On Thursday, China began to officially ease restrictions on Hubei province and the city of Wuhan, 74 days after the area was put into a strict lockdown. That lockdown included door-to-door scanning, with whole families thrown into quarantine facilities if anyone in the home had a fever. It included a flood of medical personnel and equipment from other parts of China into Hubei and facilities purpose-built to hold those hospitalized due to the virus. And at the end of the day, it included a total case count that was less than half the one already racked up in New York alone.
The process of bringing Hubei back from the original outbreak of COVID-19 has involved an all-points program of continued scanning and testing that has put police in fever-sensing visors, used cell phones to make sure that those identified for isolation or quarantine stay out of contact, and tough fines (and brutal treatment) of those who violate restrictions. On Thursday, the papers may have been filled with images of weary doctors and shut-in citizens celebrating in the streets of Wuhan, but the “reopening” of that province has come at a price.
Now Donald Trump wants to “send America back to work” without either paying the price or considering the consequences.
Currently, China has just over 1,000 active, known cases of novel coronavirus. That sounds like paradise in an America where the case count is swiftly moving toward half a million. But what it really means is that China is right where it was at the end of January—just before the case count there exploded. Reopening businesses and schools in Wuhan is a serious test of how effectively China has actually identified existing cases and how well isolation can hold up as the suppression generated through aggressive social distancing is taken away.
Above all, it’s a test … of testing. An experiment in just how well China has been able to identify cases of COVID-19 and keep them away from the rest of the population.
But as Donald Trump prepares to pull the plug on … the nothing he’s actually done … there’s one part he really doesn’t find all that necessary. That part being everything China, South Korea, and every other nation that has brought COVID-19 under something approaching control has done.
As The Washington Post reports, Trump is ready to send Americans back out there for the good of Wall Street—health, safety, and testing be damned. Confronted with concerns that many Americans who want to be tested still aren’t able to get a test, Trump did what he does with all inconvenient questions: deny reality. According to Trump, America has “the best testing system in the world.” Even though this is patently, obviously, and definitively false.
As if realizing that, Trump immediately followed by saying that extensive testing … wasn’t really needed. “It’s not necessary,” said Trump, “but it would be a good thing to have.” And when it comes to a coordinated system of mass testing across the country—the kind of system Trump promised back on March 13 when he pumped the hands of execs from Walmart, Target, CVS, and others while explaining that Google had “17,000 engineers” at work on a website to manage all that testing—the story has slightly changed. Trump now says that large-scale federal testing “is not going to happen.”
There is, the Post reports, a “widespread consensus” regarding what America needs to do before social distancing rules are relaxed. That consensus includes “mounting a large-scale contact-tracing effort” and “widespread testing” along with isolation of those infected and quarantine of those in direct contact. It’s a theory you may have heard before, or possibly before that, or before that.
Extensive testing. Case tracing. Isolation. Quarantine. And all of that needs to be done to the point where the United States is more like China, or South Korea, or New Zealand—where there is only a handful of cases, all of them of known origin. Then social distancing can be relaxed. Carefully.
