“There’s this mindset that it’s like running a show and you’ve got to keep people tuned in, you’ve got to keep them interested and at some point you’ve got to move on and move on quickly,” said a former senior official at the Health and Human Services Department. “Viewers will get tired of another season of coronavirus.”
The president, conservative economists, political activists and some governors have argued the economy cannot remain shuttered any longer, given the damage from soaring unemployment and collapsing economic output.
“The reality is we can’t stop the coronavirus,” Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-Iowa) told reporters Monday. “It’s going to remain in our communities until we have a vaccine available. So, we have to learn to live with it without letting it govern our life.”
Trump’s own health advisers have expressed skepticism about some of the reopening plans at businesses like hair salons or spas. Some are simply urging Americans to stay 6 feet apart this summer and avoid large gatherings as the virus continues to spread, with no clear timeline for a cure. Other public health experts warn that restarting businesses across the nation now could undo the good caused by weeks of social distancing.
Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health, warned of repeating an earlier cycle of the outbreak by opening up too quickly while the disease continues spreading through thousands of transmission chains. “As each of those communities begin to open up, we won’t have sufficient herd immunity for anything different to happen from what we saw in January or February,“ Mina said.
“What that means is as things open up, any one of those transmission chains or thousands of them could potentially ignite new outbreaks,” Mina said. “That’s how a second wave can potentially be more disruptive, more damaging and larger than the initial phase of the epidemic.”
The White House guidelines recommend that states only begin to reopen once they show a downward trend in positive tests or a downward trend in new cases over a two-week period — with hospitals able to treat all cases, without being in crisis mode. The same guidelines also call on states to set up testing sites for all residents with symptoms and be able to trace the contacts of those infected.
The criteria are being met by a small number of states — those with low numbers and downward trends for two weeks. “Those would ideally be a good pilot or early test beds for reopening,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. “But in many other places, the numbers are so high that it will be difficult for them to do contact tracing or case management. The chances of them being able to isolate and contain cases and track contacts seems low.”
Source: politico.com
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