We can’t put the COVID-19 genie back in the bottle, but our response to the coronavirus already can prepare us for any future reoccurrence or similar dangerous pathogen.
Because no one had ever dealt with a virus in the U.S. as lethal as this one, no one knew exactly what to do when it invaded our country. The same infectious disease experts we rely on for advice now played down the potential for the disease in January. The same Democrats who criticize President Donald Trump now lambasted some his early actions to combat it. The same scientists who predicted up to 2.2 million deaths now scramble to explain why we’ve had fewer than 55,000 cases to date.
We rushed to close down business and schools, clear out hospitals for incoming virus cases, and told people to stay home. Those measures certainly slowed the spread of the disease, but they also collapsed the humming economy.
Now, as the country reopens its economies in fits and starts, it’s instructive to look at how some current statistics can inform our reactions in the future.
* As The New York Times’ Bret Stephens pointed out in a column Tuesday in the Times Free Press online edition, the number of virus deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) – as of last Friday – was more than 16 times those in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (8). If New York City proper were a state, he suggests, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined.