Stressful lockdown beats alternative
The novel coronavirus has infected more than a million Americans and killed more than 50,000 in about three months — probably many more on both counts — by some estimates outpacing cancer and heart disease to become the leading cause of death in parts of California as well as the country at large. It has done so despite strict distancing measures affecting most of the U.S. population.
This isn’t a gauge of the inefficacy of distancing: The respective outbreaks in the Bay Area and New York City, for example, have shown that even modest differences in the timing and extent of the strategy can dramatically change the spread of the virus. Rather, the statistics are a frightening testament to the toll the contagion would take without these painful collective impediments.
That’s why six Bay Area counties’ decision to extend their nationleading shelterinplace order through May makes sense even amid rising impatience with the mandate in the region, organized protests in parts of California and a rush to resume business as usual in other states and the White House.
With job losses accumulating at an unprecedented clip, overwhelming the California unemployment bureaucracy’s ability even to answer all the phone calls, the economic consequences of these measures can’t be minimized. The
Bay Area Council noted Tuesday that a recent survey of employers found that “pressure is building to reopen the Bay Area economy,” with 17% of member companies having laid off employees since the crisis began and a similar share expecting to do so if the closures last more than another month. Council President Jim Wunderman described area businesses as “reaching a tipping point in their ability to withstand the severe economic effects of the shutdown.”
Other parts of the state and country have been more restive. Officials from six mostly rural northern counties offered a counterpoint to the Bay Area jurisdictions last week in a letter urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to let them ease restrictions, citing their low numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases. Beaches in Orange County reopened last weekend to alarming crowds. And protesters gathered in Sacramento and other state capitals in recent weeks to call for an end to the shutdowns, cheered on by President Trump against the advice of his own experts.
While the pandemic has certainly been concentrated in urban and suburban areas, it has not spared every small town. And if the virus is allowed to spread unchecked through the nation’s metropolises, it will reach more rural areas just as surely as it has encircled the globe. A second wave of infections and deaths on the scale of the current one — or, as with the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago, greater still — would not be conducive to the economic recovery everyone wants.
More Americans of every stripe understand this than the protesters or the president would have us believe. Polls have shown that a majority back distancing measures and are more concerned that they will end too quickly than not soon enough. Most also have a higher opinion of the governors who imposed the lockdowns than they do of Trump, who has undermined them. Even the Bay Area Council survey found remarkable support for the mandates, with 80% of employers calling regional governments’ response “just right” and nearly as many saying they could maintain their payrolls through at least another month of sheltering.
The irony of distancing is that the more effective it is, the less necessary it will seem. In the Bay Area and elsewhere, its impact is measured in sicknesses not suffered and lives not lost. Abandoning such hardwon successes too soon would be their undoing.