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.