-19” [Bloomberg]
“There’s a long war ahead and our Covid-19 response must adapt” [CNN]
“The U.S. Shut Down Its Economy. Here’s What Needs to Happen in Order to Restart.” [The New York Times]
“Why Widespread Coronavirus Testing Isn’t Coming Anytime Soon” [The New Yorker]
“The Great Empty”: A vacant world in photos [The New York Times]
WHAT YOU’RE SAYING
Here’s what readers had to say about the last debate: How are we supposed to vote during a pandemic?
Rebecca from Washington (via email): “Washington State has had all mail-in voting for years for all elections. No polling places at all. At first we missed the opportunity to connect with neighbors while voting at the local school, but soon realized that voting at the kitchen table was better.”
Eugene from New York (via email): “I am a retired computer programmer and systems analyst. I’ve also been a security officer at a small company (Mobil) so I believe that I have some knowledge on the subject. I say that absolutely we should have online voting. But there is no doubt that we do not have the technological means to establish a secure system in the next year or so.”
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