Trump's "Light at the End of the Tunnel" Is a Delusion
In the past couple of days, stock markets around the world have rebounded owing to news that curves tracking the coronavirus pandemic have flattened in some of the worst-affected countries, including Italy and Spain, and tentative signs of progress in New York. “light at the end of the tunnel!” Donald Trump declared in a tweet. Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, told MSNBC that dealing with the public-health crisis remained the White House’s top priority, but he added that it was also examining how “maybe to gradually reopen the economy, open chunks of the economy, stay away from the worst hot zones.”
Given the enormous economic costs that the shutdown is imposing, the desire to mitigate the impact is understandable. Other Western governments are also preparing options for eventually reopening parts of their economies. “When we have the curve under control, we will shift towards a new normality and towards the reconstruction of our economy,” Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, said on Saturday. “A specific team of epidemiologists has been working for two weeks now on a plan to restart economic and social activity.”
It is one thing to plan for better times. It is something different to suggest they are just around the corner, as Trump has done repeatedly since the outbreak began. Before any serious thought can be given to reopening businesses and getting people back to work, two enormous challenges have to be met: containing the virus’s spread and sharply reducing the number of new infections; and coming up with a safe and practical plan to relax the lockdowns. There is little indication that the United States and the Trump Administration are on top of either of these things.
In New York, Monday was the most lethal day yet, with seven hundred and thirty one deaths, Governor Andrew Cuomo said at a Tuesday-morning briefing. Based upon figures from the covid Tracking Project, the number of infections in the state is now rising at a rate of about seven per cent a day. The good news is that this is roughly half of the rate from around a week ago. The bad news is that it still translates into the number of cases in New York doubling every ten days or so, and in other states, such as Louisiana and Michigan, the rate of increase is even faster. By Tuesday afternoon, there were 374,329 confirmed cases nationwide, which represented a doubling over the previous week. Given the very limited testing in many places, these estimates are almost certainly lower than the actual incidence of the disease.
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