was unable to coordinate an emergency response between states and cities and prevent the virus from taking hold everywhere. It would require ensuring that Americans have health-care coverage should they test positive, so there would be no incentive to avoid testing and reporting cases.īecause of failures on each of these things, the U.S. It would require financial reassurances that businesses and their workers could survive the shutdown. That would require federal, state, and city governments to work in tandem, and Americans to trust them. But if cases keep going up elsewhere, an effective shutdown may affect swaths of the country for several weeks at a time. That would be a dire move, and feel especially unnecessary in a place such as New York City, which was once the global epicenter of the outbreak, but after months of intense measures, now seems to have contained the virus. The plan cannot be to hope that that virus goes away and then to simply go back to what we were doing before.Ī more successful shutdown wouldn’t likely mean closing down the whole country at this point. The value of such a measure is entirely contingent on the quality of the plan for how to emerge from it. The shutdown would end when we are able to implement widespread testing and tracing to contain cases before they turn into outbreaks. The closest real-world example would be China, or to a lesser extent, places like Germany, where shutdowns have led to major drops in caseloads. Hypothetically, if everyone were truly, absolutely sheltered in place for several weeks, the case count would drop to zero. A “second shutdown” would not mean that the entire country is under the same directives, but it would mean that everyone is operating from the same playbook.Īs case counts once again creep up, a “second shutdown” might be the pandemic equivalent of calling tech support and describing an elaborate problem with your computer only to hear in response: Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again? The goal would be to essentially wipe the slate (nearly) clean. Instead, we had a patchwork of shutdowns determined by cities and states as they saw fit (or didn’t). Though far from the only way forward, this would mean reattempting what we didn’t manage to do in the spring: lockdowns that are precisely implemented and coordinated, in which nonessential businesses are closed and people are ordered to shelter in place. In an attempt to end the limbo, some experts have proposed that a “second shutdown”-for part or even all of the United States-could save money and lives. It is a palliative measure rather than a preventive strategy. In much of the country, contact tracing is essentially used to construct maps after an outbreak. Given limited data and testing, it’s difficult to know precisely. A preliminary analysis of one August biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, for example, suggested that the gathering may have led to some 266,000 infections and at least $12 billion in health costs. The virus continues spreading so widely and insidiously that some hot spots are impossible to discern while they can still be contained. also has nearly 40,000 new coronavirus cases a day, far more than many other industrialized countries. Consumers are still going out less and spending less than usual, and unemployment remains higher now than at any point since 2011.īut despite all these sacrifices, the U.S. Yet, as they are open, governments justify easing up on safety nets meant to help them get through the pandemic. Limitations on the number of people who can enter a store or sit down at a restaurant allow for businesses to continue operating, but with less revenue. At the same time, many businesses are struggling, in part because they are only partly open. Most of us are still making compromises in daily life, severely limiting our social interactions. The reopening is not enough to ensure economic prosperity, but the restrictions are also not enough to contain the virus and prevent needless death. The country is divided over the false binary of financial and health security. It happens when a country has an outbreak, haphazardly and incompletely shuts down, and then attempts to reopen without changing much of what allowed the virus to spread in the first place. Perhaps the least enviable status of any country during the pandemic is indefinite limbo-in which economic and physical suffering remain high, and no end is in sight. I’m an American living in Germany, and I’ve been following how some people in the United States have opposed lockdowns due to fears about “shutting down the economy.” It seems to me that even to those who believe the economy is what matters most, having a complete national lockdown for a few weeks is economically better than what the U.S. Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, James Hamblin takes questions from readers about health-related curiosities, concerns, and obsessions.
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