Governors

State governors were faced with an overwhelming demand on their hospitals or a near future which promised that and, yet, no national policies or guidelines. They decided to protect their citizens in the only way that was available to them—general lockdown of society.

They could not identify who had the disease (insufficient testing). They could not stop its transmission because healthcare workers didn’t have sufficient Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Those workers could catch COVID-19 and give it to their families and closest associates.

This lockdown has led to an intense contraction of business and leisure activity as the empty incoming road to an airport attests.

How We Got Here

The US has 1/3 of worldwide cases and a quarter of worldwide deaths, with just 1/25 of the world’s population.
Not the numbers of a successful handling of the pandemic.

No one wants a nanny state, but Lockdown Protesters should be protesting Trump’s failures which led to the lockdown. What failures you may ask?
a. Failure to isolate patients and closest contacts in the earliest days of the disease in the United States.
b. After that chance was lost, there was insufficient testing to handle the breadth of cases.
c. Trump’s ban on Chinese visitors was very incomplete. It allowed Americans who visited Wuhan to return. As if the virus differentiates between citizenship.
d. There was no checking of non-Chinese visitors who had recently visited Wuhan. This cross-border visitation has been identified as the main source of COVID-19 cases in the US.
e. Why hasn’t Trump use the Defense Production Act to produce tests and PPE? Instead, he’s only invoked it to order meat processing plants to remain open and for GM to make ventilators.

Reopen for Business

My next post will be on the difference between reopening for business and the partial lockdown that should remain for specific sets of people.