Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously – The Atlantic
The public, the media, the business community, and policymakers are largely unprepared for a pessimistic scenario, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity argued in a recent white paper. That is, the U.S. may have no treatment, no vaccine, and no ability to scale up testing and quarantining, due to technical hurdles or Trump administration incompetence or a lack of public buy-in.
If we knew that a broadly effective COVID-19 treatment was imminent, or that a working vaccine was months away, minimizing infections through social distancing until that moment would be the right course. At the other extreme, if we will never have an effective treatment or vaccine and most everyone will get infected eventually, then the costs of social distancing are untenable. We don t know where we sit on that spectrum. So we cannot know what the best way forward is even if we place the highest possible value on preserving life and protecting the vulnerable.
That uncertainty means, at the very least, that Americans should carefully consider the potential costs of prolonged shutdowns lest they cause more deaths or harm to the vulnerable than they spare.
Obvious but necessary.