Solutions That Don’t Solve

There is a bumper crop of plans for ending the COVID-19 pandemic. To my eye they all share one defect: they wouldn’t actually end the pandemic. Take, for example, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s op-ed in the New York Times:

Americans stayed at home and sacrificed for months to flatten the curve and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. That gave us time to take the steps needed to address the pandemic — but President Trump squandered it, refusing to issue national stay-at-home guidelines, failing to set up a national testing operation and fumbling production of personal protective equipment. Now, Congress must again act as this continues to spiral out of control.

Those who frame the debate as one of health versus economics are missing the point. It is not possible to fix the economy without first containing the virus. We need a bold, ambitious legislative response that does four things: brings the virus under control; gets our schools, child care centers, businesses, and state and local governments the resources they need; addresses the burdens on communities of color; and supports struggling families who don’t know when the next paycheck will come.

Here’s what the next federal response must include:

Start with funding the robust public health measures we know will work to address this crisis: ramped-up testing, a national contact-tracing program and supply-chain investments to resolve medical supply shortages. Without these measures, we will not be able to adequately reopen safely, more people will die and there will be no economic recovery.

I’m not opposed to any of those things. I just don’t think they’ll produce the results the senator thinks they will.

For one thing there’s too much cargo cult thinking. The line of thinking goes something like this. Because South Korea and Japan did contact tracing and South Korea and Japan have had among the very best results in dealing with their outbreaks, therefore you need contact tracing to have good results. Leaving aside the thousands of differences between South Korea or Japan and the United States a key step is being omitted: mandatory isolation. I don’t believe that any form of isolation, voluntary or mandatory, would be effective in the U. S. We can’t even get people to wear facemasks voluntarily. I don’t believe that even if we paid people to be isolated it would be effective. And mandatory isolation is completely out of the question. If you don’t believe it picture this scenario. Thousands or tens of thousands of people in mandatory isolation, the majority of whom are black or Hispanics. The headlines practically write themselves.

Testing has a similar problem. There is presently no identifiable relationship between testing per se and getting control over the virus. If you don’t believe me, just look at the testing rates per million population compared with the cases per million or deaths per million. If there’s a correlation, it’s a positive one (you test more people because more people have the virus). The basic question is never asked: testing to what end? I think we’re doing far too much diagnostic testing as it is with not nearly enough systematic epidemiological testing in an effort to identify where resources were most needed.

My views are so unpopular as to not even be worth airing. I think that we just must assume that no cure or vaccine or even an effective treatment will be developed and shoulder the risks of going on with life, doing what we can to mitigate them as best as we are able.