The Corona Virus and Local Impacts
By Albert B. Kelly
Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill often said that all
politics is local and it’s true. Regardless of the issue, it always comes down
to how things play out at ground level where people live their lives. In that
same spirit, it’s not too much to say that impacts from novel corona viruses
are local as well. I know that sounds like a stretch of the imagination since
most of the cases and the impacts have been clustered in China, but “far away”
is not the type of world we live in anymore.
As I write this, the number of deaths from this novel corona
virus has climbed above 900 beating out the 2002 SARS corona virus, and the
number of people infected is in the neighborhood of 40,000. As I understand it,
corona viruses routinely cause of many respiratory illnesses and such viruses
are behind the common cold. What is different about this “novel corona virus”
is that it has mutated and become something we have not encountered before.
Fortunately for us at this present moment, the vast majority
of the cases are in China. Unfortunately for us, we also live in a world where
people can travel around the globe in a matter of hours and their infections
travel with them. The other thing that’s true is that because it could be days before
symptoms show up, people might not know they’re sick when they get on a plane.
Of course one obvious response to all of this is to restrict travel, lock down
borders, and quarantine anyone who is suspected of having the virus. And so we
shall.
But I’m not so sure that’s the only way to protect ourselves
or even the best way to protect ourselves over the long haul. I say that,
because the impacts of this novel corona virus are not just health-related, but
economic and job-related. Whether we like it or not, we live in a
“just-in-time-economy” which means companies only order what they need or can
sell for the short term. Gone are the days when companies have months of
inventory on hand. Given the fact that we buy an extraordinary number of goods
from China what happens there, even if it remains there, will have a huge
impact here if this thing continues much longer.
Whether auto parts, medical equipment and IV solutions, or
any one of a thousand other things, a shutdown of factories in cities with
names we can’t pronounce or even find on a map can impact our lives in very
profound ways. As much as we might like to think of the rest world and its
problems as being far enough away so that we shouldn’t have to care what
happens to “those people”, we don’t have that luxury anymore and this matters
because it dictates what we expect from our elected leaders in terms of how they
engage with the world- whether proactive or reactive.
One option is to close our eyes, seal our borders, limit
travel, and hope that we’ve done enough to prevent infected people from
circulating among us while hoping we have enough critical supplies to ride out
the storm. The other option is to fund and invest in epidemiology and preparedness
both here and around the globe so that small outbreaks don’t become major
pandemics whether they originate here or elsewhere.
A few years ago, we were headed in the right direction with a
director for global health security who was part of the National Security
Council- a sort of “czar” able to coordinate a government-wide response over
multiple agencies. As important as the “czar” was, the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) plays the most critical role in preventing epidemics and
pandemics from reaching our shores by working proactively on the front lines in
nearly 40 countries on everything from surveillance to detecting drug-resistant
bacteria.
Unfortunately, the director for global health security is no
longer part of the NSC and budget cuts in such key areas as emerging and
zoonotic diseases and preparedness and response to name but a few, leave us far
more vulnerable than we might otherwise be right now. Funding cuts aside, let’s
hope the experts get a handle on this thing soon because if they don’t, local
impacts will include sick people in our midst, shortages of critical parts and
supplies that squeeze employers and jobs, and an widening overall mess in our
“just-in-time” economy.