About the only thing keeping pace with the coronavirus in the United States is the argument raging over whether or not we’ve overreacted. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has advanced an idea fostered by Dr. David L. Katz, the founding director of Yale University’s C.D.C.-funded Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and an expert in public health and preventive medicine, that would isolate the physically vulnerable while keeping the rest of the population in circulation, much as we do with the flu.
This would be fine with President Donald J. Trump, who wants the work force back by Easter, even though the week leading up to Easter — Holy Week, which coincides with Passover — is a wash as far as work is concerned, and the stock market isn’t even opened on Good Friday. (Trump could’ve avoided much of the economic shutdown by jumping on testing and also choosing his economic words more carefully. At least he’s learned to hold his briefings after the market closes.)
As a woman of a certain vintage who works in the always challenged publishing industry, I myself am sympathetic to the get-back-to-work argument. I recoiled at a New York Times post from a 73-year-old woman who has lost everything in the COVID-19 crisis. Who wants to hire a 73-year-old woman? she wrote. Who indeed? My heart broke for her even as I saw her as a dark mirror of myself.
I’m tired of the argument that Wall Street is the villain in all this. The people who maintain that filthy poultry and seafood market in Wuhan, China where the virus started are the villains. The Chinese officials who at first hid the truth and buried their heads in the proverbial sand are the villains. The strongmen who turn out not to be strong leaders are the villains. But Wall Street isn’t the villain. Wall Street remains the tide that lifts all boats, for those who seek a college education, a home of their own, a dream retirement.
And those investors employ many in the freelance, hourly economy who now have no work and no income. How long can a government bailout, no matter how broad, last for them?
Just as Wall Street isn’t the villain, neither is New York as the epicenter of the pandemic in this country. I’ve noticed people from Florida and Texas dumping on New York City and state online for not having their act together. — even though social distancing appears to be working as the number of cases in the city have dropped from doubling every two to three days to doubling every four or five days.
Of all the megacities, the Big Apple ranks 10th in population but first in urban density. It’s not possible to avoid people in New York, even though residents observe personal space as much as possible. (The idea that illegal immigrants brought the virus into New York, a global hub, is laughable.)
New York’ state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has been commended for his commanding leadership in the crisis. His daily briefings are carried globally and have everyone from Trump to residents of the Far West sitting up and taking notice. New York was one of the first states to implement containment in the suburb of New Rochelle, where the National Guard was called in not to run a concentration camp, as one overwrought poster put it, but to help hand out food. And each day New York City tests more and more people, up to 15 times more now than when the city started.
So New York — which acted with courage and purpose and without self-pity on 9/11 and in its aftermath — is doing the best it can. It survived then. It will survive now. But if I were Florida or Texas, I wouldn’t be so smug. Surely a place like Florida, whose billboards advertise sex shops on the one hand and the rights of the unborn on the other lacks the intellectual awareness to parse the subtleties of crisis. As for Texas, what role did overdevelopment in Houston play in the flooding of Hurricane Harvey? And how are those World Series champion cheating Astros doing? Not to mention the state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who said grandparents like him were willing to die of the virus rather than jeopardize their grandchildren’s economic future. Sure. Let’s go with that.
Patrick aside, the argument for an economic future is a compelling one. But it can’t be made at the expense of the medical present. Saving lives has to be the priority. But that doesn’t mean we can’t save lives and the economy, as Cuomo noted. First, why isn’t Trump invoking the Defense Production Act and putting automobile manufacturers to work making ventilators? Why aren’t we in high gear making masks, gowns and other protective equipment? Why aren’t we using artists and actors to create more PSAs on hygiene?
During the Great Depression and World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilized an entire nation. But Trumpet, who likes to think of himself as a wartime president as he hogs the spotlight at his daily press briefings, is no FDR.
Yet like Roosevelt, we are fighting a war on two fronts. We need to win both.