No Way Out Of New Depression

To no one’s surprise:

The International Monetary Fund issued a stark warning about economic damage from the coronavirus, saying on Tuesday that the global economy faces its worst downturn since the Great Depression as shuttered factories, quarantines and national lockdowns cause economic output around the world to collapse.

The grim forecast underscored the magnitude of the economic shock that the pandemic has inflicted on both advanced and developing economies and the daunting task that policymakers face in containing the fallout. With countries already hoarding medical supplies and international travel curtailed, the I.M.F. warned that the crisis threatens to reverse decades of gains from globalization.

In its World Economic Outlook, the I.M.F. projected that the global economy will contract by 3 percent in 2020, an extraordinary reversal from earlier this year, when the fund forecast that the world economy would outpace 2019 and grow by 3.3 percent.

This year’s fall in output would be far more severe than the last recession, when the world economy contracted by less than 1 percent between 2008 and 2009. A 3 percent decline in global output would be the worst since the Great Depression, the I.M.F. said.

How could it be otherwise? There is scarcely any commerce anywhere.

Politically, this is almost certainly unsustainable. The problem is, if everybody goes back to work, then more people get sick and die. The virus doesn’t recognize that we’re fed up with lockdown, and want it to give us all a time out so we can recover economically. This is the thing that drives me the craziest about virus denialists and minimizers: they act like we can make the monster go away if we deny by act of will that it is what it is. This works for children who think there’s a monster under their bed — because there are not monsters under their bed. There actually is a deadly virus moving among us. It is spread by close personal contact. That is a scientific fact. All the magical thinking in the world won’t change it.

I learned last night that a close family friend has been tested for the virus. She’s really, really sick, with all the symptoms. I have to think that a lot of people who are so het up on denying that this is a big deal must not know anybody who has suffered from coronavirus. It’s horrible.

There was a sharp, clear, helpful debate in the Catholic Herald last week about the economy and the virus, between Helen Andrews and Pascal-Emanuel Gobry, both conservatives. Here’s a link to it. Excerpts:

[PEG:] As I write, the French government is requisitioning refrigerated food storage warehouses to use as morgues. Spain is storing bodies in ice-skating rinks. Before it went into lockdown, Iran dug mass graves for virus victims so big they could be seen from space.

I note this not to be macabre or to play on emotions, but because when quarantine skeptics question the numbers (and they are imperfect), my instinctive response is a version of Dr Johnson’s “I refute it thus.” Who knows if people are dying at a higher rate than in past years? Well, have you looked at all the overflowing morgues?

That said, the numbers do tell a very clear story. If, as you suggest, we look at overall deaths, the conclusion is that we are almost certainly undercounting coronavirus deaths rather than overcounting them, since people also die without being tested. This is true in Spain, Italy, and France. In Northern Italy, excess mortality is up to twice the official virus death toll. Now, you might say, aren’t figures less bad in the rest of Italy? Yes –because they went into lockdown.

Then there is the issue of ICU beds. Coronavirus is undoubtedly killing a lot more people than the flu, but it’s giving many times more people pneumonia of the kind that requires intensive care to survive – hence the notorious “flatten the curve” strategy. People have drowned in their own mucus awaiting treatment in Madrid’s most modern hospitals. Italy and Spain have already implemented battlefield triage rules. ICUs in Paris have been running at occupancy rates hovering around 200%, despite the Air Force evacuating people around the clock to less-affected regions; in hardest-hit Vosges, the number is a staggering 425% (and this is weeks into lockdown). This is very, very real.

A pandemic will cause economic mayhem in any world, but there is simply no doubt in my mind that a laissez-faire approach causes an unacceptable risk of collapse of the health care system and of avoidable mass casualties. I spent February raging at Macron’s establishmentarian pusillanimity in the face of an insidious foreign threat, at establishment media saying “It’s only the flu and if you disagree you’re a racist,” but at least this sort of liberal deathwish I understand. I wish I could understand that of my fellow conservatives, particularly those who, as I know you do, care more about the common good than economic figures or libertarian shibboleths.

Helen Andrews answers:

You can’t credit the lockdown with reducing the figures for at least two weeks, given the incubation period of the virus. In that interim in Italy, before the benefits of their lockdown could possibly have been felt, death totals were still comparable to 2016-17. Things were bad, but not unprecedentedly bad.

Unprecedentedly bad is 6.6 million people filing for unemployment in a single week in the United States. The week before it was 3.3 million. The previous record was 695,000. Don’t expect the new record to last for long.

Do you know what 30 per cent unemployment looks like? I’m terrified we are going to find out. Restaurants and retail shops are just the beginning. Small businesses of all kinds are dying, and they won’t all spring back to life when the lockdown ends. I’m staggered by people who think the government can treat the economy like a computer on the fritz: unplug it and plug it back in again. It doesn’t work like that.

And most of the people whose lives we are ruining are those to whom the coronavirus poses virtually no threat at all. Unlike the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed the young and healthy by the millions, this is a disease that, everywhere it has struck, has killed almost exclusively the very old and already seriously ill.

One friend who got laid off is pregnant. She needed these next few months of work to save up a little fund for cribs and strollers. She would qualify for unemployment benefits if she could get them on the phone, but of course the lines are jammed. I don’t know what will happen to her savings now. Probably go to her landlord.

The number of coronavirus deaths in DC stands at 12. More than a month ago, we had multiple confirmed cases wandering around CPAC and AIPAC (never mind the acronyms, two of the biggest conferences in town), infecting, one would have thought, dozens if not hundreds of people in those enclosed conference spaces, who then would have infected thousands more in the weeks before the city shut down. The horrible crisis for which we are putting an entire city under house arrest, ruining people’s futures and finances, and forcing my friend to embark on her first year of motherhood with a bank account at zero – is this it?

Read the whole thing. It’s a good exchange, because both writers have good points. PEG, in the end, says it best: whichever strategy we settle on (and it will probably be a mixture of the two), it is going to be economically devastating for us all, because we cannot have a normal economy with a bunch of people dying from a virus. One way or another, we are in for a terrible time, no matter what we do.

Think forward to this fall. Scientists predict that we may see a lull in infections over the summer, but they will come roaring back in the autumn. Think about the schools. Everybody will be eager to put their kids back in school. Kids have been the most resilient and resistant to coronavirus of all demographics. But they can carry the virus without showing symptoms. Their teachers will be much more susceptible to serious illness than they will — and so will the school’s support staff, administrators, lunch ladies, janitors, and so forth. Do we want to ask adults to put themselves at that kind of risk? This is very real to me: my wife is a classroom teacher. I am her immunocompromised husband.

What about older employees at every business? Or the immunocompromised? We might have to go back to work, because the economic devastation more than most people are willing to tolerate, but if we make that call as a society, let’s do so in full knowledge of what we are accepting.

Personally, I was glad that the bishops of my church decided to put liturgies on hold for now, in terms of public access. The older people at my church, and the immunocompromised (like me), would have had to struggle with our consciences over whether or not to risk it. I know these people, and I know myself; all of us would have pressured ourselves to go to church, out of fear that we were letting down the Lord. In truth, I believe God would have been merciful, and would not expect people who are at serious risk of catching this deadly virus to go to church. But people are not God, and I am sure we would all have been less merciful with ourselves than God would have been. And that could cost us our lives.

Let’s say we all had been permitted to go to church during this period, and one or more of our congregation had caught coronavirus and died. Talk about guilt! It would have been hard to have lived with myself had I reason to believe that one of us in the congregation exposed others there to the virus, leading to the demise of one or more parishioners. This is the kind of thing you don’t get to do over again.

This is why I have been chill about the temporary stop in church services: because it’s something that I can give up to protect the health and lives of the weaker among our congregation. After my wife’s phone conversation with our suffering friend (who is not an old person, by the way) last night, my wife told me what our friend’s symptoms were. Really horrible stuff — so bad that I actually had a nightmare last night about it happening to me. This is not abstract when it happens to someone you know, and she tells you about how hard it is to breathe. 

When the question is poverty or life, well, as I said at the beginning of this crisis, you can’t get any poorer than dead. But the truth is, for a lot of younger, healthier people, they risk of dying from this virus is smaller. So do we let them go back to work? I could see agreeing to that — but we have to remember too that these young people are not islands. They will not be able to visit with their older relatives, for example. If my college-student son goes back this fall — as I’m sure he will — he will not be able to visit us the entire semester, because of this virus. He will be living across town, but will not be able to come home, unless we take some extraordinary precautions. (I’m thinking even know as I write this about how we could make this work.)

The point I’m making here is that there is no way out. We are all going to be in a world of hurt until there is a vaccine, which could take 18 months. It is an illusion to think that we can restore the economy without a vaccine. How many of us will end up living much as we did under lockdown, simply because it’s too dangerous to do otherwise? That will have big economic effects, even if all of us are at liberty to live as we choose.

A friend texted last night to say that he feels that we as a society are getting to the end of what people are willing to do in terms of lockdown. He’s probably right about that. Something is going to have to change. We have to have a talk about that. But I hope we can talk about that without false bravado, and without the voices of those who deny that one way or another, the choice we will have to make as a society is a tragic one that will involve terrible suffering. Again: there is no way out. 

We are so accustomed in the West to thinking that there is some sort of solution that will enable us to avoid bad things. In this awful case, nature reminds us that our powers are limited. We have to figure out how to endure.

UPDATE: Jonathan Rauch tweets:

Week 6 of Covid-19 crisis: one citizen’s assessment of where we stand. Spoiler: what needs to be happening isn’t happening, and the president isn’t even talking about it. We need a Lincoln but have a Buchanan. OK, here goes.

Lockdown/isolation are temporarily effective but brutally costly and unsustainable. Lockdown costs trillions and causes huge human disruption. Must be lifted before long. Every day needs to be spent building for post-lockdown.

Lifting lockdown with current testing and tracing capability would cause viral resurgence. Also costs trillions with potentially even huger human disruption.

That leaves option No. 3. VASTLY increase testing capacity, by one or two orders of magnitude, and build MAJOR infrastructure for contact tracing. Do it now, before lockdown is lifted.  Testing and tracing together can get ahead of the virus by shutting down asymptomatic spread. Nothing else works, and both are needed.

NB, testing is a big job but tracing is even bigger. Requires major logistics and coordination. Build, test, deploy apps; decide privacy safeguards; coordinate state health services; get Cong’l authorizations; inform and prepare the public; etc.

Important new study from Microsoft researchers shows that testing and tracing need to be an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is currently talking about… (7/11) ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-f…

…but that is still one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than the status quo or an under-prepared reopening. ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-f…

In short: there’s really only one thing to do, and we’re not doing it. Or even really talking about doing it. POTUS should be leading a whole-of-government test/trace mobilization RIGHT NOW. Should be reporting every day on progress. Should be focused like a laser.

Instead he’s berating the press, claiming his brain is the strategy, and “hoping to God.” It’s the greatest presidential failure of leadership in my lifetime (and I lived through Vietnam). Maybe since Buchanan.

Final tweet:

Meanwhile, the rollout of testing is *slowing*. This is not good. See @bradstuartmd today. https://t.co/0ZPiSbsFyA (11/11)

— Jonathan Rauch (@jon_rauch) April 14, 2020

Read it all on Twitter — and follow Jon Rauch, who is always interesting.

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