To restart the economy, the government needs to set up immunity registries similar to those for childhood diseases.
The Ebola virus spread rapidly in Sierra Leone in 2015 and killed many. One of us (Dr. Mores) was there and saw the local health-care system get overwhelmed. Without enough personal protective equipment, doctors and nurses worked tirelessly, always fearing infection. The economy was destroyed.
Eventually, Ebola was contained. The new coronavirus will also be contained. Everyone is looking forward to the end, trying to figure a way out of the crisis. Social distancing reduces the virus’s ability to spread, but until cures and vaccines are discovered, the only way out is naturally occurring immunity.
Both of us have experience documenting immunity. Sen. Cassidy is a gastroenterologist who founded an immunization program that protected 36,000 children in Louisiana against hepatitis B. Dr. Mores followed patients in Sierra Leone who were immune to Ebola after recovery. Experience informs our ideas.
Coronavirus spreads rapidly. One person typically infects two or three other people, who then infect two or three others and so on. Most recover or never have symptoms, and most likely become immune. A vaccine works by mimicking the immune response of a naturally occurring infection. Herd immunity develops when 40% to 70% of a population becomes immune. The “herd” of people who are immune blocks the virus from taking hold and infecting others. A person’s immunity to the novel coronavirus could last 12 months. By then, a vaccine could be ready.
When individual and herd immunity develop, society and the economy will begin to return to normal. When a nurse knows that she is immune, she can care for routine Covid-19 patients without wearing a respirator mask. An immune bartender can serve customers without fearing exposure. An immune insurance agent can have meetings without getting infected.
In the U.K., officials pursued an initial strategy of allowing herd immunity to develop. When they realized that waves of Covid-19 patients would overwhelm National Health Service hospitals, they abandoned the approach. A successful strategy combining herd immunity with social distancing for the vulnerable requires that the authorities know and record who is and isn’t immune.
The U.S. has experience recording immunity. States currently use online immunization registries to estimate herd immunity for a variety of vaccine-preventable diseases. These registries were paid for by taxpayers and comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Doctors can enter information. Schools can look up student vaccination records.
When Dr. Cassidy vaccinated 36,000 children, their records were added to Louisiana’s immunization registry. When Dr. Mores knew an African patient was immune to Ebola, the patient was employed to relieve exhausted health-care workers. Increasing the number of immune people and knowing who is immune fundamentally changes things in a health crisis.
To restart the economy, the government needs to set up coronavirus-immunity registries. At the same time, widespread testing is necessary to document immunity in those who haven’t fallen sick. A recent report from China found that 100% of patients tested two weeks after symptoms cleared had antibodies for the coronavirus. Recovering from a known coronavirus infection or having a positive antibody test is likely to indicate immunity lasting for at least some time. Those who so demonstrate that they are immune can be allowed to return to work. The whole community is freer when herd immunity is established.
Healthy young people appear to be at lower risk of contracting Covid-19. This, combined with herd immunity, would allow children and college students to return to school. Any adult who is immune could safely teach. As herd immunity establishes itself, the 30% of Americans who are under 25 could safely return to shops and restaurants.
There’s obviously still much more we need to learn about the new coronavirus. What we learn may change how we respond. But our suggestions here are based on sound public-health principles to address the medical crisis. Only when we find a way out of the medical crisis can we find our way out of the economic crisis.
Dr. Cassidy, a gastroenterologist, is a Republican U.S., senator from Louisiana. Dr. Mores is a professor of global health at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.
As the pandemic lockdown continues, governments and central banks in the world’s largest economies are responding with stimulus programs aimed at limiting the damage while holding societies together. But as the paralysis persists and deepens, the odds of a rapid “V-shaped” economic recovery are fast diminishing.
Our 2009 book, “This Time Is Different,” documents financial crises over eight centuries. A central theme, controversial at the time of the global financial crisis, is that recessions that are accompanied by severe financial crises are deeper and recoveries slower than conventional “business cycle” recessions. Weakening financial-industry balance sheets and the inefficiencies associated with widespread default, personal and corporate, inflict severe damage on economic activity. This is often amplified by increased uncertainty and risk-aversion.
The current collapse is poised to shatter records for crisis depth. Duration is still an open question.
We have ranked crises since 1870 by severity, combining the magnitude of the initial contraction with the time it took to return to the precrisis peak in per capita gross domestic product.
At the moment, even in a scenario of rapid recovery, available data indicate that many countries—including the U.S.—are heading for contractions in the first half of 2020 that are unprecedented in the sheer depth of their “sudden stops,” as measured by peak-to-trough declines in per capita GDP.
Even a relatively quick exit from the economic standstill in China, parts of Europe and the U.S. wouldn’t avert crises in many middle- and low-income countries—or a deep global recession. Economic growth had been falling in many emerging markets before the novel coronavirus emerged. External debt, both private and public, had continued to climb. For most countries, central bank foreign-exchange reserves are significantly off their peaks. For many commodity producers, repaying hard-currency debt, mostly in dollars, will be impossible as commodity prices flirt with historic lows and investors show more aversion to risk.
For countries that don’t rely on commodity exports, the situation is hardly better. The pandemic has bitten into global trade and all manner of manufacturing supply chains. For countries that depend on tourism, the immediate prospects are especially grim. Private financing for emerging markets has come to a halt, and multilateral government lenders such as the International Monetary Fund don’t have nearly the resources to fill the gap.
As the pandemic continues to interrupt normal economic life around the world, the number of countries at once facing an acute scarcity of financial resources and a health emergency will increase dramatically. In some of those cases, emergency policies to cope with the pandemic will take priority over the repayment of debt. Defaults won’t be limited to private personal and corporate debt. Argentina, Venezuela and Lebanon will soon have company.
An urgent question is how to figure out the inevitable debt rescheduling that will be needed in many corners of the global economy. There have been calls for a debt moratorium for small businesses and homeowners in advanced economies. This makes sense. If the capacity to generate income is suspended while in lockdown, debt repayments should also be placed on hold temporarily. As an emergency measure that lifts discretionary income and may limit lasting damage to individual and corporate credit scores, such proposals can be integrated with stimulus policies.
But the problem brewing outside the richest advanced economies must also be addressed. A comparable crisis-relief measure to deal with sovereigns hit by the pandemic needs to be worked out with the IMF and World Bank. The largest creditor for many of the world’s poorest countries is China, which will also have to come to the table. Ecuador is a case in point. The country has among the highest coronavirus infection rates in Latin America, and its revenue from oil exports has collapsed.
If the economic paralysis extends too long, advanced economies won’t be spared, either. Consider Italy’s predicament. With a debilitating collapse in output, limited fiscal capacity, and a dire humanitarian problem, is it really supposed to devote scarce resources to debt repayment instead of hospitals? Other countries in Europe may face the same dilemma. In Italy’s case the response is less clear-cut than for emerging markets, as much of Italian debt is held by domestic residents, not foreign investors.
Our research has shown that heterodox solutions to unsustainable debt, including debt forgiveness and restructuring, have been widely practiced by both advanced and developing economies over the past two centuries. For the moment, however, the worst-hit households, companies and governments need an outright moratorium.
The President’s mendacious nightly press briefings on the coronavirus will go down in history for their monumental flimflammery.
During the Vietnam War, the United States had the Five O’Clock Follies, nightly briefings at which American military leaders claimed, citing a variety of bogus statistics, half-truths, and misleading reports from the front, to be winning a war that they were, in fact, losing. Richard Pyle, the Associated Press’s Saigon bureau chief, called the press conferences “the longest-playing tragicomedy in Southeast Asia’s theater of the absurd,” which, minus the “Southeast Asia” part, is not a bad description of the scene currently playing out each evening in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, in the White House. We now have the Trump Follies, the nightly briefings at which President Trump has lied and bragged, lamented and equivocated, about the global pandemic that poses an existential threat to his Presidency. Just as the Vietnam briefings became a standard by which the erosion of government credibility could be measured then, historians of the future will consult the record of Trump’s mendacious, misleading press conferences as an example of a tragic failure of leadership at such a critical moment. There will be much material for them; the transcripts from just the first three days of this week runs to more than forty thousand words.
Since Trump began making the press conferences a daily ritual a couple of weeks ago—an eternity in the pandemic era—his more memorable lines are already featuring in political attacks against him. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump insisted, two weeks ago. When asked to assess his own performance, he said, “I’d rate it a ten.” This Wednesday, with members of his coronavirus task force joining him onstage, he added, “We’ve done one hell of a job. Nobody has done the job that we’ve done. And it’s lucky that you have this group here right now for this problem or you wouldn’t even have a country left.”
The disconnect between Trumpian reality and actual reality has never been on starker display than in the past few days, as the true face of the horror we are facing in the United States has shown itself, in New York City, with overwhelmed morgues and emergency rooms, a governor pleading for ventilators and face masks from the federal government, and heartbreaking first-person accounts reminiscent of the open letters sent from Italy a few weeks back, which warned Americans: this is what is coming for you—don’t make our mistakes. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization said that the United States was emerging as the “epicenter” of the global pandemic, which makes the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room the emerging epicenter of the failure to respond to it.
A couple of weeks ago, it seemed as if maybe that would not be the case. Although the Trump Administration had faltered and delayed and denied through the initial stages of the virus, when it raged outside our borders, it looked like it might finally get its act together and take this public-health menace seriously, now that it was hitting in force inside the U.S. Trump declared a “national emergency,” stepped up testing, and, on March 16th, agreed to his crisis committee’s plan for a fifteen-day countrywide slowdown, in order to “flatten the curve” of the disease’s trajectory. Barely a week into the fifteen days, however, Trump began signalling an abrupt change of course—at just the moment when the disease was accelerating its deadly progress through a wealthy nation that turned out to be surprisingly ill-prepared for it.
Throughout this long, strange March, Trump has often framed the fight against the pandemic in martial terms: a “battle” to be won, a victory to be achieved, a shared sacrifice against “this invisible enemy” which would go on “until we have defeated the virus.” But the Commander-in-Chief did something extraordinary this week: he rebelled against his own clichés, essentially declaring that he no longer wanted to be at war with the virus after all.
On Sunday, he prefigured this pivot, apparently after watching the Fox News host Steve Hilton complain about the treatment—a shut-down country and a cratered economy—being worse than the disease. “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” Trump tweeted, shortly before midnight. By the Monday-night edition of the Follies, which are usually scheduled for 5 p.m. but often not started until later, Trump was repeating this line over and over again. “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” he said. “We’re not going to let the cure be worse than the problem.” Later, he added, “We can’t have the cure be worse than the problem,” and also, “We can’t let that happen. . . . We can’t let this continue to go on.” America, he said, would be “open for business” soon.
On Tuesday, which marked a month since a now-infamous tweet in which the President claimed that “the Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump was even more specific. He announced that afternoon, on a Fox News special from the White House lawn, that he wanted to get the country reopened and the church pews “packed” by Easter, on April 12th, at just the time when New York and other states were predicted to face the maximum pressure on their overstretched medical facilities. A few hours later, at the nightly press briefing, he was asked about this seemingly arbitrary timetable by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
“Who suggested Easter?” Collins asked. “Who suggested that day?” Trump replied, “I just thought it was a beautiful time. It would be a beautiful time, a beautiful timeline. It’s a great day.” Collins followed up: “So that wasn’t based on any of the data?” “I just think it would be a beautiful timeline,” Trump responded.
This was painfully revealing: the President, under questioning by an independent reporter, was admitting that he wanted to do something with no basis in science. In fact, within minutes, some of the nation’s leading experts on pandemics panned the suggestion as dangerous and ill conceived. By Wednesday, Trump was still talking about an Easter deadline, but only promising a new “recommendation” at that time. “I’m not going to do anything rash or hastily,” he said, which is as close to a reassuring statement from the President as he will ever offer.
On Thursday, Trump appeared before the cameras just before 5:30 p.m., minutes after the Times reported that the United States now had more than eighty-one thousand recorded cases of the coronavirus, surpassing China as the world’s No. 1 country in terms of confirmed infections. When asked about the statistic, Trump acted as though this, too, was some sort of an achievement of his to be praised, saying that the high number was “a tribute to our testing.” Despite the day’s grim news, with his Administration reporting a record-high week of unemployment claims, Trump continued his upbeat tone. The world “is going to end up better than ever,” he said, before reading out all the names of the members of the G-20 world leaders with whom he had spoken that morning, listing the provisions of the two-trillion-dollar emergency-aid package that Congress is finalizing, and even reciting the number of gloves that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent to individual states. Eventually, he got around to his main point, which is that “we’ve gotta go back to work.” Earlier on Thursday, his Administration had sent a letter to governors, saying it would soon issue new guidelines rating U.S. counties by their varied levels of risk for the disease and suggesting that those with lower risk could resume business more quickly. Trump offered no specifics, but touted it as a needed step. “I think it’s going to happen pretty quickly,” he said. He never mentioned the word “Easter.”
After all that, it was hard not to think of Trump’s whole “beautiful timeline” as yet another monumental act of Presidential flimflammery, a distracting week of misdirection to keep us all occupied while those of us who are still working do so from home. Trump’s open-by-Easter pledge may well be as quickly forgotten as his other lies during the coronavirus crisis thus far, such as when he said that the cases would go down to near zero in a few days, that the disease would simply disappear, and that it would never make it to our shores in significant numbers.
These daily Presidential briefings have understandably become controversial among the national media, which is wary of being played by an attention-seeking President. Neither the Times nor the Washington Post are sending reporters to them, citing the health risk. (A journalist who had attended several of the sessions has reportedly contracted the virus; even still, the President refuses to follow the social-distancing dictates that his government is urging others to practice.) Sources at various television networks have said that the networks were considering no longer airing them, although they have so far continued to do so. The Post columnist Margaret Sullivan has argued that the briefings should not be broadcast live anymore, citing the fact that the President was using them as a platform for “self-aggrandizement,” “media-bashing,” and “exaggeration and outright lies.”
Trump will keep doing them, however, because they work. According to the Times, ratings for Trump’s briefings rival those for “hit reality shows and prime-time football.” Trump, whose star turn on NBC’s “The Apprentice” arguably had as much to do with his election to the Presidency as anything else, is obsessed with ratings. His other metrics are good, too, including a Gallup poll showing him with the highest approval rating of his Presidency (forty-nine per cent, versus a forty-five per cent disapproval rating). Even more striking were the results of a CBS/YouGov poll, released this week, in which respondents were asked what sources of information about the coronavirus they found most credible. Democrats rated medical professionals and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention most highly. Trump came in last among this group, at fourteen per cent. But, for Republicans, Trump came in at the top, with ninety per cent saying that they trusted the President’s information about the coronavirus, making him tied for first place with medical professionals. The poll shows that, even when their own lives are literally at stake, a significant subset of the American population no longer believes in almost anything other than the President.
This, in the end, is why Trump’s nightly Follies matter. Even if he cannot reopen the country by Easter, and governors and mayors ignore him, as they surely will. Even if what he says is so contradictory and at times patently false that his own followers could not possibly heed his advice as a practical guide to action.
In the long course of the Vietnam War, which lasted a full decade, some fifty-eight thousand Americans died. With the pandemic, many scientific models publicized in recent days have projected that U.S. deaths could reach far beyond that figure by the time the coronavirus has run its course, depending at least in part on what decisions Trump and other leaders take in the coming months. But this week’s Follies have shown an irresolute leader who does not want to fight the war or even, on many days, admit that it exists. He is a cartoon caricature of a wartime President, not a real one.
A Vietnam draft-dodger, who used a phony foot problem to get out of that war, Trump this week has reminded us that he would like to be a coronavirus draft-dodger, too. But the fight is not a hoax, no matter how often he suggests it is, and the President, like it or not, is already in the fight. On Tuesday, he told the country that he would soon be reopening it, “as we near the end of our historic battle with the invisible enemy.” By the time you read this, though, the battle will not be over, or even really begun. As soon as Trump finished speaking on Thursday, CNN interrupted the briefing to broadcast the news that it had been the deadliest day yet in the pandemic for the United States, with at least two hundred and thirty-seven dead, and hours more to go.
U.S. wanted a statement referring to the coronavirus as the ‘Wuhan virus.’ Other nations disagreed.
WASHINGTON—A meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of Seven nations ended Wednesday without a customary joint statement because members wouldn’t agree with a U.S. request to refer to the novel coronavirus as the “Wuhan virus,” according to an official familiar with the matter.
The U.S. chaired the meeting, which was conducted virtually due to concerns about the outbreak of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. The State Department is using the hashtag #WuhanVirus on Twitter.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who represented the U.S., declined to comment when asked about the disagreement during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday.
Top agenda items for the meeting included preventing further crises in the world’s most vulnerable countries and keeping global travel routes open to ensure citizens can return home.
“This isn’t a time for blame; this is a time to solve this global problem. We are focused on that today,” Mr. Pompeo told reporters.
The German magazine Der Spiegel reported the disagreement among the seven industrialized nations earlier Wednesday. The Trump administration has drawn criticism for its description of the novel coronavirus, which some critics said has stoked hostility toward Asian Americans.
Mr. Pompeo reiterated his previous criticism of China for what he called a disinformation campaign about the virus. He also said that Chinese authorities still were withholding information about the outbreak that started in Hubei province.
The Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other participating G-7 nations released their own statements about the outcome of the meeting on Wednesday, though didn’t refer to the novel coronavirus as the “Wuhan virus” or the “Chinese virus,” a term used by President Trump.
The G-7 consists of the U.S., U.K., Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany and France.
“Today, I’ve agreed to work together to intensify international cooperation to support vulnerable countries, pursue a vaccine, protect the world economy, and enable our citizens who are stranded to get home safely,” the U.K. foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said in a statement.