This why health experts have been urging since 2-3 weeks into lockdown that the US needed to aggressively transition to a test/trace/isolate strategy. And why it’s such a disaster that we still haven’t, five months later.
I don’t have the words to describe how insane it is that we have spent five months arguing over the merits of unsafe reopening rather than putting in the work to enable safe and sustainable reopening.
The early US shutdown was an overreaction - willfully so. We had to use that blunt tool because at the time we 1) didn’t understand the virus well enough to be more nuanced, and 2) didn’t have the tools to be more targeted.
Neither of those factors had to be permanent. However daunting and remote a test/trace/isolate strategy seemed in March/April, a hard pivot toward making those investments would have left us in a dramatically different place now. That’s the failure that matters.
And tens of thousand have needlessly died because of that failure. Millions of kids, including my own, can’t go back to school next week because of that failure. We remain in this crisis because our political leaders have chosen to deny the crisis rather than fix it.
