Shut down and shut up

OK, here's a question.  Are people not flying because the airlines are cancelling flights left, right and centre?  Or are airlines cancelling flights left right and centre because people are not flying?  It seems blindingly obvious that the answer is overwhelmingly the latter.

This is important because we hear Donald Trump, with his mayfly attention span and his disdain for expert advice, is looking for ways to "open up" the economy again as soon as next week, after an unevenly-enforced 15-day partial shutdown.  If a large number of people really are afraid to fly and afraid of wider social contact because of fears about COVID-19, it's altogether possible that any premature attempt by Trump to get things back to normal might simply fail.

Of course, in today's divided America, things are unlikely to be that simple. State Governors who have more aggressively shut things down in their jurisdictions, led by Andrew Cuomo in New York, would strenuously resist any order from the White House that they considered dangerous.  However, die-hard Trump voters in those states would undoubtedly take Trump at his word, trying to resume their normal lives and putting themselves and their fellow citizens at risk.

The real point here is that the choice that Trump seems to imagine he has -- defeat the virus or avoid a recession -- doesn't actually exist.  If everyone is herded back to the factories and malls next week, the spread of the virus will accelerate sharply.  That's not a recipe for avoiding recession -- very much the opposite, in fact.  Some of Trump's fellow Republicans seem to grasp this very clearly: here, for example, is a tweet from Rep. Liz Cheney:

"There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what's necessary to stop the virus."

Indeed.  And while we're over at Twitter, here's an excellent observation from former England soccer player Gary Lineker:  

"If we stay at home and do as we’re asked, we won’t have to stay at home and do as we’re asked for anywhere near as long."

There was a doctor on CNN this morning claiming that five weeks of aggressive social distancing and testing would be enough to knock out the epidemic.  That sounds optimistic, given that the much tighter lockdown in Wuhan will have been in effect for ten weeks by the time it is lifted in early April. Still, you'd think that if a US President was told that a ten-week near-shutdown of the economy would end the epidemic, he'd be a fool not to go along with that, right?  Uh oh.