White House's new message on COVID: We need to live with it, because we can't keep shutting everything down

Substantively this is the right message. It’s the only rational thing the country can do at this point.

Conventional wisdom says it will be a very tough sell politically, although I think there’s a way to turn that upside down.

As it stands, the nation has been judging the wisdom of the anti-virus effort by whether cases, hospitalizations and deaths are going up or down. Down, we’re doing it right. Up, we’re doing it wrong. That’s the only measure. What we’re doing to the economy and to every other facet of people’s lives is not a consideration.

And thus far, everyone from the Trump Administration to every governor to corporate America and the media have embraced this standard. It’s given power-mad governors the right to restrict everything from gardening to singing in church. It’s destroyed tens of millions of jobs. It’s decimated sports and leisure activities.

But so far, just about no one who hopes to get votes for anything this year has been willing to say this whole thing has been a mistake. Apparently the Trump Administration, perhaps for want of an alternative, is prepared to be the first:

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At the crux of the message, officials said, is a recognition by the White House that the virus is not going away any time soon — and will be around through the November election. As a result, President Donald Trump’s top advisers plan to argue, the country must figure out how to press forward despite it. Therapeutic drugs will be showcased as a key component for doing that and the White House will increasingly emphasize the relatively low risk most Americans have of dying from the virus, officials said.

Next week administration officials plan to promote a new study they say shows promising results on therapeutics, the officials said. They wouldn’t describe the study in any further detail because, they said, its disclosure would be “market-moving.” Officials also plan to emphasize high survival rates, particularly for Americans who are within certain age groups and don’t have underlying conditions. The overall death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. has been on the decline. More than 130,000 Americans have died of the virus.

This is what we’ve been saying for months. No one wants anyone to get sick, and we’re certainly distraught that it happened to our boss. But this is the nature of viruses. When the virus is novel – meaning it’s new and no one has developed antibodies – it’s going to spread quickly and infect a lot of people. Trying to keep everyone cooped up to avoid infection is an understandable sentiment and well-meant, but it only delays the inevitable.

Until herd immunity is established, we’ll be living with a pandemic. You can try to keep everyone in lockdown until the vaccine is ready, but as much as we all want to be optimistic about the timing of that, you’re risking the permanent decimation of the global economy if you go that route. You’re putting people at risk of everything from obesity and depression to drug addiction and domestic violence if you prevent them from living free the way people are used to living.

And you’re doing it in the hope of outrunning a virus that, while frightening, has still killed only a tiny percentage of those who’ve contracted it.

Trump said early on (and was blasted for saying) that we had to be careful not to make the solution worse than the problem. That is exactly what we did. It is not true that absolutely any measure, no matter how oppressive or extreme, is justified to keep the virus from spreading around.

I don’t mind the idea that people should wear masks to protect themselves and others. But I do mind the idea that we destroy people’s lives and livelihoods in a desperate attempt to keep the pandemic from running its course in the only way that it can – which is when enough people have developed antibodies that it’s no longer the public health threat it started out to be.

This is why you don’t just “listen to the experts.” In this case, the so-called experts were people who know about infectious diseases and not much else. They didn’t care about jobs being lost and companies going under. They didn’t care about the price people would pay. They didn’t care about the elective surgeries that would be put off. They didn’t care about the people who needed to go to the emergency room for other reasons but would refuse to do so – and in some cases die – out of fear they would catch COVID.

The “experts” didn’t care about any of that. They only cared about COVID not spreading, and no price would be too high to pay in the pursuit of that objective. The rest of us, who care about our entire lives and not just that one thing, paid the price and continue to pay it.

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We need to urge people to be careful, but to live their lives. We need to augment the capacity of the health care system to deal with the surge in cases that’s entirely predictable. We need to apply what we’ve learned over the course of these months about the treatments that work. And we need to do everything possible to limit the risk of those most vulnerable to dying, while everyone else lives life.

I say this not because I think it’s nothing if people get this virus. It’s far from nothing. I say this because there is no way to reduce its lethality if we all hide from it like it’s a nuclear fallout. We’re keeping it novel, and that’s keeping the virus in control.

The White House is correct with its new messaging. I hope they stick to it. Unfortunately, the White House is not in control of the actual policies that will be put in place, as that’s decided at the state level. What may happen is that blue-state governors will become even more restrictive in order to be as unlike Trump as possible, while red-state governors will follow Trump’s lead and get buried by the press over rising case levels in their states.

Sadly this has become a political disease, and for far too many people, winning the partisan war over COVID is more important than defeating the disease itself. That, even more so than the coronavirus, has been the real tragedy of 2020.