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theintercept.com

Trump’s Obsession With Reopening

the Economy Ignores Public Health
Experts
Nick Turse@nickturse
6-7 minutos

Almost since the moment he issued guidelines for combatting

Covid-19 through social distancing, in mid-March, President
Donald Trump has been pressing to reopen the country. This
week, his push has reached a fever pitch as right-wing
demonstrators took to the streets – from California to
Kentucky, North Carolina, Wyoming, Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Ohio – in protest (and defiance) of stay-at-home orders.

On Wednesday, Trump, who had previously said that

decisions about “rejuvenating the economy” will focus on
protecting “health and life,” announced: “You already know
we’ll be opening up states, some states much sooner than
others, and we think some of the states can actually open up
before the deadline of May 1.” (On Thursday afternoon, the
president said that decisions about when to loosen social
distancing restrictions would be left to individual states,
contradicting statements he’d made earlier in the week.)

Experts, including those in the government, have indicated

that reopening the country too soon will actually threaten

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“health and life.” On Tuesday, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director

of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cautioned
that if mitigation strategies in certain areas of the country are
relaxed too quickly, outbreaks in major cities across the United
States could follow. He also warned of worse to come in the
months ahead. “We’re definitely going to have a second
wave,” he said, predicting that Covid-19 cases would peak
again late in the year.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious

Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota,
warned that the United States may experience multiple surges
of Covid-19 over the next year and half, noting that while it’s
impossible to know for certain, the coronavirus seems to be
following a “1918 model” — a reference to the 1918 flu
pandemic that may have killed up to 100 million people
worldwide.

“This first wave … is just the beginning of what could easily be

16 to 18 months of substantial activity of this virus around the
world, coming and going, wave after wave,” Osterholm, who
served as a State Department science envoy for health
security from 2018 through 2019, said during a recent online
conference. “It surely is a virus that likely will have to infect at
least 60 to 70 percent of the population before you’re going to
see a major reduction in its transmission,” he explained.

Similarly, a study by researchers at Harvard University,

published this week in the journal Science, warned of
“recurrent wintertime outbreaks” of Covid-19, meaning the
virus may become a seasonal, global fixture. If those infected
develop short-term immunity (on the order of 40 weeks), we

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may see annual outbreaks of Covid-19 while longer-term

immunity (two years) would likely mean biennial outbreaks.

Without effective new vaccines or therapeutics, achieving

population immunity to Covid-19 may be impossible in the
short term, leading the researchers to project that intermittent
social distancing efforts — such as stay-at-home orders and
school closures — may be necessary into 2022. Such
measures are currently needed to “flatten the curve” and
thereby prevent the U.S. health care system from being
overwhelmed by the pandemic, but effective social distancing
will leave a pool of people who are susceptible to Covid-19
precisely because they haven’t yet been exposed to it. If social
distancing is relaxed, a new surge in cases may prompt the
reinstitution of such control measures.

Read Our
Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus Crisis

“The plans to reopen the country are close to being finalized,

and we will soon be sharing details and new guidelines with
everybody,” Trump said on Tuesday. “We’re going to pick a
date. We’re going to get a date that’s good. But it’s going to be
very, very soon — sooner than the end of the month.”

Trump’s supporters have doubled down on his eagerness to

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do away with distancing requirements, often suggesting that

the Constitution prohibits such intrusion by government in the
lives of individuals.

“We don’t need a nanny state to tell people how to be careful,”

Meshawn Maddock of the Michigan Conservative Coalition
and an organizer of the April 15 protest in Lansing against the
state’s stay-at-home order, told Fox News. In Wisconsin, Terri
Bialas protested Gov. Tony Evans’s decision to close state
parks in an effort to protect the public, after thousands flocked
to them amid the outbreak. “This is insanity. It’s gone way too
far,” said Bialas. “We don’t live in Nazi Germany.”

Osterholm said that he’s currently involved in devising data-

driven guidelines for how to reopen Minnesota, as well as
reimpose social distancing if worrying benchmarks are
reached. “If we see different kinds of measures changing, then
we can take … some kind of action. And then we can explain
to the public why we should be on lockdown,” he said. “It’s not
just, ‘We’re going to pick a date out of the blue.’”

The Harvard researchers acknowledged that “prolonged

distancing, even if intermittent, is likely to have profoundly
negative economic, social, and educational consequences.”
They also pointed to the “potentially catastrophic burden on
the healthcare system … if distancing is poorly effective and/or
not sustained for long enough.”

Osterholm warned that the worst may be yet to come, and that
the pandemic is still closer to its beginning than its end. “We’ve
got to prepare ourselves because some of the cities that have
been hard hit already are going to have peaks some months

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down the road that may even be much larger — in terms of

case numbers — than we’re seeing right now,” he said. “Right
now, we’re in the second inning of a nine-inning game.”

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