As I sat down to write this column an e-mail landed from my child’s school.
“As of today, we continue to see the rate of coronavirus cases climb ... and informed predictions indicate that we are still days or weeks away from the peak. Our own reading of trends and best practices suggests that social gatherings of people will be prohibited or discouraged for some time to come — into the summer ... for these reasons, the (school) has determined that we will remain in virtual learning mode through the remainder of this school year.”
That is, until June, when the summer break begins.
It has been nearly six weeks since many parts of the US were ordered into lockdown. The country is now the epicentre of the global pandemic. Up to Tuesday, 826,000 people across the US had tested positive for Covid-19, though testing remains nowhere near the levels required, and more than 45,000 people had succumbed to the virus.
Many parents are finding out that their children are unlikely to resume normal learning until the next school year begins in September.
It remains unclear when the curve will flatten. What is clear is that the US economy has collapsed, with the sort of numbers not seen since the Great Depression. At least 22-million people across the country have lost their jobs, and many have lost their health insurance.
There is growing hunger, which speaks to the underlying state of American society. Images of long queues at food banks evoke memories of the soup kitchens of the 1930s.
The government’s economic relief programme has revealed an inefficient bureaucracy unable to get relief to those who desperately need it.
There is a lot of talk about opening the economy, and this call is likely to get increased traction among many hungry people who have bills to pay.
As a political calculation, US President Donald Trump has declared his interest in getting the country back to business.
His three-phase plan to reopen the economy will see “vulnerable” people (the elderly and individuals with serious underlying health conditions) staying at home initially. Everyone else would return to work at restaurants, bars and gyms as long as they continue with social distancing. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing, which is strangely not co-ordinated by the federal government.
This position has received enthusiastic support from about 20 governors, most of them Republicans. But many other governors, Republicans among them, are expressing their doubts. A few thousand Trump supporters embarked on enthusiastic anti-lockdown protests in several states over the past week.
But not so fast. “If we all tried to come out at once, everything would look cool for about three weeks. And a week or two after that, the emergency rooms would start to fill again, and people would start to die again,” so says New York Times science writer Donald G McNeil in The Daily podcast. His interviews with medical experts who have studied the history of pandemics suggest that it is fantasy to think normalcy will return in May, or June, or even August.
“Flattening the curve is a notion that people love, but when we say we’re flattening the curve, no, we’re plateauing at a very high level of the curve. That means a steady rate of deaths. So what we want is to see the lockdown last until we get back down to close to what the normal baseline rate of deaths is. And it’s going to be piece by piece.”
So until there is a vaccine, and/or a lot of people are infected and become immune, we may need to get used to constant curtailments of our freedom of movement. Alternatively, we may have to live with the fact that those in power get to decide who lives and who dies.
• Morudu is a writer and director at Clarity Global and Strategic Communications (Washington DC and Cape Town)
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