Not for long

Here is Donald Trump’s Covid-19 strategy in a nutshell: wave a wand and it will go away. No need for testing, no need for a vaccine. Open up the economy and it will all take care of itself.

He has absolutely no scientific basis on which to make this claim.

Some viruses do “disappear,” but not because they magically vanish with the wave of a presidential wand. They are defeated by public health measures. Testing and contact tracing, precisely the techniques Trump denigrates, work. Witness SARS. With Covid-19 contract tracing is harder because those infected but not showing symptoms can infect others for a longer time, as long as two weeks.

Covid-19 is already well beyond the point at which it can be contained and made to disappear by isolating infected people. We should still try, but real defeat of Covid-19 will require a vaccine. Neither a vaccine nor an effective treatment is necessarily possible, as Noah Feldman posits. Social distancing may be our new normal, if not forever at least for the next year or two. What does that portend?

Some things are obvious: we are not going to be shaking hands or hugging anytime soon. The “hand over heart gesture,” common in the Middle East, is a good substitute, not least because it signifies honesty. Two hands pressed together also serves well. Nor are we going to use cash much. Some countries were already well down that road even before the epidemic, which will accelerate the process of digitizing currency.

Social distancing has taught many of us that we can easily shop and work from home, without taking up commercial space, heat, and light. I wouldn’t want to have a big stake in office space or shopping malls. People returning to work will be leery of mass transportation, but we were pretty much at capacity for cars in many large cities in the US before the epidemic. I think those bikes and scooters are going to see another surge in popularity.

Longer distance travel is going to be risky until there is either a vaccine or herd immunity, which means at least another year. Trains and airplanes pose obvious risks, as do hotels. I might return to the habits of my youth and drive to places like Chicago and Atlanta from Washington–it’s a long day, but not an impossible trip to do in 10-12 hours or so. Beyond that distance, a lot of us are going to be asking some tough questions of the airlines, which will no doubt want to pack us in like sardines as they did before Covid-19. Business class, always attractive, has acquired an additional appeal.

Medical and dental procedures are going to be among the most risky moments all of us are subjected to. My own inclination is to require that anyone touching my body, as well as all the previous patients, be tested, preferably the morning of the procedure. Nor am I going to be comfortable sitting around in a waiting room with people who haven’t been tested. Tests will have to be available at the entry of every doctor’s and dentist’s office in the country, as well as at the entrance of every hospital.

Assuming the same will not be true for restaurants, it is going to be a long time before I dine in again. There is simply no way to know if the person taking your order has Covid-19 but is asymptomatic, and no really effective way of distancing yourself unless you are ordering from the digital kiosks at MacDonald’s. Take-out is going to remain the preferred modality. In my part of DC, the local Broad Branch market has been delivering prepared foods with those boxy Estonian robots. Slow but sure and cute wins that race.

For President Trump to pooh-pooh testing and vaccines when he can get himself and anyone near him tested whenever he wants is simply outrageous. But the odds are, given at least two positive tests in recent days inside the White House and the now rapid spread of the virus in red states, he won’t be pooh-poohing for long.