This coronavirus crisis is hard. And it’s going to get a lot harder. President Donald Trump is no doubt right when he says, “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down.” Americans are can-do people. We don’t take well to “can’t do.”
But the hard truth is that unprecedented restrictions on our freedoms are necessary – because they’re the only weapon we currently have against the dangerous, insidious coronavirus. We might even consider changing the slogan on our New Hampshire license plates to “Live Free and Die.”
Humans everywhere have a hard time with uncertainty. But that’s the state we’re all living in right now. And we’d better get used to it, because it will take some time for the fog of this antiviral war to clear. It’s very likely that different parts of the country – including ours – will become coronavirus hot spots at different times. And even if the danger abates in the upcoming warmer months, experts currently expect this vigorous new microbe to come roaring back next November.
That’s why I cringed on March 16 when the president and his chief coronavirus advisers stood in front of posters proclaiming “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
Call it Fake Expectations. There was no way we could have turned this around in 15 days. We won’t even know by that March 30 deadline if we’ve slowed the spread, since we’re so far behind in testing people for infection. After all, the infections emerging on that date will reflect people who got infected back when the White House put out that wishful 15-day promise. Coronavirus deaths, still increasing every day, are an even more lagging indicator.
And then there’s the new notion, repeatedly and forcefully asserted by the president, that we should drop all precautions and get the economy back to normal by Easter. The president’s chief coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, an honest man who understands the danger of new diseases better than anyone on the planet, is trying (once again) to walk back that dangerous notion.
“He put that out because he wanted to give some hope to people,” Fauci told NPR’s Noel King on Thursday. “I’ve spoken to him about it…and he keeps saying that although he would like that to be the date, he’s open-minded and flexible to make sure that the facts and the pattern of the virus is going to determine what we’re going to do.”
That would be reassuring if we could be sure that the president won’t be swayed by the enormous pressure to get the country back to business-as-usual – and the threat that drastic public health measures pose to his reelection. He put it plainly during the daily White House briefing on Wednesday evening: ”I think there are certain people that would like [the economy] to do financially poorly, because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls.”
At the same time, the president appeared to walk back his back-to-work-by-Easter proclamation. “I would say by Easter we’ll have a recommendation,” the president said.
This kind of wildly mixed messaging is exactly the wrong approach to the scariest public health threat in a century. Until scientists come up with a vaccine of proven efficacy (free of surprise side effects like the Guillain-Barre paralysis caused by a swine flu vaccine back in 1976), the only weapon we have against this new coronavirus is radical, universal, sustained change in human behavior.
And that, as any public health expert will tell you, demands clear, consistent and credible explanations of what’s required of us in the coming months – and why.
Richard Knox is a veteran journalist who specializes in medicine and public health. He lives in Sandwich.