When Edna passes by
Track of Hurricane Edna, in September 1954
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary, in GoLocal24.com
Americans are famously impatient – not good in something open-ended like a pandemic that might be with us for at least for a year or two, probably in waves, before a vaccine hits the market. And we’ll tend to see the whole crisis as having ended when it passes by our locale for a while. It reminds me of a 1954 essay by E.B. White called “In the Eye of Edna,” in which he noted that once a hurricane of that name went by Boston, the big news media lost interest in it even as it was slamming the Maine Coast. We’re already seeing this in the stock market on some days in which there’s news that reported COVID-19 cases might be leveling off. Sorry, we don’t know how this thing will unfold. It’s very early and information is very incomplete.
On opening up the economy, I’m a little Trumpian. The closures now in effect could soon do more direct health damage, as well as economic damage, than the disease. We need to start opening up business in early May, while being prepared for perhaps several years of cycles of lifting social controls and then reimposing them in hot spots as the pandemic recurs, hopefully with less severity than this first round because of widening herd immunity. It’s obvious now that at least for the next few years, most of us will be living differently than we had before the virus. Until memories fade?
God help many small businesses and social organizations. Some people may permanently avoid them for fear that customers and members might be a source of disease.
Many people will permanently lose their jobs because of the closures. Some companies are already finding that they don’t need as many people as they thought. All the more reason to institute Medicare for all who want it, to offset the loss of employer-provided private health insurance, and start a national infrastructure-repair-and rebuilding program to employ millions of people and make the country more competitive. America may need civil engineers more than it needs software engineers. .