Governors are one party or the other. State legislatures are the opposite. Legislators who disagree with governors pass laws that contradict the governor. Then legislatures appeal their law to the judiciary, the court systems. One sides with or against the other. Counties step in to make the granular decisions because of the gridlock upstairs. When that doesn’t work either, mayors and local governments attempt to make those micro-determinations. And the hot potato goes round and across the circle. Ad infinitum. The whiplash metaphor is battered at this point. The reopening of the country has become a horror show tilt-a-whirl of contradictions, accusations, exorcistic head-spinning, and as much sleight-of-hand pass-the-buck as anyone can bear to witness.

Read More

Dr. Marty Makary is a surgeon and a professor of health policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. His ideas about how to deal with Covid-19 are, to borrow an Obama Era word, evolving. Ours should be, too. In “How to Reopen America Safely,” he writes, “The choice before us isn’t to fully lock down or to totally reopen. Many argue as though those are the only options.” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the C.D.C. in the Obama administration, said this week, “We’re not reopening based on science. We’re reopening based on politics, ideology and public pressure. And I think it’s going to end badly.” I agree with Dr. Frieden. After some consideration, I think it’s going to end badly, too. Here’s his upshot: “Having 50 states and more territories do competing and uncoordinated experiments in reopening is daring Mother Nature to kill you or someone you love. Mother Nature bats last, and she bats a thousand.”

Read More