The full force of the US Federal Government is going against the virus. The biggest states are mobilized and taking pretty decisive actions. So the biggest questions now relate to execution.
I am sure there is a huge amount of work going on. My issue is focus, coordination, actionable specificity, hands on project management. The evidence here for this kind of focus is very inconsistent. This is where you need the dictators. At the top of the US government the focus is on what to do; rather than how to do it. Success will require both.
Governments around the world are telling their people to continue creating physical separation between themselves and about everyone else except those with whom they live. Meanwhile, governments world-wide are busting their asses to try and assemble the medical resources needed to treat people if they get seriously ill. They are also reminding you that 80% of infected people won’t even need medical attention but will just ride it out at home. This is because there currently is no medical treatment – drugs – because science has never before seen this virus and it will take quite a while to figure out how to confront it. So, stay home, get rest, and do all of the things you would do if you had a really bad case of the flu, and/or had respiratory challenges. Governments are saying that a very small percentage of sick people who show all of the symptoms of the virus will, unfortunately, continue to get sick. And yes, they are preparing their people for estimates that many more people will die from this as compared to the flu, perhaps ten times as many, maybe more. But also, maybe fewer.
In summary:
- We have been told how to reduce substantially our chance of getting sick and we just need to do it!
- We are told from many quarters that it is very likely there are many more people out there who have contracted the virus than current estimates. This is a good news/bad news problem. The good news is that the more people have it, the lower the percentage calculation of those who even enter the health care system, or those who enter the hospital, or those who die. Day by day, it seems that the data is leaning toward the denominator – the people who have become infected, who caught the virus in any form – being larger and the percentage of fatalities being lower. It is not unreasonable to think right now that that number may stay in the range of Dr. Fauci’s 1%, or 10X the flu, and could even be lower.
- We are told that if everyone takes sensible precautions, especially not being physically close to other people and practicing extreme measures of daily hygiene, the number of cases may be significantly fewer than they could be.
- We are told to stay home if there is any indication that we may be ill.
- We are told that our senior citizens and other people with heath conditions that would reduce their ability to fight off the virus need to be extra precautious.
- We are told that our health care system will be stretched to multiples of current capacity, and all hands are on deck trying to prepare. One way or another, at one cost or another, our capacity to address this will expand greatly.
- A frightening percentage of our national economy is not functioning. This is the price we have been willing to pay to stretch the bubble, to allow our citizens time to learn about this disease and also how to protect themselves, and in the end, to preserve life.
Now it is time to start the next conversation: reopening our economies
What is our mission? A consensus is building that this is obvious: maintain the functionality of society. In order to achieve that we will need to get used to taking more risk than has been asked of us for decades. This means that a functioning economy and the managed threat from the coronavirus are going to need to co-exist.
What is the threat to health and happiness from a non-functioning economy? Let’s look at the American case. We have been told for years that many Americans – 40% to 60% or more – have very little in savings, if any at all. So what happens to these people if 30-40% of our economy is shut down? We have been told for years to save in various tax deferred retirement accounts. So those of us who do save are invested in stocks, bonds, and maybe real estate, which we probably live in. So the current 37% drop in major market indexes, let alone the 50% that it could go to, is hardly academic. We are told that unemployment could go to 20-30%. Well, if huge percentages of the economy are shut down, that unemployment number could be much greater.
Let’s put some numbers on this.
Median household income in the US is around $60,000, working off of a base of 128 million HH. Total HH income is over $8 trillion. There are perhaps 64 million households in the bottom 50%. I don’t have precise statistics on the average HH income in this group but I am going to estimate about $35,000. So, total income of the lower 50% may be in the area of $2.2 trillion per year. HHs making between $60,000 and $75,000 might add another quarter of US HH, raising the number to 96 million households, and add another $2.2 trillion to annual income. So, we have about $4.5 trillion of HH income that is in dire threat from a partially shut down economy. A hugely disproportionate percentage of the unemployed will come from these households. It would be a pretty good guess that the lost income might be half of this, or $2.2 trillion. Of course, this doesn’t include the lost income from the upper 25%, which will also be considerable.
Can we all agree that if the economy goes into the toilet for six months or a year these are the people who will get crushed. They have very little savings. So, if you are an American, and your politics are such that you simply think, no problem, the government will pay their salaries, I would only suggest that you are living in a fantasy world. The bill is too big, way too big.
So, if a huge percentage of our people get laid off, or have their salaries cut deeply, and if they also have essentially no savings, just precisely what might you think the loss of life might be from this situation – starving to death, unmet serious health conditions, suicides, homeless, increased violent crime, increased mental disorders, etc., etc.
In the United States, only a functioning private sector economy can protect a great deal of this $4.5 trillion household income stream.
My conclusion, we need to take some risks that two months ago might have seemed unacceptable.
Can we mitigate these risks?
Why not? Especially if we focus on the first six months or year from now.
Listed below are a few ideas that might greatly reduce the risks.
- Do everything you can to change the work paradigm. What have we learned in just the past three weeks? Continue to redesign how work is done. Do some process re-engineering. Look at the work processes and identify those which are not location dependent. Then demand that those processes be conducted remotely.
- Change the spatial dynamics in the work environment. No one sits closer than ten feet from another. Expand the space. Yes, it will cost, but not as much as being shut down.
- Change the social dynamic. No physical touching. No congregating. Do your cheerleading on-line. Meet on Zoom, or similar platforms.
- As Tom Friedman states in today’s NY Times column, no one goes back to work before a 14 day self-quarantine. Many of us are in the middle of that. Give or take the time, the idea is that no infected person enters the work environment. (Tom’s column, “A Plan to get America back to work”. Required reading.)
- Unlimited paid sick leave. If you don’t feel well, go home. Also, set rules for proper oversight such that irresponsible people don’t take advantage of this policy. (Yes, the Democrats may get to win on this one.)
- Continue social distancing in everyone’s private lives.
- Experiment with new rules for flying on an airplane. We spend billions now examining people for weapons and explosives. Maybe now we need to take your temperature, or inspect you for any symptoms. This one needs to be thought out. Help.
- Airlines are forced to keep middle seats unoccupied during this six months to a year period, unless occupied by a person from your same household – and you’ll need to prove it. Hey, it is better than not flying at all.
- New spatial rules for all forms of transportation.
- Issue a daily ration of facemasks to all workers as soon as we have met the capacity needs of our health care system. Expand where use where it makes sense.
- No bulk standing in line anywhere. Figure it out. 6-10 feet.
- Spatial rules need to be followed in every commercial establishment: restaurants, theatres, movie houses. In short, available capacity in all such places will be cut in half. 50% may be better than zero. In time, venues may need to become much larger. Figure it out.
- Everything can’t be figured out so there will be some net losses. But, there will also be net increases.
Perhaps every idea on this list is stupid. Ok. That’s fine. Then we need to work harder to redefine the work and commercial environment. We have no choice. Let’s put our creativity to work.
We need to get many people back to work, as many as can be done with an acceptable risk. While we are readying ourselves for the new work environment, we are adding capacity to our health care system. If we pull it all together we ought to have many fewer new infections, and we ought to be able to save most of the people who get pretty sick. In the end, we may be able to get fatalities down toward a really bad flu season, maybe one-half percent, rather than the .1% of the flu. This could still be a big number compared to the old normal. But in the new normal, it might be acceptable.
So, how do you prepare our societies for such a change? Some thoughts:
- We need to start talking seriously about the threats to life from an economic shutdown.
- We need to prepare people for the discussion that we cannot pay an unlimited price to preserve individual life, but need to balance that with preserving collective life.
- We need to start thinking about how to make an abnormal loss of life as acceptable as possible:
- Ramping up the resources for acceptable after life care so we can say our goodbyes with dignity. Looking at Italy, this also requires planning.
- Getting your own affairs in order so that your family members are not unnecessarily burdened with wrapping up your affairs when they are fighting for their own economic and physical lives. This especially applies to those of us who are older. Remember, in my 65 or older group, almost 1,000,000 of us will die in the next 12 months, from a variety of causes. This is normal. Many of my contemporaries who would have died anyway, will die from the virus.
- We need to do these things so that we can strengthen morale, build inner strength, and prepare our citizens for a new way of operating.
In the end, there seems to be a reasonable probability that the global medical and scientific community will get a handle on COVD-19 and will figure out how to treat it and, eventually, prevent it. Were that so, perhaps these rules could be relaxed after a time. We want to remember this year as the horrible first year of COVD-19, and the period where societies learned how to rethink how they operate, conduct business, and even socialize – and survive.
What could be more exciting than pulling this off?
Your thoughts?
