Jon Margolis is a VTDigger political columnist.
Ron Desantis seems to have visions of himself as this century’s Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“What is our biggest obstacle?” Florida’s governor asked the other day, as he announced he was lifting his “stay-at-home” orders.
Having asked the question, he provided the answer: “Fear. Fear of the unknown,” created by “constant doom and gloom and hysteria that has permeated our culture for the last six weeks. Fear is our enemy.”
No, it isn’t. Urging the public not to fear “fear itself” was a useful metaphor when FDR used it to combat the Great Depression in 1933. Today it’s just nonsense. The novel coronavirus is our enemy. In 12 weeks it has killed more Americans than died in combat in 12 years in Vietnam. People do not fear “the unknown.” They quite rationally fear the virus, which can make them very sick or kill them.
“Doom and gloom and hysteria” hasn’t “permeated our culture” either, at least no more than all those uplifting accounts of the heroism of doctors and grocery clerks and the selfless deeds of ordinary people from coast to coast. The cultural permeation has been balanced.
Like many politicians left and right – especially those intent on calling attention to themselves – Desantis’ rhetoric was more outlandish than his governance. His is a “phased reopening” of business in Florida, and it excludes the three biggest counties where almost one third of Floridians live.
Still, on balance, it’s likely that most Vermonters are pleased that their governor, Phil Scott, is reopening business here more gradually, pledging a “data-driven, scientific approach,” and avoiding provocative statements.
Even as he loosened restraints for construction, manufacturing and distribution on Friday, Scott said he was doing so “strategically, methodically” with strict rules, and he made clear that he would reimpose stricter regulations if Vermont’s infection rate began to rise again.
Unlike some public officials and many commentators, Scott does not act as though he knows everything. This may help explain why Vermont has satisfied the most basic of the White House “gating criteria to satisfy before proceeding to a phased comeback:” 14 days of a “downward trajectory” of cases. Florida has not.
Neither has Georgia, where the governor has removed even more restrictions, hoping for a faster “comeback.” The consensus among the experts — seconded by President Donald Trump – is that Georgia is moving too fast, that its virus cases will spike in the next few weeks, forcing it to impose even harsher restrictions. When Dr. Anthony Fauci said the other day that some states might be “tempting a rebound,” he didn’t name a state, but Georgia is doing more tempting than any other.
In the spirit of acknowledging that nobody knows everything, let’s stipulate that this applies even to Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He knows more than most of us, more than the governors, more than the president. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that in two or three weeks the number of virus cases in Florida and Georgia will have gone down. Because even the experts are sometimes wrong.
But not often. The reason they are experts is that they know stuff. Most of us do not. That’s why it’s better to have a prudent governor who worries about “a false start … and people go back to work, and then all of a sudden everything spikes and gets out of control.”
That’s what Scott said he worried about. “I’ll take the pressure,” he said. “What I can’t take is looking into the eyes of a family member who has been harmed or lost due to action we took.”
That’s why he is following the lead of the health care experts and linking the reopening of the economy to more testing and contact tracing. That way, he said, state officials will get “more information on where we need to focus our resources.”
Testing and contact tracing (finding whoever has been in close contact with an infected person) are also on that White House “gating criteria” list. But even in Vermont, the rate of testing went down last week and contact tracing is an elaborate, complex process still in its early stages. This is going to take a while.
Like most governors in this region (but fewer elsewhere) Scott seems to understand that looking at the pandemic crisis through the “health-versus-economy” spectrum is at least oversimplified and possibly just wrong. The faster the restrictions are lifted, the more people will get sick and die, perhaps compelling reimposition of even harsher restrictions, leading to more shuttered businesses and more unemployment.
But it’s worse than that. Because what the public health experts are really saying is that any relaxation of the “stay home” rules increases the likelihood of illness and death. Opening up the economy will kill people. Every time someone leaves the house – even on a “necessary” trip to buy food or medicine – that person increases the risk of catching or transmitting the virus (because no one can be certain he/she is not carrying it).
That explains all those seemingly arbitrary rules in some states about how you may go to the store to buy this product but not that one. That way, if right now you only need the product you’re not allowed to buy, you won’t go at all. The safest strategy is for everybody to stay home all day every day.
Impossible, both materially and psychologically. Already the folks at the University of Maryland who track how much people move around by monitoring cellphones are seeing signs of “quarantine fatigue,” as more people leave the house.
The numbers keep changing, but at week’s end more than 66,000 Americans had died of Covid-19, half of them within the last two weeks. Who would bet that the number will not double again two weeks hence? This is not a happy time.
A little less unhappy in Vermont, for several reasons. One of them is a governor who’d rather save lives than call attention to himself.
