Jehangir Khattak
While COVID-19 continues to pummel America’s every possible state structure in ways and to the extent never thought of before, President Donald Trump is not hiding his eagerness to reopen the country. He has logical reasons to be a worried man. The virtual nationwide lockdown has pushed the US economy towards a recession. Already taking flaks for being slow in responding to the crisis and at a time when America is almost seven months away from elections, Trump wants to play it safe.
The last few weeks have been most devastating for the US job market. Businesses are laying off or furloughing workers at a pace never seen in recent memory. Since early March, first-time claims for unemployment benefits surged more than 3,000%.
According to US Department of Labor, more than 6.6 million American workers filed for their first week of unemployment benefits in the week ending March 28, which is the highest ever. Experts fear unemployment in the country may go past 10%.
Reopening America thus remains president Trump’s most consequential decision and he doesn’t mince words to point at the inherent risks. He believes that much of America’s heartland may be ready for the reopening because of fewer number of Coronavirus cases. The administration believed that as many as 29 states may be good candidates for partial, if not full reopening.
But experts warn that the country will not return to normal for a while. Reopening the country, they insist, will not be simple – testing capacity would have to increase three times.
Test, trace and isolate will be the three basic rules of survival in the post-Coronavirus America and beyond. The economic costs of reopening could be many times higher than the ones being sustained. Reason, no country in the world is ready to cope with a flood of COVID-19 patients any time soon.
For example in New York , America’s epicenter of the pandemic, according to state Governor Andrew Cuomo, the curve of new cases in the state has flattened and is tipping down. And yet the daily hospitalization rate in, despite the downward trend, remains very high — at least 1300 admissions a day by last count. Governor Cuomo says it’s hard to distinguish between the ICU and general hospitalizations because virtually all the hospital beds in New York have been turned into ICU’s. However, important are the numbers of intubation or putting people on ventilators. Available data suggests that 80% of the people on ventilators in New York do not come out of it alive.
The virus has killed more than 1,800 Americans almost every day since April 7. The trend may continue as new hot spots have started emerging in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Texas and Illinois.
The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is reduced to 60,000 by early August, only if the current lockdown continues.
The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. But experts fear that Trump’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed.
President Trump is playing it politically safe during an election year. While he has issued the guidelines for reopening America, he has left it to the Governors to make a final decision. If it works, credit is his and if it does not, the governors will have to take the blame.
The coming months will be critical for the US in its fight against the deadly pandemic. The challenge is monumental – lives to be saved and economy to be revived. And above all, actions being taken by Trump and Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to cope with the situation will have a direct impact on the elections this November.
The writer is a senior journalist based in New York. He tweets @JehangirKhattak
