I want to write a few words about the public narrative on re-opening the economy following the coronavirus. Or, I suppose more accurately, about re-opening the economy ahead of the pandemic peak. I continue to see, as I have for weeks now, a narrative that tries to say our actions taken to address the pandemic may themselves cause us more harm, through the secondary impacts of economic distress in communities. The argument is that we must allow the coronavirus to infect and wash over us to develop a herd immunity, and thus reduce the horrors of economic privation which will be worse. In particular, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick of Texas came out today with “there are more important things than living” today as he ‘leads’ his state through this crisis.
For me, there is a key point being missed. It is possible the error is mine, and I invite facts and information that would inform a new perspective, but it is my understanding that the primary purpose of the self-isolation, social distancing, reduced business hours, staffing and services are to change the rate at which we experience the deaths. Furthermore, that the reason we want to change the rate at which we experience the covid-related deaths is because if they all happen in a concentrated bunch, wait for it, it will totally shut down our health systems and the economy as people die en masse. So, in deference to Lt. Governor Patrick’s interest in dying, it is my understanding that we will shirk none of the death and loss we would have enjoyed by allowing the disease to wash over us. But if we can follow these procedures, and suffer the economic losses attendant to a pandemic with this order of magnitude, then we avoid a whole host of deaths that, but for coronavirus swamping our health systems would never have happened, and the much larger order of magnitude economic hit from wholesale death.
I have tried to illustrate how I think the choices really look:
What I am trying to show, is that an unmanaged pandemic, I believe, would ultimately have all the same secondary health and wellness issues attendant to an economic shutdown, because the economy would shut down while we all choke on death and despair, and it would not have a rational basis for recovery for a very long while. Compared with a managed response to pandemic, where the horrors are still plenty profound, even for ghouls like Lt. Governor Patrick, and the initial economic impact maybe earlier, or maybe even more severe at first, but with a path to an orderly recovery, and on a timescale where we could see the recovery from within our current perspective.
The second leg of the argument also bothers me. The sacrifice of our economy is not a requirement. Just like we could choose to manage ourselves through the pandemic to minimize its secondary health care impacts, we could choose to minimize the economic distress too. We could have done it already, with the money which has already been spent. We have, as taxpayers, already deployed something like $2.2 trillion, not including almost $6 trillion we have fed directly into banks, foreign and domestic. Had we just given the same exact money to people it would be something like $6,000 for every man woman and child, from the richest millionaire playboy living alone in New York to the migrant farm hand in Oxnard, California and everyone’s children in between. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t have been enough for every household in the union to stay afloat and continue to make the payments that keep the engine of the country running. There is a natural fairness in doing this, because households that run on more than $6,000 per person in any 60 day period are more likely to have reserves to fill in the gap in income during the shut-down, while those households who routinely operate well below $6,000 per person in a sixty day period would get a little lift. For once. Pro tip: we didn’t need a bunch of convoluted distribution channels through banks and businesses to get the money to people. That is there to make it look like the pols are working, and to facilitate corruption.
Absolutely willing to qualify all of this as being just my understanding and expectation. I am an accounting and finance guy, not an epidemiologist. Like I have said above, I welcome real insights from those with knowledge in the matter. My current view is that the binary of covid death or death through economic distress is a false one. I view the calls from state governors to open on May 1 as the equivalent to Kip Chalmers ordering the train into the tunnel in Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged”. There is no need for the additional, unnecessary deaths and protracted economic disaster that we can create for ourselves with the ‘there are things worse than dying’ doctrine. While I agree there are, I feel no compulsion to explore them.