No sooner had the ink dried on the last $2 trillion round of economic relief from the devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic than President Trump and Congress began contemplating the next bill to address the crisis. There is, after all, crisis to spare. You might think the emergency on Washington’s mind is the rapidly escalating number of U.S. infections and deaths, or perhaps the shortage of lifesaving personal protective gear and medical equipment such as ventilators and the ongoing dearth of reliable and available tests.
But the disaster that the next round of stimulus will address, according to media accounts, is the same as the last one: the financial losses to businesses and workers caused by the social distancing measures put in place to limit the spread of the new coronavirus. The severity of current social distancing restrictions is necessitated in part by the United States’ lack of capacity to identify the infected, trace and test their social contacts, and quarantine the sick. If you can’t be sure that everyone outside isn’t contagious, then you must stay inside.
Congress remains perversely determined to treat the symptoms, rather than the illness. On Wednesday, Newsday reported, “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week proposed adding $250 billion for the popular small-business loan programs already in the recently enacted $2.2 trillion CARES Act relief and stimulus package. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded Wednesday that that interim bill also include $150 billion for state and local governments ... and $100 billion for hospitals and a 15% increase in the maximum benefit to supplemental nutrition assistance for families.” In other words, Republicans and Democrats both just more of the very same things they got last time. In fact, Pelosi explicitly pointed to the last bill as “a good model” because it managed to draw bipartisan support.
It is true that some of these expenditures, such as aid to hospitals and state and local governments, will partly aid the essential efforts to treat the sick. And putting money in people’s pockets goes hand-in-hand with social distancing policies, by defraying some of the costs of closing non-essential businesses, which in turn threatens the reliable paychecks of thousands of workers. But this approach, while vital, has at best only slowed the virus’ spread. The disease must be halted in its tracks to allow the economy to be reopened. The only answer is to rapidly ramp up widespread public testing for Covid-19 and its antibodies. (...)
“I can’t believe that here we are the second week in April and we’re still talking about testing,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “We still can’t test for a virus that has shut the entire American economy down. I talk to conservative economists, and I say, ‘You know, we’re costing the American economy hundreds of millions of dollars a day because we don’t have testing capacity.’”
As Aaron E. Carroll, a medical school professor at Indiana University, noted in The New York Times on Monday, before the economy can be safely reopened, “Every time an individual tests positive, the public health infrastructure needs to be able to determine whom that person has been in close contact with, find those people, and have them go into isolation or quarantine until it’s established they aren’t infected, too... Building that capacity will take significant time and money, and the country hasn’t even started.” (...)
What would such a federal effort look like? For one thing, it would involve a lot more aid to state and local governments earmarked for the purpose. “It means a massive infusion at the state and local level, because the people who are going to do the testing, do the contact tracing, are all state and local people,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a professor of public health at Yale. “The last bill has $150 billion to state and local governments, but they’re losing sales and income tax revenue, so $150 billion doesn’t even begin to meet the lost revenue gap. Money has to flow to the states to do the shoe leather epidemiology.”
Congress also needs to direct the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to give proper guidance and assistance to the state and local governments. “Contact tracing would have to be implemented by states,” said Jha. “But Congress could say, ‘You do it, we’ll fund it and put in some metrics to make sure it’s actually happening.’” The state and local departments of health would then, with federal dollars and oversight, hire staff of testers covered in personal protective gear such as masks and gowns.
We also simply must produce vastly more tests and build the lab capacity to turn them around quickly. Currently, patients can wait up to a week for results because the private labs that perform the tests often have a massive backlog. Jha estimates that, based on the current level of outbreak, roughly 500,000 to 600,000 Americans per day should be getting testing, which is roughly five times as many tests as we’re currently performing. It would also be helpful, since so many people who have been sick recently with flu-like symptoms don’t know if they had Covid-19, and many people who had it were asymptomatic, to develop and widely deploy a serological tests, which measure the disease’s antibodies in the blood. Then we’d have some idea of who can safely go back to work without risk of infection.
But the disaster that the next round of stimulus will address, according to media accounts, is the same as the last one: the financial losses to businesses and workers caused by the social distancing measures put in place to limit the spread of the new coronavirus. The severity of current social distancing restrictions is necessitated in part by the United States’ lack of capacity to identify the infected, trace and test their social contacts, and quarantine the sick. If you can’t be sure that everyone outside isn’t contagious, then you must stay inside.
Congress remains perversely determined to treat the symptoms, rather than the illness. On Wednesday, Newsday reported, “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week proposed adding $250 billion for the popular small-business loan programs already in the recently enacted $2.2 trillion CARES Act relief and stimulus package. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded Wednesday that that interim bill also include $150 billion for state and local governments ... and $100 billion for hospitals and a 15% increase in the maximum benefit to supplemental nutrition assistance for families.” In other words, Republicans and Democrats both just more of the very same things they got last time. In fact, Pelosi explicitly pointed to the last bill as “a good model” because it managed to draw bipartisan support. It is true that some of these expenditures, such as aid to hospitals and state and local governments, will partly aid the essential efforts to treat the sick. And putting money in people’s pockets goes hand-in-hand with social distancing policies, by defraying some of the costs of closing non-essential businesses, which in turn threatens the reliable paychecks of thousands of workers. But this approach, while vital, has at best only slowed the virus’ spread. The disease must be halted in its tracks to allow the economy to be reopened. The only answer is to rapidly ramp up widespread public testing for Covid-19 and its antibodies. (...)
“I can’t believe that here we are the second week in April and we’re still talking about testing,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “We still can’t test for a virus that has shut the entire American economy down. I talk to conservative economists, and I say, ‘You know, we’re costing the American economy hundreds of millions of dollars a day because we don’t have testing capacity.’”
As Aaron E. Carroll, a medical school professor at Indiana University, noted in The New York Times on Monday, before the economy can be safely reopened, “Every time an individual tests positive, the public health infrastructure needs to be able to determine whom that person has been in close contact with, find those people, and have them go into isolation or quarantine until it’s established they aren’t infected, too... Building that capacity will take significant time and money, and the country hasn’t even started.” (...)
What would such a federal effort look like? For one thing, it would involve a lot more aid to state and local governments earmarked for the purpose. “It means a massive infusion at the state and local level, because the people who are going to do the testing, do the contact tracing, are all state and local people,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a professor of public health at Yale. “The last bill has $150 billion to state and local governments, but they’re losing sales and income tax revenue, so $150 billion doesn’t even begin to meet the lost revenue gap. Money has to flow to the states to do the shoe leather epidemiology.”
Congress also needs to direct the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to give proper guidance and assistance to the state and local governments. “Contact tracing would have to be implemented by states,” said Jha. “But Congress could say, ‘You do it, we’ll fund it and put in some metrics to make sure it’s actually happening.’” The state and local departments of health would then, with federal dollars and oversight, hire staff of testers covered in personal protective gear such as masks and gowns.
We also simply must produce vastly more tests and build the lab capacity to turn them around quickly. Currently, patients can wait up to a week for results because the private labs that perform the tests often have a massive backlog. Jha estimates that, based on the current level of outbreak, roughly 500,000 to 600,000 Americans per day should be getting testing, which is roughly five times as many tests as we’re currently performing. It would also be helpful, since so many people who have been sick recently with flu-like symptoms don’t know if they had Covid-19, and many people who had it were asymptomatic, to develop and widely deploy a serological tests, which measure the disease’s antibodies in the blood. Then we’d have some idea of who can safely go back to work without risk of infection.
by Ben Adler, TNR | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg / Getty Images
[ed. This seems so obvious it should go without saying. See also: Testing Falls Woefully Short as Trump Seeks an End to Stay-at-Home Orders (NY Times). And: Congress Has Abandoned the Country (TNR); but don't worry, they'll be back in May (maybe, hopefully).]
