Opening Up From Covid19. Compare the Governors

Last night we ate out in a restaurant in Naples. They're just open this week and people are coming back. The beaches here in southwest Florida are now open. The golf courses have never been closed. "Social distancing" is the rule but masks are discretionary. There's been a light touch on the less populated areas of the state. So far, so good. It's been pointed out that The Villages, with its 100,000+ population of older residents has had very limited number of cases with no Covid19 patients presently in its hospital.

Governor DeSantis has been getting praise for his decision making. Going by "Suttons Law" he went where the money was and early on took aggressive measures to protect nursing home patients. Also, given the known characteristics of the virus he judged that being outdoors in the sun was a good place to start reopening. Of course, the climate here is a big advantage since getting outside is what everyone does. Overall, the pace of opening is fast enough to prevent the grumbling and protesting faced by some governors such as Governor Whitmer in Michigan.

I'm informed now that NEPA will continue to be locked down until June 4th. As much as we'd enjoy getting back to our townhouse there's not much sense in going back to sit in the house all day. At the same time I saw reported that almost 70% of the deaths in PA were in nursing home or assisted living residents. Is that something just to be accepted or is it possible that more aggressive efforts, such as those taken in Florida, to protect those individuals could make a big change in the total picture.

Governor Cuomo, in contrast to Governor DeSantis, seems to have made significant blunders. He called for wildly inflated numbers of ventilators and hospital beds, which were nevertheless provided by the federal government. But when faced with the problem of nursing homes reluctant to take back residents hospitalized and likely still infected with Covid 19 he mandated their return instead of considering having them convalesce in the available empty virus adapted beds.

Leaving the removal of restrictions to the discretion of the individual states was a good plan. The idea is very much in keeping with our very salutary governmental philosophy of federalism which allows for the dispersion of political power into the hands of the of the citizens where it belongs. Decisions are therefore adapted to the local situation. It also allows us to compare and contrast, and learn from, the various approaches to the problem.

Personal freedom, requiring at the same time self-control and responsibility, is the hallmark of our republic. So make your feelings known folks. You're the boss.

 

 

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Unknowns about Coronavirus and Opening Up the U.S.

As our country begins to open up one fact is clear. There are a lot of things we don't know about this virus. One of the big unknowns is why it seems to behave drastically differently in various places. I puzzled about this situation two or three weeks back. Why did it hit the New York metro area but not California so much? Why northern Italy, but not many of the Asian countries nearby to China? Drs. Fauci and Birx were congratulating Californians for making such good preventative efforts, presumably better than did New York, but I don't believe that explanation for a minute. Different possibilities come to mind, not only differences in mitigation efforts but also climate, population density and age, geographic location, but none of them hold up when scrutinized. You don't have to take my word for it since the dilemma finally hit the New York Times over the weekend, so it must be true.

Here's an interesting account from an old classmate friend of mine who has been traveling to Hanoi almost yearly since his military service in Vietnam to help doctors there to modernize their medical care. On April 22 he got a letter from one of his Vietnamese doctor contacts offering to send some of their surplus M95 masks to help ICU doctors in the U.S. They were having very limited virus problems, even though, as my friend informed me, there is a large contingent of Vietnamese who work in China and who came home for the Chinese New Year in late January and early February, presumably carrying the virus with them. In addition Vietnam, with its 1500 miles of coastline and beautiful beaches, is a major vacation spot for the Chinese. Yet only a few days later the major hospital in Hanoi had to close down because of a sudden influx of cases, attributed possibly to travelers coming from Europe.

So, what's going to happen now is a crap shoot. Some are focused on the severe adverse economic impact of our present efforts, with attendant major adverse social, physical and psychological consequences, which will only deepen as it is prolonged, perhaps reaching 1930's proportions or worse. Others are concerned with the potential resurgence of the virus with immediate deleterious effects and feel any price to prevent this is not too much to pay. But one of the strengths of our country is its wide dispersion of government power. So now we're going to have 50 different experiments to help show us the right way to go. And that's a good thing because experts and scientific models are often wrong in their predictions. Dr Fauci in late February was telling us that we should worry more about the flu than the coronavirus. Dr. Birx in a weekend interview admitted that the medical experts greatly underestimated the number of asymptomatic infections when devising their strategies.