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These days, lots of folks argue that the economic cost of containing covid disease isn’t worth it. The latest advocate of this view is Washington Post contributing columnist Gary Abernathy.

His arguments are in line with majority thinking in this section of the opinion-sphere: let’s close up shop in “hot spots,” protect those “at risk” and let the rest of America go about its business working, making money, and keeping the economy humming. He argues for “targeted mitigation focused on the most vulnerable, without the extremes of mass closures.”

What was needed was a strategic response that would allow less-impacted areas to keep their economies running, which would not overwhelm the health-care system.

Gary Abernathy, WaPo columnist

He’s dead wrong, and his argument flies in the face of established facts. But facts aren’t what he’s after. What he’s after is the emotional power of false choice — typically that means creating an impression of only two choices when, in fact, there are more.

But what I mean here by “false choice” is that he’s offering something that isn’t a really choice, because it’s impossible. He’s offering hope where it doesn’t exist. Offering a solution that’s pure fantasy.

His dream of “strategic” and “targeted” management of covid is just that: an illusion that defies both facts and common sense.

These commonly floated ideas of “strategic” closures and “targeted mitigation” may have been viable options back in early January when the first covid cases were reported in America, but we’re way beyond that now.

“At Risk” Is A False Meme — We’re All At Risk. It’s Dangerous to Say Some Are and Some Aren’t.

First, it’s a false choice to believe that you can divide the population and identify some people who are “at risk” and that others aren’t, or are even “low risk.” Everyone is “at risk.” Being exposed to this virus is like a game of Russian Roulette: you just never know who is going to get walloped and who isn’t. Most covid mortality is concentrated among the elderly, but a 102-year old man in Pennsylvania recovered from it.

And America’s “younger” population is at high risk for very very serious disease. This data should be frightening for anyone advocating business as usual for “low risk” Americans: 38% of hospitalized cases are between the ages of 20 and 54; and 48% of ICU cases are between the ages of 20 and 64.

Double or triple the number of “low risk” people engaged in “high risk” behaviors and you’re right back where you started in terms of a steep sickness curve. Letting the virus rage out of control among a supposedly “younger” and “low risk” population can still overwhelm the healthcare system. Not to mention that highly social young people can be effective super-spreaders of the disease, especially children.

“Hot Spots” Is A False Meme — Once They’re “Hot” It’s Too Late for Containtment.

Second, it’s impossible to count how many times expert talking heads on TV (e.g., epidemiologists, public health professionals, biostatisticians, doctors, etc.) have told us over and over and over: the best time for containment is when cases are low.

This virus spreads quickly; it’s about three times more virulent than influenza, and pre-symptomatic people are big spreaders. By the time any region sees a spike in cases, it’s already on the steep, exponential growth curve; the virus is already endemic in the community, and it’s spreading like wild fire. At that point it’s too late for any kind of “strategic” containment measures.

New York used a “strategic” response, keeping businesses and schools open for weeks, when “confirmed” cases were still low. But covid was spreading silently across the state, and suddenly cases mushroomed. On March 20, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the closure of all non-essential business. He said it was a strategy of “closing the valve.”

The case rate on 3/20 was 5,600, and it was already too late for New York.

Cases exploded. As of this writing, just two weeks after Cuomo “closed the valve,” cases in New York State stand at 102,870 and still doubling every six days.

So much for “strategic” management of economic closures. By the time cases spike, the community spread has become so bad that the only viable option is complete economic lockdown. So why not just bite the bullet, do it early, and save the lives???

Florida took an even more “targeted” hands-off approach and is now reaping the rewards: the state went from 51 confirmed cases on March 13 to 10,268 cases on April 2. Florida is now flying up the exponential growth curve, and it’s unlikely even the most draconian social restrictions will be able to tame the viral wild-fire raging across the state, at least not for weeks, or maybe months.

Florida’s Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried put it this way, after Gov. DeSantis finally issued a stay-at-home order, after weeks of pleading from state officials and healthcare workers:

“The piecemeal approach wasn’t working. I’m glad the governor finally came to this realization and decision. I hope it was quick enough.”

Nikki Fried, Florida Agriculture Commissioner

“Less Impacted Areas” Is A False Meme — We’re All Connected

Georgia resident Nicholas Hickman went to Disney World on vacation in early March, while covid was spreading across the U.S. out of control. This is what happened next:

A day after he returned home to Ringgold, a north Georgia city of fewer than 4,000 people near the Tennessee border, he learned that Walt Disney World planned to close its doors over coronavirus fears.

Three days later, he fell ill: head and muscle aches, dizziness and a fever that shot up to 104 degrees. After two trips to hospitals and a battery of tests to rule out other infections, doctors relented and tested him for covid-19.

“They told me that they felt like they were wasting a test,” he said, “because they only had four or five tests in the whole hospital. They kind of diagnosed and treated me for bronchitis. They said ‘really we think you just have bronchitis.’ ”

He self-quarantined, even though it would be days before he got test results confirming he had covid-19. One of his biggest fears, he said, was that he might spark an outbreak in his city — one that would start with his parents, with whom he lives. As Hickman’s symptoms began to abate, his parents felt unwell.

“They’ve been sick for the last week. My mom has been tested for it, but her results haven’t come back,” Hickman said. “No one will even test my dad. They’re like ‘your son’s got it and your wife’s got it’ so it’s not even worth [doing the test].’ ”

Washington Post

Now Hickman and both his parents are sick. All three are out of work on quarantine. And Hickman is terrified he will be the “patient zero” who sparked a local covid cluster in his rural community. He says now: “If we were told not to go to Disney, we definitely would not have gone.”

This is exactly what “strategic” and “targeted” management of covid gives you: everyone at risk, bad (and ineffective) advice on how to stay safe, zero control of the epidemic, unpredictable spread, lots of sick people, and yes, dire economic consequences.

Economic “Cost” Is A False Meme — EVERY Approach Comes With A Cost

Advocates of a “strategic” opening of the economy — one focused on “low risk” regions and people — all tend to ignore, or conveniently forget, the points above. They also conveniently ignore the potential consequences of business as usual: economic collapse because America is awash in corpses, hospitals are bursting with supposedly “low risk” patients, and people refuse to engage with each other at all.

Rep. Liz Cheney, no shrinking liberal wallflower, made the case succinctly and with the common sense so valued by Abernathy and his ilk:

There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus.

Liz Cheney

New York and Florida (not to mention Italy, Spain, and the UK) are evidence that slow response and loosey-goosey “targeted” management have been an abysmal failure in Europe and America. “Strategic response” and “targeted mitigation” do not work the way we have tried them: i.e., without adequate testing, surveillance and quarantine.

At this point in America’s covid nightmare, arguing for a continuation of the current “strategic” approaches … advocating for failed strategies in the face of lived experience that tells us exactly the opposite… is quite frankly, delusional.

The fact is, in an open economy with high social mobility, the virus WILL spread, and every open economy WILL eventually become a “hot spot” of illness and death. These are the choices:

• Close the economy early when there are few cases and here’s what you get: unbearable economic cost and limited illness/loss of life

• Don’t close the economy early, wait until you have a “hot spot” with high case counts, and here’s what you get: unbearable economic cost and exponential community spread and massive illness/death and overwhelmed healthcare systems and sick/dying healthcare workers and shortages of equipment/supplies and exorbitant medical costs for caring for sick & dying covid patients.

There is no choice that doesn’t have an unbearable economic cost. The real question is: How much illness and death are you willing to tolerate along with your economic pain?

The Only Way It Can Work

This may sound like backtracking, but eventually re-opening the economy may be possible even before covid is vanquished. The caveat is: right now, a radical, concerted, national containment effort is the only way to get the covid nightmare under control. The time for strategic and targeted approaches is long gone, even if we had had the tools to implement those approaches effectively (which we never did).

Strategically, and in targeted fashion, opening up the economy requires three essential tools, all implemented in large enough scale to clamp down on the outbreaks that will surely follow any “peak” in the infection curve.

Those tools are: testing, contact tracing, and isolation. Using these tools, several Asian economies rapidly got a handle on infections and started the process of re-opening their economies.

TESTING: We need effective tests to identify covid cases, especially pre-symptomatic covid cases that may be spreading the virus in the community unbeknownst to the infected, their loved ones, friends, colleagues and healthcare providers.

CONTACT TRACING: We need to able to quickly and efficiently find unknown cases based on tracing the contact networks of newly confirmed cases. (Relatives in Ireland who work for the HSE (Ireland’s national health service told LiteralMayhem that furloughed government employees from other agencies are being trained in contact tracing and tasked to the HSE for this job. America should do the same.)

ISOLATION: Whether it’s converted college dorms, converted motels and hotels, or other public facilities, covid patients need a place to convalesce where their condition can be monitored, medical care delivered, quick interventions applied if their conditions deteriorate… and most important, where they can be safely quarantined from spreading the disease to family, friends, co-workers, and the general public. (If you think this is communism, for God’s sake get a life.)

Our problem is that America has failed in every one of these areas, and we will need them all if one day we hope to take Abernathy up on his expert economic advice. Until then, following the lead of Abernathy and those like him is a false choice leading nowhere, except toward a healthcare catastrophe — one that would, in the end, wreck the economy much worse than any mandated shutdown ever could.

Then, on March 22, the president’s chief economic advisor, Peter Navarro, explained why the White House was not using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to direct the activities of private businesses, essentially forcing them to meet the public need for emergency supplies. (The president had “invoked” the Act so that he could use it if he felt it was absolutely necessary. But he didn’t think it was, or would be, necessary.)

“We are getting what we want without the heavy hand of government,” Navarro responded.

Except that they weren’t. Four days on, hospitals were desperate. Nurses started wearing trash bags for lack of protective gowns. The CDC, on its official website, somehow decided that recommending “bandanas” in the absence of protective masks was legitimate medical advice. Hospitals started converting veterinary ventilators for use on humans.

And instead of the federal government stepping in to manage the chaos, allocate precious resources, and force private companies to deliver a desperately needed increase in supply, what American hospitals got was: school kids sewing surgical masks; medical students holding street-side donation drives; and churches scrounging for supplies in their basements.

Yes, the richest country on Earth was reduced to what Rachel Maddow on 3/26 called “dumpster diving” for life-saving equipment and supplies.

At Long Last, a Conversion? Not likely.

Today, the White House finally announced that it was using the DPA (kinda-sorta no one is really sure how much of it is being used) to force General Motors (GM) to make ventilators — this after a Twitter spat with GM CEO Mary Barra. She said GM was willing to do whatever was required, but that it would cost millions to re-tool an electronics factory to make ventilators and she wanted help with the bills. That provoked the president’s fury and he raged at her on social media, in the end slapping GM with an executive order (again, kinda-sorta) — but it was the only company to receive one.

Questions: Why the stiff reticence to invoking the DPA? Why only one company? Why just ventilators instead of all the other stuff hospitals need?

The latter two questions are easy to answer: The president said last night on FOX TV that he doesn’t believe the projected shortages are real, based on his gut feeling. (We’ll be able to check that in a few weeks.) So it looks pretty simple: he still doesn’t think using the DPA is necessary, but he had a personal beef with Mary Barra and wanted to slap her down, all the other “fake” shortage projections be damned. This was personal.

And what about that first question? Not using the DPA because conservative Republicans deplore the “heavy hand” of government ?… Well it goes back a long long way.

“A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man’s business; the eye of the Federal inspector will be in every man’s counting house. The law will of necessity have inquisitorial features, it will provide penalties. It will create a complicated machinery. Under it businessmen will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of Federal inspectors, spies and detectives will descend upon the state. They will compel men of business to show their books and disclose the secrets of their affairs. They will dictate forms of bookkeeping. They will require statements and affidavits. On the one hand the inspector can blackmail the taxpayer and on the other, he can profit by selling his secret to his competitor.”

Richard Byrd Sr., Virginia Speaker of the House (1908-1914)

Woah. This guy sounds like the patron saint of conspiracy theorists everywhere. But that sentiment grew and grew over many decades.

Barry Goldwater, one-time Republican presidential candidate (1964) and godfather of today’s small government movement, was famous for his pithy condemnations like: “Government should stay the hell out of people’s business”; and “I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow”; and “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

Today, Goldwater would be considered a sissy by the he-men of the right. Goldwater, really a libertarian, was an early proponent of gay rights and railed against religious influence in politics. Whereas the heir to the “conservative” throne, Ronald Reagan, would eventually combine evangelical Christianity and conservative politics to create a formidable and world-changing political force.

With Reagan leading the charge, anti-government zeal became a core tenet of their right-wing political religion. One of Reagan’s most famous lines, given during his first commencement, tersely claimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

Business moguls like Mitt Romney, too, never stopped harping on the superiority of the “free market” over the tools of government in every circumstance, for every purpose, for all time. Yet it was crusader Grover Norquist, a former speech writer in the Commerce Department during the Reagan years, who helped turn free-market, anti-government zealotry into a government-killing mania: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

This is the guy who also said: “We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals — and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship.”

You gotta give the guy (and his movement) credit for chutzpah, and achievement. They certainly have gotten a lot of what they wanted in terms of shredding the social safety net and sowing bitter conflict at every level of public service (even if they so far have failed to shrink the overall size of government). But they won at a severe cost, now, to the rest of us. As put by another conversative voice, about the Republican party:

“It’s become unhinged from a relationship with the public and it’s been gained by a lot of interests — both ideological and financial,” he says. “As a result, you have policies that are crafted by lobbyists and by ideologues rather than by … sincere representatives of the public interest.”

Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, to NPR in 2012

Negative Spin Has Real-World Consequences

Holding back the “heavy hand” of federal help is, quite possibly, killing people.

Think about it this way: government just is. Every society of people needs designated people who can run things. That’s just a fact. Government is a tool, and the bigger the country, the bigger the tools needed to keep the place humming. (Pun intended.) So let’s concede, for the sake of argument, that whatever “hand” the U.S. government wields, it is necessarily “heavy.”

Peter Navarro has thus placed the heavy hand of the federal government squarely on the scale, in favor of private market evangelism. Too bad private markets are not equipped for the job of crisis management. As evidenced by… well, by the chaos we are seeing all over the country, unfolding minute by minute.

Not an hour goes by that we don’t see the failure of private markets: Drug store chain CEOs promised drive-through testing facilities all over the nation. Sorry, nope, not happening due to… you guessed it: supply shortages and logistical tangles. The president promised that Google was building a national database tool for triaging COVID testing. Nope.

Every day private markets for masks and gowns and ventilators descend deeper into chaos. The governor of Massachusetts said that a confirmed order for millions of dollars of supplies simply “evaporated” before their eyes when someone outbid them. That someone was probably another state governor, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), or some other government entity — because they are all bidding against each other in an insane frenzy that’s driving up prices. Private reserves of essential supplies in Texas were being auctioned online to the highest bidder. The “invisible hand of the market” was price gouging at the exact moment that thousands (perhaps a million or more) American lives were on the line.

And in this one sense, private markets aren’t failing; they’re doing exactly what they’re designed for: finding an efficient clearing price for goods and services. Too bad that it’s doing so at the cost of life-saving medical efficiency.

Finally, consider that it was the private market that set up all these risk dominoes to fall: shifting payrolls to part-time and gig workers to shave wage and benefit costs (reducing or eliminating health insurance benefits); reducing “just-in-time” inventory systems to threadbare levels to shave operating costs; building far-flung supply chains vulnerable to bottlenecks in the name of reducing manufacturing costs.

The system was built not built to survive a crisis; it seems designed extraordinarily well to fail in a crisis. (Except maybe the grocery store business and the food supply chain; although if seasonal workers are too sick to show up for the Spring planting season, all bets are off come the Fall.)

There Is Something Called the “Public Interest”

When one thinks of PR “spin” one rarely thinks in macro terms, but ideology is its own kind of “spin.” Savvy practitioners wield it with a heavy hand in order to short-circuit your critical faculties and provoke a knee-jerk response: you falling in line with whatever prescription they are selling.

This time, they want you to buy into the belief that the government should not usurp the role of private markets even in the name of public interest, even when governors are shouting from the rooftops that they need the feds to do just that, when millions of lives are at risk, when bodies are piling up, when the entire system is on the verge of collapse. Block your ears, close your eyes, and just keep repeating to yourself: “private markets are better… private markets are better… private markets are better…”

Joe Nocera, writing for Bloomberg, was right in his headline when he said:

“Heavy Hand of Government Is Just What Crisis Needs: Using the Defense Production Act to obtain equipment and coordinate supplies is simple common sense”

This whole “heavy hand of government” business is just an insidious form of spin. It’s an ideological confection offered to people like an enormous dollop of whipped cotton candy — frothy, sweet and easy to eat a ton of it, but it dissolves into nothing in an instant, and it’s terrible for your health. Maybe even deadly.

That’s the power of spin at work: the power to kill people, literally.