There’s no shortage of magical thinking nowadays

Holman Jenkins, Jr., editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, clearly thinks of himself as a realist in the midst of a sea of journalists who don’t necessarily mean harm, but are causing more harm than good by calling for continuing lockdowns to fight the coronavirus pandemic. In a column this morning, he very cogently makes the argument:

1. Given that there’s no cure or vaccine for Covid-19 on the horizon in the near term, we’re going to have a certain number of deaths – there’s very little we can do at this point to change that fact.
2. The rationale for lockdowns is that they “flatten the curve” to keep hospital systems from being overwhelmed, as we wait for a cure or a vaccine to get us out of this mess. Yet even New York City’s hospital system didn’t get overwhelmed by the recent crisis, which is definitely past its peak.
3. Therefore, given that nothing we can do now is going to significantly lower deaths over the course of the pandemic, we might as well open up the economy (beyond the small amounts of opening up being done today, in the states that locked down in the first place), so that we can have at least some economic activity while we wait for a cure, a vaccine, or the arrival of Godot to fix our problem.
4. (this is implied in his column, but not stated) Since we can’t count on a cure, vaccine or Godot to bail us out anytime in the near – or even in the far – future, making the decision to reopen now means we’ve decided to wait for herd immunity (which is supposed to kick in when 50-70% of the population is infected) to end our misery (and a number of our lives, along with the misery). And since there’s still no evidence that even the presence of antibodies ensures someone won’t be infected a second time with Covid-19, herd immunity itself can’t be counted on. So we’ll just have to accept the fact that close to the entire US population will be infected in the next year or two. This means we need to be prepared for six million deaths.

I disagree with all four of the above statements, since they all underestimate the problem we’re in. But I want to focus now on the third statement, which assumes that, when the economy is opened up, at least a significant portion of the previous level of activity will quickly return – in other words, “If you build it (specifically, reopen it), they will come.” Both in the movie Field of Dreams and in the current crisis, this will only happen if we have a great deal of magic working for us. We’ll need a series of miracles, and I challenge Mr. Jenkins to identify which of the following miracles will occur, and how they will occur.

1. Nobody is going to walk into a store or restaurant unless they’re reasonably sure that nobody else with Covid-19 isn’t there now, or won’t walk in while they’re being served. Yet, given that so many people are asymptomatic and the number of infected people is somewhere between 25 and 50 times the reported infections – and that won’t change until nearly ubiquitous testing is available – when will they ever have that assurance? It will be a miracle if they have it before our poor country has the virus under control, and that goal seems to have been pushed aside in the frenzy to open up the economy.
2. Almost the same consideration applies to workers: If someone isn’t sure that the people they’re interacting with on the job are virus-free, why would they go back to work? I’ll note that, in the discussions about the meat packers yesterday, one union official said the workers would want all workers and visitors tested every day before they come into the plant. I would think that workers in every workplace, large and small, would also want that – as I mentioned in my post yesterday, the one office I know of that has this practice in place now is the Oval Office. Yet it will obviously take a miracle to be able to do this in all workplaces in the US, at any time in the near future.
3. Absent testing everybody every day, there’s another condition that needs to be in place for workers to feel safe returning to a workplace: paid sick leave. If this isn’t in place, how can any worker be sure the guy working next to him doesn’t feel well, but came in because he can’t afford to miss any pay? And by the way, this also applies to shoppers – would you go into a store or restaurant if you thought the person who serves you might only be working because they can’t afford to stay home?
4. One assumption behind the call to reopen now is that any workplace will be made safe enough that the owner or managers could call workers back with a clear conscience. Yet in how many workplaces is that the case today? We used to have a government agency called OSHA (started by a Republican president, Richard Nixon – along with the EPA, earned income credit, and other useful measures. He would be considered a frothing-at-the-mouth leftist today), which is supposed to promulgate and enforce standards for workplace safety. However the small rump that remains of OSHA after lots of budget cuts now explicitly disavows even writing standards, let alone enforcing them. Will workers decide they aren’t at all concerned about their safety once they’ve made the decision to return to work – and therefore OSHA won’t be missed? It will take a miracle, to be sure.
5. Here’s a problem that affects a huge portion of the workforce: Schools are closed just about everywhere, and for some reason parents haven’t been jumping for joy at the idea that their children might be brought back to school while the pandemic rages outside, despite the helpful suggestions my Messrs. Trump and Pence that this will happen soon. Since probably at least half of all workers have children at home that need to be watched over, how are they going to feel safe to come back to work until the fall, when the schools might finally be open again? I haven’t even heard any proposals for that. Mr. Jenkins, do you have one?
6. Along with all of the above miracles, we still need the miracle we’ve been waiting for all along: the government needs to get the novel coronavirus under control. This requires ubiquitous testing capacity, a robust contract tracing program, an end of growth in new cases, and isolation of all quarantined people by themselves, not with their families (the first three criteria were prerequisites stated in the White House’s opening up guidelines put out a couple weeks ago, yet none of the states that are now opening up – with the possible exception of Montana – meet them).
7. There’s another prerequisite that I realized was needed for reopening, when I recently wrote about a different column by Mr. Jenkins: Any owner or manager of a workplace or retail location, who wants to get people to patronize their store or work in their office or factory in the near future, needs to work with his or her workers on the front line, for at least one day a week. And any commentator like Mr. Jenkins, who airily dismisses concerns about safety as something that’s easily manageable, should volunteer to work on one of those front lines - again for at least a day a week, but an entire month would be more appropriate.

I originally framed the above point as a possible legal mandate, but now I realize the shoppers and workers can easily enforce this themselves, as long as workplaces and retail establishments voluntarily disclose when and where managers and owners have volunteered – and if they don’t post anything, the assumption will be that they haven’t, and said shoppers and workers need to proceed at their own risk. Don’t you just love a free market?

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into these numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 9%.

Yesterday, we passed the Vietnam War in total deaths. In a couple weeks, we’ll pass total military deaths since WWII, and keep going up from there.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Pct. Change from previous week/month
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5	111%
March 21	244	35	542%
March 28	1,928	275	690%
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889	223%
April 11	12,126	1,732	95%
April 18	18,434	2,633	52%
April 25	15,251	2,179	-17%
Month of April	57,979	1,933	1428%
May 2	11,835	1,691	-22%
May 9	14,720	2,103	24%
May 16	19,763	2,823	34%
May 23	21,936	3,134	11%
May 30	27,283	3,898	24%
Month of May	94,259	3,041	163%
June 6	36,631	5,233	34%
June 13	40,659	5,808	11%
June 20	50,570	7,224	24%
June 27	67,897	9,700	34%
Month of June	221,108	7,370	235%
Total March - June	377,404

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 59,266

Increase in deaths since previous day: 2,463 (vs. 1,388 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 4% (vs. 3% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 3-day rate of increase in total deaths: 9% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above. It was 9% yesterday)

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 1,035,765

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 25,258

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%

Percent increase in reported cases since 3 days previous: 8%

III. Reported case mortality rate so far in the pandemic in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 142,238

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 59,266

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 29% (vs. 29% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 29% of them have resulted in death. Compare this with the comparable number from South Korea, which is 3%. Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that they had fewer than 250 deaths, while we had over 55,000 deaths as of April 27?