Sending people back to work now will doom the economy, not save it

Many people will not return to their normal lives in a country that is being ravaged by an unchecked disease just because the president has announced a “reopening.” Many aren’t going to return to restaurants and bars or go on family vacations to Disney. Many companies aren’t going to tell their employees to come back to the office. Many cities and states will keep businesses shut down in order to try to contain the illness as much as possible within their own borders. But some won’t. And many Americans will try to resume life as usual, the same way many are ignoring the warnings to stay in now, which means the virus will continue spreading. We will have a half-functioning economy and nonfunctioning health care system, with untold numbers of Americans dying from an illness that causes victims to suffocate as fluid floods into their lungs, on the way to total organ failure.

Avoiding that nightmare will require more dramatic actions than we have taken so far, not more restraint. So far, the Trump administration has not really tried to coordinate a national lockdown. Instead, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued some toothless public guidelines urging Americans to stay home for 15 days to “Do Your Part to Slow the Spread of Coronavirus,” like it was reminding campers to prevent forest fires. This has left states to decide their own paths forward. Schools are shut down across almost the entire country, thankfully. But so far, only some states have issued stay-at-home orders and are closing nonessential businesses. That patchwork approach to combating the disease means we’re unlikely to contain it nationwide. Meanwhile, we’re already facing an unprecedented economic downturn, with potentially millions of layoffs.

The more sensible approach to taming this virus and saving our economy would be to orchestrate an actual nationwide lockdown for at least three or four weeks while the government essentially pays everybody’s bills (see: the economic aid bill Congress is working on).