The Point of No-Return
By early May of this year it was apparent that the President and his fellow Republicans had embarked upon a strategy focused exclusively on resuscitating the nation’s economy in an effort to retain control of the White House and the U.S. Senate. They did this knowing that it would precipitate a rise in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. In actuality, the President had started down this path in early February when he ignored the warnings of his public health advisers and did his best to assure the American people that the coronavirus posed no threat to them. He could have followed the lead of other world leaders, all of whom had grown in popularity by leading the fight in their countries against the spread of the virus. In retrospect, this would have been a safer path to his re-election; but the President is a man who follows his own instincts and not professional advice. He is also a man who is loath to admit that he has made a mistake.
Starting in late April, he had begun encouraging and pressuring the nation’s governors to relax their restrictions on social and business activities. At that point, because of his delay in even acknowledging the danger posed by the pandemic, the virus had already invaded the bodies of almost one million Americans and the nation’s death toll was approaching 55,000 and projected to reach at least 90,000. Even for a man accustomed to claiming victory in the midst of defeat, convincing the American public that he had done a good job in leading the fight against the virus was going to be an uphill battle. Looming even larger in his mind was the likelihood that even 150,000 deaths would not impair his chances of re-election as much as a depressed national economy. Thus, for the President, an all-out effort to restore the economy continued to seem to be the best, if not the only viable, path to a second term.
The nation’s Democratic governors were not inclined to follow the President’s exhortations to relax their efforts to curtail the spread of the virus. They would be moved by the advice of their public health advisers and not the President’s fanciful predictions that the the virus would soon miraculously disappear. Most Republican governors, however, owed their loyalty, if not their own elections, to the President and were therefore willing to implement the his strategy. Besides, most of them would not have to stand for re-election until 2022; and, of the seven running for re-election in 2020, all but two of them had been elected by margins exceeding 17% and three had been elected by a margin exceeding 30%. Thus, if retaining the White House (and the political goodies that go with it) depended on a resurging economy, they were willing to join the effort, at least as long as it didn’t place them in political jeopardy. The interests of the Republican governors, however, were not wholly aligned with those of the President as their political futures were not dependent upon the President’s re-election. Thus, at some point they might find it to be in their interests to make saving lives a higher priority than saving the economy.
For those of us who tend to heed the advice of others with greater knowledge, simply following the lead of someone who had already made a bad situation worse seemed like a poor gamble as there had been ample warnings that the premature reopening of the nation’s economy would lead to a resurgence of the virus. Thus, it seemed only a matter of time until the Republican governors would choose to deviate from the President’s strategy. For the next six weeks, their decision to support the President’s plan seemed to be doing well; however, in mid-June the feared resurgence of the virus began to materialize. By August 1st, the daily new case numbers had risen to three times their peak in mid-April, with hospitals being filled to capacity in a number of cities and the death toll rising faster than at any time during the previous two months. In an effort to stem this tide, 30 states had imposed requirements that face masks be worn in all public spaces where social distancing was not feasible and several states had chosen to close bars and limit restaurant capacity. Even so, a number of public health experts were warning that these efforts were too little, too late and recommend that states again lockdown their economies and start over. This warning signaled that the point of no-return had already been passed and that there was little that Republican governors could now do to avoid the personal political fallout that was once clearly avoidable.
According to the latest data, there are now over 2,000,000 unresolved cases of the virus in the U.S.—more than five times the number that existed at the end of March when the IHME called for the nation to commence a two-month period of restrictions on non-essential economic and social activities. While the vast majority of these cases represent individuals being successfully treated in hospitals or individuals in self-quarantine, this number is also indicative of the extremely large number of persons already infected by the virus who are freely circulating among us. Thus, to bring the virus under control now would require an economic lockdown at least as long as the two-month lockdown deemed necessary at the beginning of April and probably longer. Considering the current widespread advance of the pandemic, a second lockdown would have to be kept in place for two to three months, leaving the nation’s economy in a near-comatose state on election day. This, combined with a death toll in the neighborhood of 180,000 (equaling the war dead of World War I and the Korean and Vietnam wars combined), would not only sink the President’s chances of re-election, but would also badly diminish those of Republican legislators and governors all around the country.
This means that the least unpleasant alternative for Republican governors now would be to continue forward with face-mask requirements and closures of bars and other indoor venues attracting large numbers of people, while allowing economic activity to continue as much as possible. Even though this would probably result in an increase in the nation’s future death toll by another 50,000 individuals, it would at least facilitate some increase in economic activity. This analysis, however, doesn’t take into consideration the added problems posed by the necessity of finding a way to resume the education of the nation’s school children.
To be sure, the current interruption in the education of the nation’s children is having a profound adverse effect upon them, not only in terms of their intellectual growth, but also in terms of their social and emotional maturity. In addition, in many cases the meals which millions of the nation’s young children receive in school are their major source of nutrition. What particularly troubles the President is that as long as children are not in their classrooms, the productivity of their parents will be diminished, if not non-existent.
In many respects, this is a replay of the decision which the nation’s governors faced at the beginning of May when the President exhorted them to take action to restart their economies before the virus had been brought under control. Would moving ahead quickly to allow the parents of school-age children to return to work actually increase economic activity or would it simply cause a further resurgence of the virus that would again tear them away from their jobs. The answer of the President and his Secretary of Education is to simply ignore the virus and send the kids back into their classrooms. They argue that school-age children are largely immune to the virus so that they would not be placed at risk by resuming their classroom activities. While this has never been established, there is some evidence that young children are less susceptible to the virus because their bodies have not developed the types of cells which the virus tend to infect.
This hypothesis is in conflict with two recent incidents. The first involved a summer camp in north Georgia. Although all persons attending the camp were required to have been tested for the virus before attending the camp and all camp counselors were required to wear face masks at all times, one of the camp’s teenage counselors fell ill two days after the start of camp and so many others soon followed that the camp had to be closed one week after it had opened. Of the 600 children attending the camp 344 were tested for the virus (50% of whom were ages 6 to 10) and 260 of them were found to have been infected by the virus (an infection rate of 77%). Seventy-five percent of those who were found to have been infected were symptomatic. This not only shows that young children are not immune to the virus, but also that they can quickly become infected. This past week a middle school in Indiana which had reopened was shut down that same day when a child was found to be infected. This required the quarantining of a number of other students who had been in contact with the infected child.
Because of the safety issue, most parents of school-age children are likely to be reluctant to send their kids to school. In addition, teachers and other school employees will also be understandably reluctant to return to their jobs until reasonable steps have been taken to protect their children’s health, and no governmental order is likely to change that. In fact, several teachers’ unions have already voiced their objections to plans to push ahead with reopening schools. The CDC did seek to provide the nation’s elementary and secondary schools with a list of appropriate safety precautions in a set of guidelines; however, the President deemed those guidelines “too restrictive and costly” and demanded that they be rewritten in a manner to encourage the reopening of schools. Thus, the very revelation that the CDC’s Guidelines have been watered down is only likely to increase the anxiety of parents and teachers.
Despite the President’s call that in-class education be resumed on schedule and his threat that federal aid to education would not be forthcoming for states that did not comply, most governors are only likely to proceed slowly and cautiously. That’s because no level of enhanced economic activity from sending children back to their classrooms is likely to offset the anger of constituents whose children and grandchildren have been placed in a dangerous situation. Like the teachers, parents of school-age children may simply decide to keep their children at home, thereby erasing any benefit to the economy that might have been anticipated from reopening the schools.
In the final analysis, most governors, both Republicans and Democrats, are likely to steer clear of making the politically charged decisions of when and how to reopen their state’s schools. Instead, they will probably seek to provide their school superintendents with the best advice available and let them make those decisions. While this may not help President win re-election in the fall, at this point, there is not much more that Republican governors can do for him except help energize their constituents and suppress the votes of those who are likely to vote for Vice President Biden.