What We Need Now

This morning I walked in to our living room and stared at my wife. “Now what?” As the days melt in to one another, a general feeling of malaise has set in (tempered by impatience and restlessness). We pine for a return to normalcy, the freedom to go where we want when we want and do what we want when we get there. For now, our duty is to physically distance and follow official guidelines. Typical New England early spring weather has mixed blisteringly gorgeous days of jacket-less temperatures and sunny blue skies with damp, chilly, depressing days of rain and wind. Moods swing along with the weather – from cautious optimist to grim fatalism. A sense of stagnation has set in: one step forward, one step back. 

             Talk of re-opening the country has gained momentum in recent days though a clear, unified plan remains elusive if not impossible. Keeping track of surges, hotspots, downward trends, supply capacity, new case rates, death rates, testing rates and the like is a constant struggle. Separating signal from noise requires careful parsing of messy information. We need more testing but how quickly this can be achieved remains uncertain. Vaccines and proven treatments remain months, if not years, away. Antibody tests are coming, but their reliability and usefulness are debatable. Guarantees of immunity are not certain.

             I’m no expert on pandemics, infectious disease, or population health. Admittedly, I have largely been insulated from the frontlines and cannot speak directly of the hardships faced by my medical colleagues or the families of those affected. My own thoughts on the outbreak have vacillated from “gross overreaction” to “horrific tragedy,” from “let’s never go outside again” to “what are we waiting for?” The only thing that seems clear with this disease is that nothing is at all clear, nothing black and white. “Touch of Grey” indeed. This is not an attempt to deny the seriousness of the pandemic or diminish the lives lost and sacrifices made. There’s too much evidence to the contrary in places like New York City and Northern Italy.

             What does seem clear is that our current approach is lacking. A vaccine isn’t walking through that door. It seems highly unlikely that a magic bullet treatment is out there waiting to be discovered. In the meantime, we have plenty of what we don’t need. Running death counts whose macabre intent seems to be gamifying the outbreak like some grim competition among countries. Fear mongering, backbiting, misinformation, conspiracy theory, and leadership failure abound. Groupthink, uninterpretable and incomplete data, hyperbole and bloviation muddy the waters. Touting unproven treatments and profiteering on protective equipment is at best disingenuous and at worst fatal.

             What we need now is sanity, unity, and critical thinking. There will be things we don’t know and can’t know. The data will be imperfect, the way forward far from obvious. There will be no unassailable solution that precisely balances tragedy avoidance with minimizing economic and societal impact. Debate and disagreement are healthy when they lead to compromise and measured progress, toxic when they distract from goals and cause stalemate. One way or another, we will get through this by crystalizing our efforts and putting aside our biases. The last several weeks have been about literally staying apart -- now is the time to metaphorically come together.