Do You Want to Be President the Day the Country Falls Apart?

The latest distraction is the idea that that we should just let people die from the coronavirus. The argument is that most of the people who will die are old, and the thought - not always explicit - is that we would be better off without them anyway.

As I said, this proposal is a distraction. Lots of people are going to die in this pandemic, whether it is well managed or not. This is an extremely contagious, highly lethal disease. We currently have no vaccine and no effective therapeutic drugs.

The purpose of lockdowns is to prevent the collapse of the medical system. If the medical system does collapse, people will not receive proper care, and mortality will be much higher than it otherwise would have been.

In addition, once the medical system fails, the larger society will soon start to break down. We have seen this already in Italy. We have not seen it in China because we're not seeing very much in China.

This is only one of a number of distractions in the air right now. Let me try to vacuum some of the other chaff that's trying to clog the system.

Coronavirus deaths are currently lower than seasonal flu deaths. Many people have noted that the issue is not how many deaths we have now, but how many we could have in the near future. And we can bend that curve. But to come back to seasonal flu deaths - yes, they are too high, and that is because only half of Americans typically get a flu shot. This is not a scandal, but it should be. Unnecessary death should always be a scandal.

People are also pointing to the figure for traffic deaths, and saying that we all take that in stride. Nobody in the White Houses has apparently heard of the Vision Zero movement, which holds that all traffic fatalities are avoidable. Vision Zero plans to reduce crash deaths to zero, the only acceptable number.

It strikes me that the people in the White House are astonishingly ignorant, and in some cases stupid as well. They think of themselves as masters of the universe, classical Machiavellians, but they have no idea what a real disaster looks like.

I hearken back to an early meeting where the military brass tried to explain that a big part of their job was preventing World War III. The president's response was querulous and dismissive. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, Trump can't handle the truth.

See also Coronavirus, Travesty, The Cost of Delay, Dithering.