This year, the summer months—specifically June, July, and August,
when kids are out of school, college campuses are all but shut down, and
Americans normally make plans for vacations, outings, camping trips, or
just hanging out at the local pool—are going to be like no other.
Yes, there will be some activity. People have to get out. Some coastal states will open their beaches with strict guidelines in place. State and national parks will be open to some extent. Neighbors in less densely populated (and even some cities) will hold backyard barbecues and happy hours, observing social distancing as best they can. Young people will sunbathe and play Frisbee.
Some states will experiment with their citizens’ lives by opening up bars and restaurants to a degree, assuming the results of doing so don’t result in an immediate, uncontrolled spike in COVID-19 infections (we’ll know soon enough whether that happens in Wisconsin, for example). But no one should kid themselves that this summer will be anything close to “normal.” It won’t be.
For seniors—anyone over 60—it is going to be every bit as harrowing and restrictive as the last two months have been. For people in retirement communities or nursing homes, reopening—even to a limited degree—just means opening new avenues of anxiety since older people are the ones most at risk. Life is not going to be much better for folks living in tightly packed environments like apartment buildings or housing projects. Most public pools will not reopen at all.
Travel by air will be a nonstarter for most. Museums will be closed. Riverfront parks and most beaches will continue to be exercises in avoidance. People simply can’t or won’t congregate or socialize the way they would want to. For most people, every trip to the grocery store or the pharmacy will still feel like running the gauntlet.
Yes, there will be some activity. People have to get out. Some coastal states will open their beaches with strict guidelines in place. State and national parks will be open to some extent. Neighbors in less densely populated (and even some cities) will hold backyard barbecues and happy hours, observing social distancing as best they can. Young people will sunbathe and play Frisbee.
Some states will experiment with their citizens’ lives by opening up bars and restaurants to a degree, assuming the results of doing so don’t result in an immediate, uncontrolled spike in COVID-19 infections (we’ll know soon enough whether that happens in Wisconsin, for example). But no one should kid themselves that this summer will be anything close to “normal.” It won’t be.
For seniors—anyone over 60—it is going to be every bit as harrowing and restrictive as the last two months have been. For people in retirement communities or nursing homes, reopening—even to a limited degree—just means opening new avenues of anxiety since older people are the ones most at risk. Life is not going to be much better for folks living in tightly packed environments like apartment buildings or housing projects. Most public pools will not reopen at all.
Travel by air will be a nonstarter for most. Museums will be closed. Riverfront parks and most beaches will continue to be exercises in avoidance. People simply can’t or won’t congregate or socialize the way they would want to. For most people, every trip to the grocery store or the pharmacy will still feel like running the gauntlet.
And we all would be watching the news, not out of fear, but out of hope as we saw our local health officials and governments acting cautiously, but positively, with an end goal for all to see.
There is one reason that none of that happened: Donald J. Trump. Americans need to be reminded of that, again and again.
As Michael Hiltzik observes, writing for the Los Angeles Times, by now we’re all understandably experiencing “shutdown fatigue.” It’s debilitating and anxiety-inducing. It’s even led to what some are characterizing as a “mental health crisis” among Americans. We want to get our lives back on track, we want to go back to work, we want to see our older relatives without having to talk through a mask or plate glass window, but there seems to be no hope for any of that on the horizon.
We have shut down our lives, our livelihoods, and the entire U.S. economy for months in response to this pandemic—and for what? Hiltzik has the same question.
[M]any people are getting fed up with the lockdown, and not only because it throws millions of them out of work, whether temporarily or for the long term. The other is that we have made scant progress against the virus, or at least not nearly as much as the richest, most powerful and most technically adept nation on Earth should have made.Americans understood the shutdown to be a critical step in fighting the virus. The degree to which Americans complied with those shutdowns speaks to just how serious they believe the threat is. But we had a right to expect that, once American citizens made the unprecedented sacrifice of pushing the pause button on our entire existence for three months, the federal government (under Donald Trump’s so-called “leadership”) would have stepped up to the task of mobilizing a national response.
But, Hiltzik continues, that just didn’t happen.
One source of discontent with the shutdown is the broken promise that it would give the country time to put in place a program to successfully fight the virus. Without a program of testing and screening to identify viral hot spots and institute selective quarantines, the general public has learned it faces many months more of work, travel and recreational constraints.If Americans saw any “light at the end of the tunnel,” then the fatigue and weariness we are all experiencing so acutely could, as Hiltzik says, at least be something we could cope with: “If clear progress were being made in testing and screening and clearly consistent rules were being promoted across the board, then the current shutdown would be much easier for most people to bear.”
But as things now stand, we have Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Health (NIH) basically telling us if we try to reopen now without an adequate testing and screening regimen—which so many other countries have already achieved—then things are going to actually get worse, not better, and we’ll be back to square one. Three million more Americans filed for unemployment just in this past week, and there’s seemingly no end in sight, no matter what Trump says. We have thousands of businesses ready to go belly-up, taking their employees down with them, potentially leaving millions without any health insurance, much less a sustaining income.
It’s been three months of Donald Trump doing exactly nothing to improve the situation. Minimal testing, no screening, CDC guidelines hastily recalled, deep-sixed, and rewritten. Three months of appalling, dismal dysfunction and inaction.
So Republicans, sensing a disaster in the making, tried a new tactic—force Americans back to work by declaring businesses reopened and threatening to take away unemployment compensation from those workers too fearful of catching the virus to return to work. But in addition to being callous and cruel, that strategy has one big practical drawback: Americans literally aren’t buying into it. They’re not going to malls, they’re not going into shops, and they’re (for the most part) not going into restaurants. As Hiltsik asks, why would they?
The problem is that consumers can’t be coerced into the marketplace. As Jordan Weissmann observed in Slate, patrons have so far been reluctant to pile back into sit-down restaurants in great numbers even in the most aggressively reopened states.Contrary to what you might think from listening to this administration, consumers are not flooding back to businesses in those states that have tried the early reopening tactic. Hiltzik cites survey responses from Open Table, for example, showing that restaurant patronage in such states remains down, between 75-85%. Conversely, the percentage of those who are currently unemployed and still favor the lockdowns and partial shutdown of businesses is a startling 79%. That means people are still scared, and while they’re moving around a bit more, they’re not spending their money … anywhere. Again, why would they? Hiltzik cites a Kaiser poll that shows nearly 75% of Americans feel the “worst is yet to come.”
The reason they feel that way is obvious: Donald Trump gave Americans nothing to hope for. As Hiltzik says, the last three months have been one colossal missed opportunity.
As public health expert Harvey V. Fineberg laid it out in early April, it required establishing a unified command with indisputable authority to mobilize every public and private resource for the war against the virus.The nation would have to gear up to perform millions of diagnostic tests by mid-April and establish a system of disease surveillance and quarantine of infected or at-risk individuals.But the Trump administration did none of this. Instead, it picked pointless fights with state governors practically begging for assistance. It hyped phony cure-alls. It exploited the pandemic for political ends. It put Jared Kushner, of all people, in charge of the response. On the most important element—testing—the administration has been next to AWOL, a fact that was backhandedly acknowledged this week during the Senate testimony of Drs. Fauci and Redfield, and Bret Giroir of the Department of Health and Human Services. The only “commitment” with even the barest hint of certainty was a vague allusion by Giroir that more testing would be available hopefully by September, possibly in times for schools to reopen.
September. So summer is gone, folks. And that’s the optimistic scenario.
A country that once built up its military might to fight a two-front world war in less than a year now cannot provide a simple antibody screen in sufficient numbers to test its population. There is only one reason for this: a lack of leadership and political will. As Hiltzik notes, this country’s unique failure to address the COVID-19 pandemic owes itself to not just the abysmal ineptitude of Donald Trump, but to the the anti-government ethic that drives the Republican Party that supports him. But ultimately, Hiltzik notes, there is only one reason that Americans will remember 2020 as the year without a summer: Donald Trump.
At a moment when a consistent, humanistic expression of government authority would save thousands of lives, federal leadership is in the hands of a petulant egotist whose interest appears to be in using this crisis to divide Americans, not unite them in a shared cause, and blame everyone else for his own manifest failure.On Thursday, Dr. Rick Bright—who was ousted by the Trump administration for highlighting its gross negligence in January—testified that if it could not muster the will and means to respond to this crisis, this nation was likely headed for its “darkest winter in modern history.” (See following story.)
As it turns out, even that may be optimistic.
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