You can have both Economic Health and Physical Health.
Lots of individuals, institutions, and governments are stuck in a false dichotomy: “Do we open and accept the deaths?” or “Do we stay safe at home even if we have to destroy our livelihoods?”.
Viewing our choices in this binary way is not at all unhelpful.
Dealing with COVID-19 does not have to be a choice between either having a functional economy or a healthy populace.
When China originally quashed COVID-19 they rescued both their economy and their citizens from complete disaster. I worried that China’s success could not be replicated in a democratic society. However New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, and South Korea show us that there is a way forward for open societies and that the impacts of COVID-19 need not be as big as we, in the US, are currently facing. A open economy doesn’t have to be associated with sickness and death. It doesn’t take a Great Depression to keep people healthy.
Change your mindset, our situation is like walking a tightrope.
Any path we take through this crisis is going to be costly in terms of time, money and lives. The question is “What is the best way forward with the least cost in all those terms?” We’re walking a tightrope with death on one side and financial ruin on the other.
Oh, and by the way, we’re walking not just one tightrope but two.
The Time Tighrope:
What is the fastest pace we can sustain that both allows businesses to open and, at the same time, allows people feel comfortable frequenting those businesses? After watching the economy implode over the past two months, I think it’s clear that if we go too slowly we will end up in financial ruin. However, if we go too fast, we also end up shooting the economy and ourselves in the foot.
An economy is built on trust. The economy depends on both a business opening up and people frequenting that business. Imagine the economy opens up, without sufficient safeguards, and people start visiting restaurants and getting sick. A new round of social isolation will quickly ensue, shutting the economy down yet again. When the second round of social isolation lifts, people will be even more reticent to frequent a restaurant.
The Money Tightrope:
Not only do we have to walk a tightrope with lives, we have to walk a tightrope with money too. As we have seen for the last two months, money needs to be spent on a vast scale to mobilize the resources needed to deal with a pandemic. Not investing enough in the pandemic response means that you get hit with wave after wave of infections which leaves the economy sputtering for life. On the flip side, the amount of money required to mount an effective response is so large that a small miscalculation means that billions of extra dollars have been wasted.
Make the wrong decisions and:
lives are lost: The challenge, of course, is that a wrong step could kill lots of people.
the economy suffers: The additional challenge is that a wrong step can kill the economy. This also, in turn, kills people.
And so if we don’t have to choose between a lockdown and our health or an open economy and free spread of COVID-19, what options are out there? Would you like some hope and a specific plan? Look here:
Please let me know what you think of the COVID-19 Rapid Response Initiative’s plan (and my description of it.) I am planning to create a post discussing the metrics around this plan and also what we can do to help implement it. For the moment, please just make sure that your elected representatives know that a plan exists that lets us have our cake and eat it too.