Travel to and from the U.S. has been curtailed. Major sports leagues have suspended their games. Conferences and concerts have been shut down, and in some places large gatherings have been banned outright. Disneyland is closed for the foreseeable future. Universities have sent students home and moved classes online. Employers have asked their workers to stay out of the office, and government offices have closed to the public. People have been cautioned to remain 6 feet away from each other. The U.S. economy has gone from solid to suspect almost overnight.
Normal life has been upended, and will remain so for the foreseeable future, as the United States struggles to get ahead of the novel coronavirus pandemic. It’s going to be difficult, disruptive and costly in ways we have yet to imagine. And while the extraordinary measures taken by large employers, colleges and professional sports leagues, Disney and others may seem extreme to those in areas with few or no reported cases, they are in fact rational. The reality is that the nation is still unprepared for the spread of a microbe we don’t fully understand.
True, only 4,500 cases of COVID-19 and at least 81 deaths from the disease had been reported in the U.S. as of Monday. But public health experts believe that the true infection rate is orders of magnitude greater than has been reported because of the shortage of diagnostic tests.
Public health officials believe the battle to contain the novel coronavirus has been lost and the strategy now must be to slow the rate of infections — to flatten out the curve, in public health speak — so that a surge of cases doesn’t overwhelm health care systems. Doing so could buy time until flu season has ended, which will free more capacity in the system to respond to COVID-19, and until new medicines to treat sick people become available.
To get a clear idea of why delaying the spread of COVID-19 cases is so important, we need only to consider what’s happening in Italy at the moment. In just a few weeks, that country’s infection rate exploded from a few cases to thousands. Now the entire country is in quarantine, and the Italian health care system is stressed nearly to the breaking point.
Avoiding that fate is going to require considerable cooperation, preparation and patience — though not panic. More than ever, we wish we had a president equal to the challenge of competently and rationally guiding the nation through a crisis. The leadership vacuum makes it all the more essential that state and local officials step up to make the difficult but essential decisions needed now to protect their communities in the days ahead.
We hope that a year from now we look back on this moment as the point at which the U.S. got the upper hand in the coronavirus outbreak. But for now, it seems wise to plan for the long haul — for more infections, more cancellations, more social distancing and more bad economic news — and to respond by changing our lives cautiously, calmly and responsibly.