I am writing on March 27, 2020. Readers in the future will know how this story ends; I do not.
I have never despaired of humanity or America, but I cannot deny that our light is fading, at least for the moment. In the past few days there have been calls to reduce social distancing and lift the emergency shelter-in-place orders, in order to get the economy moving again. These calls started with President Trump, who has said he wants churches full of worshipers on Easter Sunday.
The science—and even simple math—indicates that this would be a very bad idea. Currently corona virus has a mortality rate of about 2% in the US, but if a hundred million Americans got the virus, our healthcare system (which includes only about a million hospital beds) would collapse, and it would also probably be impossible to deliver food and medicine to all those recovering at home. And since many essential workers would fall ill, there might be blackouts and food shortages.
So in that case the mortality rate would be far higher than 2%. Italy still has food and enough hospital beds, and the mortality rate there is 11%.
If the US had a hundred million cases and a mortality rate of 11%, that would mean eleven million deaths. We don’t have the capacity to process that many dead bodies by ordinary means. A political system that cannot even bury the dead may well be replaced or drastically reformed.
And yes, 11% is chosen somewhat arbitrarily, but since Italy is already seeing this mortality rate without running out of food and without a complete collapse of its medical system, 11% mortality with 100,000,000 cases in the US is certainly possible; Italy currently has less than 100,000 cases.
It’s unclear from the statistics how many of the critical/serious cases survive in Italy, but of course all those who die were classified as critical/serious at some point. So the total number of critical and serious cases in this scenario is at least eleven million. That’s eleven million critical cases in a country with 924,000 hospital beds, and no more 64,000 ICU beds. We also have only about 169,000 ventilators.
https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals
Yes, we have some military resources available, and we can improvise; Tesla has already delivered 3,000 ventilators.
However, bear in mind that pandemic or no, people are still going to have heart attacks and babies at the same rate as before. Cancer, shootings and overdoses will still be happening. The vast majority of those hospital and ICU beds are already occupied:
Currently, US hospitals routinely operate at or near full capacity and have limited ability to rapidly increase services. There are currently shortages of healthcare workers of all kinds. Emergency departments are overcrowded and often have to divert patients to other hospitals.
http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/cbn/2020/cbnreport-02272020.html
And there will be plenty of corona virus victims who will need to be hospitalized for supportive care who would not be classified as serious or critical, and who won’t require an ICU bed or a ventilator. Clearly that group will be sent home with a bottle of Tylenol—-if there’s any still available—and some unknown percentage of them will turn critical and die, with or without a return trip to the hospital.
And worse: the resources detailed above, as thin as they are, will be under-utilized if health care workers themselves get sick in large numbers—which is quite likely if masks, gowns and gloves remain in short supply.
No matter how you slice it, our medical system would be crushed into powder by a pandemic of this magnitude—and most of the pandemic would play out in an environment where few people in this country could get medical care for anything for months. How do we suppose that dialysis patients and stroke victims will fare? Will diabetics still be able to get insulin and other supplies? What about baby well checks and prenatal exams? People who need organ transplants?
Lots of people will die in this pandemic who never catch the corona virus.
How likely is this scenario? Mathematically, highly likely if we do as Trump commands. Currently the US has about 100,000 confirmed cases, and due to our lack of testing, we have no idea what the actual number is. One blogger estimates the real number at 5-20 times the official number:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/19/coronalinks-3-19-20/
Since 12.5 is halfway between 5 and 20, let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that we currently have 1.25 million cases in the US. Many of course are asymptomatic, but still infectious. (Note that this number is already higher than the number of hospital beds available.)
How long would it take us to get from 1.25 million cases to 100 million, if we ended most social distancing restrictions tomorrow, which is March 28? In other words, how long would it take for our cases to increase 80x?
A month ago, on Feb. 27, Italy had 655 cases; by March 21 it had 53,578, an increase of 82x. That’s in 22 days, or for us, April 18.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
But that’s not a fair comparison, because Italy instituted a nationwide lockdown on March 9, following several successive regional quarantines and other isolating measures that started on Feb. 23. So for the entire 22-day period I’ve selected, significant parts of Italy were under quarantine or lockdown. Without those efforts, the 80x increase would have taken place sooner, maybe in two weeks instead of three?
Two weeks from now is Good Friday.
You can change these numbers and assumptions all you like, but the answer is still the same: ending the shelter-in-place and social distancing restrictions at this time would result in a dreadful catastrophe. I have used the example of 100,000,000 corona virus cases with at least 11,000,000 of those critical and serious, but if we have 20,000,000 cases and 2,200,000 critical and serious then the effect on the medical system is largely the same. Even 200,000 critical and serious patients could overwhelm us.
Of course it won’t happen like that—but that is the implication of Trump’s Easter Miracle. Fortunately, his power is limited and most of the states would surely resist his mad scheme. But he could still get a lot of people killed in Florida, Mississippi and Alabama, where the governors are kamikaze Republicans, and unchecked infections in a few states could prolong the pandemic nation-wide for a long time. Because when things get dire in Florida, Mississippi and Alabama, people will flee and will bring the virus with them wherever they go. The states they flee to will have no choice but to prolong the lockdowns, and the economy and stock market will fall even further.
[Late note: Trump appears to be backing off his Easter Miracle plan, but there’s always a chance he’ll come back to some version of a premature lifting of the lockdowns.]
A particularly dismal part of this drama is how many right-wing commentators agree with Trump on this this issue:
As I’ve pointed out in A Greater Power, Mother’s Milk and Potosi, and Capitalism and Air Safety, capitalist socialization leads to a disregard for human life. We seldom see a starker version of this than in the comments of Dan Patrick, Dennis Praeger, R.R. Reno and Brit Hume above. There’s enough material there for several Halloweens—a proposal to deliberately infect first responders (from the Wall Street Journal!) or volunteers; the assertion that restarting the economy is worth 35,000 deaths; a lament at the modern unwillingness to sacrifice our lives to save the economy in the same way the WWII generation sacrificed their lives to win the war, etc.
Glenn Beck, of course, said he would rather die than let the country’s economy go down. I wanted to send flowers to his funeral, but his obituary isn’t online yet; I’ll check again tomorrow.
There’s a feeling akin to Schadenfreude at witnessing the idiotic depravity—displayed in public–of those with whom you disagree, but I only want that feeling for a second or two. Instead, let’s pivot from Beck and Brit Hume and think about the implications of the foregoing discussion, particularly in light of A Gift, my previous post.
Remember when I wrote this?
“Any political movement should be able to state its basis, and by that I mean its highest value and its goals in governing. It may also include a theory of political change, including revolution…”
And then I used the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence as an example?
I propose to the do the same for modern socialism—what I think of as Survival Socialism, because we are facing the loss of our civilization, our climate and mass death.
So what about us? What is the highest value of socialism? It is not, in my view, opposition to existing property arrangements, and this is an important departure from the past.
It is instead that human life is sacred. And since human life flows out of the natural world, nature is also sacred.
Capitalism, and particularly Billionaire Capitalism, do not hold human life sacred. If we didn’t realize that before, we can see it clearly in the supernatural light of Trump’s Easter Miracle.
The Socialist Investor 