Economy

Lives vs the

Economy: The Toxic and Unnecessary Choice of Coronavirus

The Roman philosopher Seneca stated, “More things will scare us than crush us; we suffer more often in the imagination than reality.”

Were we cowed and terrorized into a false choice? The narratives around the decision to either save lives or save the economy to stop the

Coronavirus, feel kind of Orwellian when you look at the consequences. Fear mongering and catastrophism, not seen since the days of the Y2K scare, blanket the major networks’ coverage of the war to stop the Coronavirus. I got to admit that the whole Y2K fiasco made me a skeptic, and I think healthily. The same instiBy Theo E.J. Wilson

tutions that told us the world’s computers would melt down once the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000 are now telling us something even scarier 20 years later; that to stop the spread of a flu-like pandemic, we must send the world into economic freefall.

I’m thinking, no! Of course, I don’t want a single person to die because of our lack of care, but lack of context can be deadly as well. The problem is that to defend the economic angle is to be seen as an ignorant, Trump-supporting troglodyte who thinks money means more than human life. That scared me for a while, until I realized that the two are interconnected. It’s not an either-or, it’s a both-and. Lives uprooted will be lives lost in due time.

To prove that the modern world can survive a similar pandemic, I don’t have to go back that far: just one president ago. Under the Obama administration, from April 2009 to April 2010, the H1N1 virus ravaged the planet without nearly the same shock and awe.

According to the CDC, the “Swine Flu” infected between 43.3 and 89.3 million Americans and caused an average of 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in this country. Some counts put it as high as 18,000. The global death tally could have been as high as 575,400 people, 151k on the low estimate. I don’t remember the world stopping, stay-at-home orders, and massive unemployment.

People would rebut with, “The mortality percentage for COVID-19 is exponentially higher than the Swine Flu.” That is until you realize that they’re not counting the cases the same way. COVID-19 relies on a hard count of positive cases, whereas H1N1 was extrapolated through the surveillance of positive lab confirmed cases, and multiplied via this method.

If COVID-19 were extrapolated the same way, you’d have a much larger sample size to compare against the mortality rate, making this Coronavirus far less lethal. Perhaps the death rates would increase a little, but not the way people are rushing to the E.R. for the slightest cough.

And then, you have the fact that the federal government is counting everyone who dies while infected with COVID-19 as a Coronavirus death. This makes the U.S. unique in this respect. For example, if your dad is hospitalized and dies because of a heart attack, but tested positive for asymptomatic COVID-19, it’s a Coronavirus death, not death by heart attack.

Knowing this doesn’t change the fact that the TV scares the pants off of me every time I turn it on. I get the fear, especially when the virus strikes close to home.

I knocked on my parents’ door, and found my father bedridden with body aches, a mild fever, and a mild dry cough. A chill ran through my body as

the stark possibility of my dad actually having COVID-19 stared me right in the face.

“Could this be it for ol’ dad?” I wondered.

What shocked me was how good his spirits were. All the signs pointed to every reason to panic, but dad was calm and light hearted about the whole thing. Perhaps he was trying to stop me from worrying, but we talked about death and fear. I was reminded of something he told me when I was kid.

“Son, there’s a million ways to die … afraid ain’t one of ‘em.”

But, when my mother came home, she turned on the television, and the body count began. The shadow of death had literally squeezed the life out of our economy and the people who make it run. Every channel apocalyptic catastrophism made me ask “Where are the survivors? Why aren’t they posting the tally of the 330,000 plus people who’ve already beaten this bug?”

Well, the answer seems to be fear. Fear of overwhelming first responders with new cases of COVID-19 when restless humans violate social distancing guidelines. With my only sister a hospital nurse, this particular issue is dear to me. I think of her safety all the time. Perhaps fear of infecting more elderly and vulnerable people –more death in general.

Though these outcomes are horrific, I understand them. Death by illness makes historical sense to me. It’s familiar ground.

The new dangerous territory for me is the cascading effects of a record 6.6 million people filing for unemployment due to no fault of their own. Why did we have to go this route? What’s new is the possible 20- week delay on the arrival of stimulus checks when rent and phone bills are due, now!

What happens when the suicidal worker who only felt useful at his job suddenly doesn’t have it anymore, just the mortgage? What is unfamiliar is an even more touch-starved culture where human connection was already on shaky ground.

What happens to the dream of that young Black business owner being mandated to shutter a barely profitable business, and only the streets remain a place to make a profit?

Just because we can turn off the economy like a light switch doesn’t mean we can just turn it back on; especially not for entrepreneurs. Twenty years of hardearned momentum could be permanently in the wind. Like an old car, the economy sputters down the street just fine as long as you drive it every day. Let it sit for a while, and you may never drive it again!

When the initial shock of the pandemic wears off and when our sobriety returns, I don’t think we’ll like how comfortable our government has gotten with constricting our constitutional rights. When the survival centers in our brain begin to quiet, we’ll ask could there have been a middle ground that 2nd Location

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did not involve ending the world as we knew it?

Perhaps a disciplined, finetoothed, calculated scale-back of the labor force could have accomplished more than this. No one had the guts to say what the CDC said: that we were beyond containment, and had to shift focus to surviving this thing, and not avoiding it.

I guess that would have taken real leadership and a strong will that didn’t cave to that of the panicked masses. Why are we flattering the curve while counting deaths in a way that uniquely bolsters American numbers? Was flattening civil liberties in the process truly wisdom?

This is not to discount the first responders and hospital workers like my sister, Cydnie. This is not to discount those who passed away from this, like my own uncle, Michael Grissom. He wouldn’t want millions to go unable to feed their families on account of him.

I’ll calmly assert that even in

World War II, with bombs raining from the sky, the Brits and the French could still go to a bar; and that’s the closest we’ve ever been to legit Armageddon! You could still listen to live music. People got married and children graduated. Even societies that live under the threat of our drone strikes and air raids have the one thing that keeps them sane; contact with other human beings.

What if our hospital workers are getting overwhelmed by the force that took all the toilet paper and hand sanitizer; a culture of catastrophism, not the disease itself? What if living in constant terror isn’t the way to show we care? The mental health of our reaction to this disease is already showing as suicides.

What if this is just the beginning of a much larger crisis? Time will tell. If we have nothing to fear but fear itself, then in this climate, what we’re making of COVID-19 will be far deadlier than the disease itself. .

Denver Urban Spectrum — www.denverurbanspectrum.com – May 2020

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