The stories have been so scary lately, many are saying to turn off the news to keep your sanity. Much of the mainstream media tends to cover the pandemic like a horse race, counting the number and broadcasting the reach, without analyzing potential solutions and mitigation strategies. This is a disservice to the public because it glosses over the fact that we have hard choices ahead and we need to start strengthening the sense of civic duty and public resolve to fight this pandemic.
So far the strategy in much of the West has copied China’s in Wuhan: draconian blanket lockdowns to try to contain and then stamp out the virus. However much China touts itself as successful due to its claim that it now has no new cases in Wuhan, the containment strategy was a failure. This is because prior to locking down Wuhan, the measure was announced and a deadline was set, a tactic which allowed thousands if not millions to escape the area, some of whom carried the virus with them. These “quarantine refugees” spread the virus outside of China to places like Iran, Korea, Japan and eventually Italy. China’s police state has ensured that the rest of China can be monitored heavily and those “refugees” could be contained, but once the virus left China and made it to countries with no experience of dealing with a pandemic, the cat was out of the bag.
Lock Downs Are Not Logical or Feasible in the Long Run
The problem with an indiscriminate lockdown is that it strangles the economy and only slows the spread of the virus, it will not stop it. There has been much talk of flattening the curve, without recognition that there could be multiple curves in the coming year.
Let’s assume that we do flatten the curve with a lockdown in places like California and New York. If we experience a peak and then slowly start to return to normal, there will still be sick people and the virus will likely still be on things like door handles and elevator buttons, even if they are cleaned. Why? Because right now we are flying blind, we don’t know who is infected, where they are going, or who they have had contact with. The virus is spreading silently and undetected and our testing is woefully behind it. Authorities are still unprepared, despite their best efforts. People that are still infectious and a-symptomatic could easily go back to work, touch a bunch of surfaces or be close to people and start a new outbreak cluster. What are politicians going to do once it spreads to thousands again when this happens? Lock down the whole country again and spend another trillion dollars?
This tactic is just not economically feasible. The initial data coming out of China’s economy is much worse than expected. Industrial output for China in January and February, which was expected to fall 3% compared to a year earlier, fell 13.5%. Retail sales fell 20.5%. Fixed asset investment, which measures things like spending on machinery and infrastructure, fell 24% or 6 times more than predicted. These are just the initial numbers, in the US, 1.5 million people are expected to file for unemployment in the next week. Locking down the economy runs the risk of a downturn potentially more severe than the financial crisis.
Right now politicians and technocrats are approaching this much the same way they did the financial crisis of 2008-2009. The focus is totally on the economy and just throwing money at the problem. This is not enough, there needs to be a dual front war with public health being the primary battle and the economic one being secondary. The reason being we need a concrete and comprehensive plan to save lives now. If we just do a back of the envelope calculation we can see how many need to be infected to build up herd immunity and how many may die in that process.
If each infected person infects 2-3 people, according to epidemiologists, we would need 50% to 70% of the population to become infected to get herd immunity. However, with social distancing we can reduce that infection ratio to 1 person infecting only 1 other person and herd immunity can be built up over a smaller proportion of the population. If we just guess a number (and this is a total guess by me) say 30%, and assume a 1% mortality rate and also assume it will continue to affect only adults, we are looking at 480,000 deaths in the US. That’s about as many Americans as died in WWII. These are sobering numbers but better than 2.2 million dying if there were no measures put in place.
The other alternative is a vaccine, but given how fast the virus is spreading, it would be irresponsible to just hope and wait while we could be taking mitigating measures today to save lives.
Copy Korea, Not China
It is looking like the best model to try and solve this lies with Korea. The basic tactic there is to spot clusters, implement a targeted quarantine and only lock down a small proportion of the population so the rest can go about out business to keep things functioning. This will require a massive mobilization across the US which needs to include the best features of the Korean plan including:
1. Taking over unused facilities like school dorms, gyms etc. to be prepared to house patients.
2. Make and purchase from around the world as many testing kits as they can find and deploy them all over the country.
3. Build pandemic “go teams” which will quickly track down those infected. Isolate them and find out who they’ve been I contact with.
4. Invoke national emergency civil defense laws to gather data from tech companies on the recent movements of those infected and share that with the public similar to what Korea has done.
5. There will not be enough ventilators, bed etc so a screening system will be needed to classify those that are confirmed sick. We can look to Korea again for an example which was described in Science Magazine:
High-risk patients with underlying illnesses get priority for hospitalization, says Chun Byung-Chul, an epidemiologist at Korea University. Those with moderate symptoms are sent to repurposed corporate training facilities and spaces provided by public institutions, where they get basic medical support and observation. Those who recover and test negative twice are released. Close contacts and those with minimal symptoms whose family members are free of chronic diseases and who can measure their own temperatures are ordered to self-quarantine for 2 weeks. A local monitoring team calls twice daily to make sure the quarantined stay put and to ask about symptoms. Quarantine violators face up to 3 million won ($2500) fines. If a recent bill becomes law, the fine will go up to 10 million won and as much as a year in jail.
A Pandemic Patriot Act
A solution like this will require changes to US law which will be new and controversial. For this we also have precedent though through Korea. The country suffered an outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS in 2015 which saw an initial bumbled response very similar to what we are seeing in the US now. The response lacked both transparency and testing kits and as a result 186 people were infected with 36 dying, a much more deadly mortality rate than with Covid-19. In response, the government enacted new legislation which gave the government sweeping powers once a public health crisis is declared. The law blog Law Fare Blog described the legislation:
Article 76-2(2) of South Korea’s Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act (IDCPA), for instance, was amended in the aftermath of MERS to equip the minister of health with extensive legal authority to collect private data, without a warrant, from both already confirmed and potential patients. The article expressly mandates that private telecommunications companies and the National Police Agency share the “location information of patients … and [of] persons likely to be infected” with health authorities at their request. This is in addition to Article 76-2(1), which already enables the health minister and the director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control to require “medical institutions, pharmacies, corporations, organizations, and individuals” to provide “information concerning patients … and persons feared to be infected.”
Together, these provisions have allowed authorities to extract surveillance footage, credit card histories and cellular geolocation data of both confirmed and potential patients without a warrant. This explains how the South Korean government has been able to rapidly “contact-trace” hundreds of thousands of its own citizens to curb the outbreak.
Super Hero’s Needed
In fact, the idea of go teams and other government sponsored measures could also provide an economic backstop to give people work fighting the pandemic rather than sitting around idly collecting checks in quarantine. It would also invigorate a renewed sense of civic and community pride as people pitch in to do their part to fight the pandemic.
There could be neighborhood units, funded by the government, which would track down the sick, find out who they were in contact with, make sure they stay quarantined and deliver food and medicine is needed (also to be funded by the government). Some of these workers may get sick themselves so there needs to be strict qualifications that they be relatively healthy and have no underlying conditions. They also need to be aware they are taking on risky jobs.
Manufacturers for critical needs could get direct government assistance immediately. Teams of newly hired workers, with government and private industry cooperation, would expand factory capacity and manpower. Resources would be directed at producing enough masks, ventilators and other medical equipment as needed as fast as possible.
Most controversially and similar to in Korea, the government could partner with tech companies to track the movements of the infected and the potentially infected. They could then contact those they may have come in contact and order them to be quarantined. The go teams and national guard would enforce and monitor these people. Once the pandemic is over each of these people will have a right to return to anonymity and have their data deleted by the government with confirmation from the authorities.
Conclusion: Appeal to Our Best Attributes
To paraphrase from WWII propaganda, if you were to look back on this time and people were to ask what you did during the pandemic, how will you answer? We have an opportunity for national solidarity and civil participation on a scale that has not been seen since WWII. We need to be laser focused on an effort to save millions of our fellow citizens, markets will need to function and stimulus will be needed but the economy needs to take a back seat for now. The focus needs to be on lives going forward.
Out capacity and willingness to help one another needs to be harnessed through leadership and decisive action now. We don’t need this from the President per se, we just need him and the administration to sign on. There is nothing that says that a President has to lead us, it could simply be someone like Anthony Fauci or Mario Cuomo seizing the national dialogue and agenda pulling the rest of the country with them through results. There is still hope left in a response and still time to implement it but we need to hurry.
The information provided by www.cashchronicles.com is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered legal or financial advice. You should consult with an attorney or other professional to determine what may be best for your individual needs. www.cashchronicles.com does not make any guarantee or other promise as to any results that may be obtained from using our content. No one should make any tax or investment decision without first consulting his or her own financial advisor or accountant and conducting his or her own research and due diligence. To the maximum extent permitted by law, www.cashchronicles.com disclaims any and all liability in the event any information, commentary, analysis, opinions, advice and/or recommendations prove to be inaccurate, incomplete or unreliable, or result in any investment or other losses. Content contained on or made available through the website is not intended to and does not constitute legal advice or investment advice and no attorney-client relationship is formed. Your use of the information on the website or materials linked from the Web is at your own risk.