Let’s face it. Timing the return to a normal life after the onset of the pandemic was not meant to be an easy or a well-informed decision. A number of countries, especially in Europe and East Asia, waited until new case and death rates went reliably down before they relaxed the lockdown restrictions. In some cases, they had to reimpose them at the local level.
In the US, the out-of-sync federal system from the President down to the states proved to be the cause of an uneven and haphazard approach to the pandemic from its start to the time it came to fashion a return to normalcy. Whether aiming to restore some semblance of social life or, more urgently, to reboot the economy, states started to relax the precautions by following the usual pattern. Republican governors hewed to the President’s persistent reopening call while Democratic governors opted to march at their own more cautious pace.
What lies behind the two different approaches are different calculations and sentiments regarding the right balance between saving livelihoods and saving lives. Now, after several weeks of reopening attempts, the results are streaming in and the news isn’t pretty. States that hastened to reopen their economies are recording accelerating rates of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. This adverse reality does not seem though to change the minds of the rushing governors and the segments of the population that stand behind them.
Sometimes the argument in favor of saving livelihoods takes on a libertarian ideological cover under which, however, there lies a more or less nonchalant stance toward human loss. It goes like this: “We can’t shut down the economy just because some people are expected to die. After all, people die every day for one or another reason. The vulnerable ones can always choose to sequester themselves to avoid infection.”
I recognize the importance of saving livelihoods but we also need to appreciate the nature and scope of this calamity. First, dying of complications from Covid-19 is not the same as dying from just any other disease. Many have died because they caught it from the very people they had to care for. Almost none of them would have otherwise died. Others died because they caught it from an infectious relative, friend or co-worker who might never have suspected to be a carrier of the virus. Absent the coronavirus, these people would still be alive. To those who lost someone to Covid-19 it feels like a tragedy. They have suffered a grave loss that could have been avoided. That heart-sinking feeling of “what if” can last forever. To the survivors of the Covid-19 victims, the conundrum of saving livelihoods versus lives has a whole different meaning; it’s very personal and devastating.
Next, let’s think of what it means for a state authority to say it’s okay to apply less caution than before. For example, the prime minister of UK, Boris Johnson, just recently said that social distancing can be reduced to one meter (three feet) down from two meters. What does that mean from an epidemiological standpoint? Can an official declare by fiat we are now safer under the closer distance? Will all of a sadden the virus obey the new guideline? It would have been more honest if Boris Johnson had also informed his fellow citizens how the shorter distance changes the infection risk.
And what about the position that advocates to let the people decide what to do by making their own calculations of the risks they take? This is the libertarian view that leaves things up to the individual not the state. It appeals to those who believe that individuals acting as autonomous units eventually produce a better solution than state mandates. It sounds liberating until you dig under the surface and discover how naively counterproductive it is.
Mandating individual behavior in relation to coping with the coronavirus is similar to regulating various activities and markets. So let’s think along this regulation paradigm. Why do we have regulation? Not because we believe that individuals in general are dishonest and behave badly but because we believe, based on experience, that some individuals will behave badly. So what? Well, if people do not have the information or the expertise to guess who will behave honestly and who won’t, or the cost of doing the screening is prohibitively high, then a lot of individuals will shun away from an activity or market and bring their collapse.
This is exactly the situation we face with the coronavirus. When we walk into a venue, we have no idea who carries the virus. Since carriers can be asymptomatic, how many of us are willing to step into a situation where distinguishing between low and high-risk individuals is impossible? Very few, unless we are recklessly indifferent to sickness and death. We can encourage and increase participation, by mandating that certain precautions, like wearing a mask and/or keeping the required distance, are required of all, regardless of their sense as to what risk they pose to others. This is equivalent, for example, to the rules that require all firms to disclose the same types of information when they wish to sell new shares or bonds to the public in order to protect buyers from fraud. Therefore, a mandate to comply with certain precautions contributes to having a lot of vital activities and markets up and running instead of letting them wither or completely shut down under the failure to signal a reliable measure of protection.
But then, we hear the worn-out argument “What about my constitutional right (meaning ‘to do as I please short of committing a crime’)? My answer is: “And what about the right (it doesn’t need to be constitutional) of a vulnerable person to shop for food or work or worship without risking his or her life?”
The truth of the matter is that by accepting mandates for certain behavior and rules we can restore a lot of social and business activities and enjoy many of the life’s pleasures. But we have to show discipline and social responsibility. And, also let’s stop invoking individual rights, no matter how deadly they may be, because we cling to the naïve assumption of the all-rational and responsible individual. The states that stuck to this fantasy are now those that reap the grim reality of the virus.
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