Inslee Washington reopening raises question: Was it worth it?
In a roller coaster of a week, Washington has gone from a state of near-universal gloom about the apparent surge in COVID-19 cases to an announcement that we can at least tentatively return to something like “normal” life by the end of June.
It’s of course good news, if somehow only in keeping with the bewildering inconsistency with which our political leaders have dealt with the pandemic since the start.
With the inevitability of the rising sun, we’ve now taken another strange turn on the long and twisting road of the campaign initially sold to us as a brief effort to “flatten the curve.”
Perhaps you remember that phrase. It was first announced 14 months ago. Just to give it some context, that’s the same amount of time it took to build the Space Needle, longer than the presidencies of William Harrison, James Garfield and (to date) Joe Biden combined.
We should perhaps face some unpalatable facts. Whatever the tentative good news announced this week, at the heart of the governor’s plan and its many caveats is the belief that there exists some theoretical nirvana in which mankind can live in a completely healthy and safe state.
No such state has ever existed, and neither will it, for the simple fact that as man conquers one disease, nature supplies another to replace it.
If our goal is the complete and final eradication of COVID-19, we should reconcile ourselves to living the rest of our lives in a fearful, isolated existence, voluntarily or otherwise separated from friends and loved ones, and denied many consolations that make the human condition tolerable.
Because, notwithstanding the governor’s words of measured optimism this week, there will never be a day when our elected officials stand before us and announce as one: “We’re fixed.” I repeat: never.
As a society, we hear much of the need to “follow the science.” In that spirit, here are some hard facts:
In the past 15 months, there have been 5,547 deaths attributable to COVID in Washington state. That translates to an annual total of roughly 4,438 fatalities, which compares to the 12,959 deaths from cancer, 11,859 from heart disease and 3,567 from preventable accidents recorded in 2019.
Harsh as it is to use the word “only” in relation to mortality statistics, it might reasonably be applied in one sense today. In Pierce County, for the two weeks April 27-May 10, there were nine COVID-related deaths. In a typical 14-day period, the county loses an average of seven to eight of its citizens to suicide, and roughly the same number to drug or alcohol misuse.
Suppose a friendly Martian were to look down on us today and assess the whole COVID ordeal and our response to it. Would the alien applaud our collective efforts to contain the disease, agreeing with the governor that our mutual sacrifice has been entirely proportionate to the problem?
Or might our visitor be puzzled that the more our society recovers both from COVID and the paralyzing effects of the lockdowns – with children effectively denied an education, businesses shuttered as if in the wake of a nuclear attack, and once-in-a-lifetime family events lost forever – the more politicians warn us of dire consequences should we fail to obey their assumed powers at any time in the future?
Might the alien also note, finally, the strange paradox of our governor’s “state of emergency,” with all the extraordinary interference in our daily lives, even while he insists that “We are moving towards a strategy based on vaccination as opposed to restrictions in our personal behavior”?
Nearly a century ago, economist John Maynard Keynes had a neat reply to politicians who were given to assuring citizens that, hard as life might be, in the long run things would be for the best.
“In the long run,” Keynes wrote, “we are all dead.”
Life is indeed finite, and there will be no bonus years added to compensate for the sacrifices we’ve all been called on to make since March 2020. Rather than worrying obsessively about an unattainable goal of universal good health, the governor would do better to allow us to simply live in the here and now.
Without further delay.
Christopher Sandford was born in the United Kingdom, lives in unincorporated South King County and has long family ties to the Tacoma area., including a late grandfather who wrote a column for The News Tribune. Sandford is the author of some 30 books, including “Union Jack: John F. Kennedy’s Special Relationship with Great Britain.”
