Borrowing Time

Survival that night was a very tight race, and savagely simple. People who started early and moved fast had some chance of winning. People who started late or hesitated for any reason had no chance at all. Action paid. Contemplation did not. The mere act of getting dressed was enough to condemn people to death, and although many of those who escaped to the water succumbed to the cold, most of the ultimate winners endured the ordeal completely naked or in their underwear. The survivors all seem to have grasped the nature of this race, the first stage of which involved getting outside to the Deck 7 promenade without delay.

–William Langeweische, A Sea Story, The Atlantic (May 2004)

I am not absolutely certain that protecting the public from coronavirus requires the same remorseless haste as escaping the sinking of the ferry Estonia, but I increasingly and uncomfortably believe that the chance is high enough that we must act as though it does.

This past week, the United States tried social distancing with all deliberate speed. Stores closed, parades cancelled, universities went online. Restaurants and bars are open but often with curfews and capacity limits. And many school systems announced that they would be closed for a week or two.

How did it go? Not so great:

In Seattle, where one hospital is reportedly preparing for Northern Italy levels of infection and already running low on some supplies, bars in the Capitol Hill neighborhood have been full of people. On Friday evening, a Twitter search for the phrase “the bars are packed” yielded hundreds of tweets from cities like Baltimore; Columbus, Ohio; Los Angeles and New York City. On Saturday in Chicago, one reporter tweeted a photo of a line around the block for a St. Patrick’s Day bar crawl at 8 a.m.

This doesn’t sound good either:

On Wednesday night, as President Trump was announcing a travel ban from Europe to the United States, hundreds of residents at The Villages freely roamed the sprawling property. Partygoers danced to the live music presented nightly, ignoring the warnings of the CDC to practice social distancing — “remaining out of congregate settings, avoiding mass gatherings” and maintaining a distance of about six feet to guard against infection.

“We’re living the last third of our lives,” Sal Gentile, 70, wrote in response to a Washington Post inquiry. “We’re bolder, not older. Time to be mindful. Take a deep breath and enjoy life. We worked many decades to now have the privilege of being older. … Yep, I have a pacemaker and recent fusion; however my love for quality of life is more important to me than being rattled by a TV station.”

Also pretty bad:

Airports around the country were thrown into chaos Saturday night as workers scrambled to roll out the Trump administration’s hastily arranged health screenings for travelers returning from Europe.

Scores of anxious passengers said they encountered jam-packed terminals, long lines and hours of delays as they waited to be questioned by health authorities at some of the busiest travel hubs in the United States.

If this is broadly representative, then we are doing exactly what Italy did at the same point in its infection curve. Their grim and worsening present will be our future. People will die, in great and terrible numbers.

If people will not voluntarily keep away from each other, government will need to make them keep away from each other. Close the bars. Close the restaurants. Close the churches. Close the stores, except for groceries, pharmacies, and a few other essentials. And most especially, close the schools. These moves will eliminate the most extreme and outrageous concentrations of people infecting each other. And they will also signal, clearly and unmistakably, that people should treat their own social distancing as a matter of life and death, because it is. (If not their own, then those of people they love, and of their fellow Americans.)

There are obvious and quite severe costs to taking these steps. They shutter more businesses and put more people out of work. They isolate people mentally as well as physically. And they make it harder for the work that must still be done to get done. The schools are an especially poignant case. Many children depend on schools to eat; many parents depend on schools to be able to work. A nurse at home watching two children off from school is a nurse who is not able to care for pati