Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
Trump Proposes County-Level Reopening of America
President Donald Trump has lots of ideas, almost all of them bad. His latest plan is to relax federal government guidelines for social distancing and Covid-19 avoidance on a county-by-county basis. One hardly knows where to begin in critiquing this idiocy. It presumes that the nation has vast amounts of information it lacks. It pre-supposes that each county in the country is hermetically sealed off from all others. It further requires the virus to avoid crossing county boundaries. In short, it is unworkable, unreasonable and plain stupid.
First and foremost, the federal government's guidelines are just that, guidelines. They are not hard and fast rules, and they are meant to cover the entire nation. However, states and local governments in many places have put much tougher regulations in place. In one California jurisdiction, any non-essential business that is open will find its water cut off. Changing federal guidelines will not even be noticed in the hardest hit areas.
Second, the idea of ranking each county as a high-, medium- and low-risk area with different guidelines means that data on infection rates must be known in each and every county in the country. That means a degree of testing that America has yet to achieve. It is a fair bet to suggest that Queens County in New York is a high-risk area while Pierce County in North Dakota is not. But the extremes are the easy ones to categorize. It is the huge number in the middle that cause the problems in categorization.
Third, even if those data existed, the idea that one county would have one set of guidelines while a higher-risk county that borders it would have another will quickly result in the disease spreading. The reason is simple; the borders between counties are porous. People live in one, work in another, and may have to traverse a third to get from home to the job and back.
Fourth, the virus pays no attention to the boundaries mankind has created. Britain has Brexited, but Boris Johnson and Prince Charles have the virus that originated in Wuhan. Science has shown that the virus can survive on various surface for several hours, even for a couple of days. Canned food put on a shelf in a count where gloves are not required for supermarket staff can make it to another county where the infection-level requires gloves. The counties involved can try to give the virus a citation and fine it, but some how one doubts the efficacy of that.
Mr. Trump wants the economy up and running, as does everyone else. The trouble is that the economy is not going to improve until people are not afraid of going to work. Until there is a treatment and ideally a vaccine, Covid-19 is going to hamstring economic activity. Reopening America cannot happen the way Mr. Trump proposes without increasing the death toll. Either he does not understand this or he does not care.
The virus was not his fault, but his ineptitude and ill-conceived ideas for "fixing" the problem prove he was never the man for the job.
© Copyright 2020 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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