A number of things are now evident about the CORVID-19
pandemic:
The US federal government is proving to be far too slow, too
cumbersome, too bureaucratic to be of much use in this crisis. China’s drastic efforts
at containment bought the Western world a month or two of warning, but the US
(and most of Europe) squandered that time and were thoroughly unprepared when
the infection spread out of China.
President Trump is clearly out of his depth, and seems slow
to take the advice of his experts. But to be fair, polls show that there is a
fair proportion of the nation who are still in denial about how serious this is,
not only medically but economically. And a potential President Biden, while certainly
a welcome change in personal style, doesn’t portend much practical improvement,
given his painfully obvious loss of mental capacity. In any case, the
dysfunction is not limited to the president right now – Congress and the whole federal
system are proving to be equally dysfunctional, as the debacle with testing
kits demonstrated.
Clearly the infection increases will continue for an
extended period, perhaps 6 months to a year or more. If we want to keep the new
infection rate down to what the health care systems can manage, we will be in
lockdown for months and months, and it is not clear the economy can survive
that. There are an enormous number of people who are out of a paycheck now with
the shutdowns, and this will rapidly become a serious social and political problem.
On the other hand, if/when we lift the lockdown the infection rates will no doubt
pick up again. This problem will persist until we have an effective vaccine widely
available, probably not for 12-24 months yet.
I suspect that the experience of telecommuting and attending
online classes for an extended period will hasten the national move to do that more
often, hastening the changes in education and the workplace.
Bad as the crisis is in this country, it is far more severe
in the rest of the world. It seems to me fairly likely that China as a nation may
not survive, at least under the present government. They have conquered the
worst of the pandemic, but their economy, already fragile, depends on exports,
and the exports worldwide are drying up.
The European Union, already under strain before this, is simply
falling apart. Italy, in crisis, is getting no help from France or Germany, who
have banned export of medical equipment and supplies - it is the Chinese of all
nations who are sending much needed medical equipment and medical teams to help
Italy. Increasingly EU members are closing their borders to try to contain the
pandemic. The ill will that this is generating among EU members will poison the
effort to hold the EU together from now on.
And the pressures
this crisis puts on places with poor health care infrastructure, like Iran,
Russia, North Korea and most of Africa, are bound to have substantial political
consequences in the long run.
This event will clearly substantially reshape the world.
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