David Leonhardt, who writes The Morning newsletter for the New York Times, addressed the issue of pundit accountability by evaluating various conclusions he'd reached about American politics. I was grateful to read this, as I have been evaluating my own thinking about the pandemic, shifting from a model of managed retreat to one of cascading disasters.
At the beginning of all this, I thought of "managed retreat" as a several-month process of "flattening the curve" then re-emerging having limited death and illness, preserved much of what we had and ready to rebuild.
Instead of giving the novel coronavirus a one-two punch, our society was ambivalent about both managing and retreating. As a result, we've triggered an avalanche of social disintegration. We've lost a massive number of jobs, businesses, gathering places, and social supports that could be rebuilt with a Marshall plan, but how would we get through Congress?
As a physician, I must say that it has been torture (I mean that pretty literally) to watch the way the pandemic has been mismanaged. I have had to change my mind: it's not a months-long process from which we will bounce back, but a years -- maybe decades -- long catastrophe that will cause profound suffering that will only end when people rise up in disgust and say "enough."
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