There Is No COVID Plan

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, October 26, 2020

 

The 2020 campaign for president has been surprisingly empty of substance since Joe Biden became the nominee. The Republicans notably didn’t even bother updating their party platform. Donald Trump’s team has spent many of the last days of the campaign making personal attacks, focused on the alleged financial corruption of the Biden family. Joe Biden has a simulation of Elizabeth Warren’s endless “plans.” But he doesn’t talk about them in any detail. At the last debate, we got a glimpse of why. Joe Biden couldn’t describe what a “public option” health-care plan was, the very thing he wants to add to Obamacare, and which he is now calling Bidencare.

 

If there is one electoral concern that is going to determine the result of the election, it will be the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Democrats and Republicans rate Donald Trump’s response as poor. Some of Biden’s most effective moments in the debates came when he made the case that Donald Trump said foolish things at the start of the crisis.

 

But what’s really striking is that just a week before the final votes are cast, Biden’s plan either imitates Trump’s plan or, where it adds on, it doesn’t seriously improve on it. Instead of choosing a different strategy, voters are left to choose a different rhetorical emphasis.

 

“Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Friday laid out exactly how a Biden administration would address the coronavirus crisis, one day after the United States recorded nearly a record daily high in new coronavirus cases” reported CNBC. Biden’s most effective lines were the rhetorical ones. “He has given up,” Biden said of Trump. But most of the details on offer in Biden’s proposals have been present since the Democratic convention.

 

In Biden’s acceptance speech, he said he would “unmuzzle the experts.” Are they muzzled? He said his plan was developing rapid tests and making medical supplies and protective equipment in the United States. So far, the Trump administration has been doing all of this. Joe Biden also mentioned his national mask mandate. Legally speaking, that would be more of a piece of advice or a guideline he’d encourage governors to implement. Biden simply repeated most of this in his “detailed speech.” He has spent the most time and effort on masks. He seems to be reading the polls that masks are popular even among most Republicans.

 

He distinguished his plan only in a few ways, saying he would organize an equitable and free national distribution of an effective vaccine. He said that he wants to increase the amount of testing by seven-fold. And he would create a jobs program that hired contact tracers. But none of this was blended into an actual strategy for containing the virus.

 

The two remaining success stories that are in any way comparable to the United States are New Zealand (Western) and South Korea (modern, densely populated.) Both nations have sea borders. In South Korea’s case, their only land border is the hardest on the planet. They also implemented very tough quarantines for those arriving from outside the country. South Korea also goes further in that it has implanted centralized quarantine — isolating sick people in COVID hotels. South Korea’s contact-tracing system is almost entirely digital, based on location tracking of cellphones.

 

The more we increase testing, the more we’re likely to see a massive decrease in the positivity rate. But, a seven-fold increase in testing alone may not be possible if you’re testing only those who are symptomatic and request a test, which is how most tests in the United States are done. At that level of testing, you would have to get buy-in for community testing that included asymptomatic people, to really measure the spread geographically. But Biden has not announced a plan for supporting a testing regime that might start by looking for upcoming outbreaks in sewage systems, and then move upward to community testing.

 

Biden gave a shoutout to contact tracing, but he makes it seem more like a jobs program than an anti-virus strategy. No country has had major success using human contact tracers alone. Biden made no mention of any national effort to adapt the efforts of Apple and Google into a real digital-tracing strategy. Now that we know the virus spreads when people share the same poorly ventilated space, something like Silicon Valley’s Bluetooth tracing technology could make a lot of sense for alerting those in major metro areas and mass-transit riders that they were exposed. But so far, no major Western country has made effective use of contact tracing. Though Germany was hailed for launching its system early in the summer, it now has little buy-in from the public. It is not as invasive or pervasive as South Korea’s system, and correspondingly it seems to be having almost no suppressive effect. The United Kingdom’s version of a contact-tracing app and program has also only just barely launched and is awaiting further updates.

 

The only effective contact-tracing system in America is the one done at a very local and institutional level. School districts and human-resources departments, who already know where and with whom their students and employees spend significant time, send notifications to parents and teachers when someone contracts COVID.

 

If you go to Biden’s website, you’ll see a list of ideas he never mentions on the campaign trail. Like creating the capacity to build “multi-hundred-bed temporary hospitals” in any city. Is this a good use of resources in the short term? The Western experience — from Nightingale Hospitals in the UK, to the USS Comfort and the USS Mercy Navy hospital vessels that Trump sent to New York City and Los Angeles respectively, to the tents outside my own local hospital at what was one of the initial U.S. hotspots — is that these hospitals went unused. With treatments vastly improving, what would Biden’s temporary hospitals add?

 

Biden’s site also claims that he will “ensure that public health decisions are made by public health professionals and not politicians.” Unfortunately, this is an abdication of responsibility for elected politicians, no different than saying that one would let the joint chiefs of staff make all military and foreign-policy decisions. It also makes a lie of Biden’s promise to “to shut down the virus, not the country.” How would he be able to keep such a promise?

 

The advice of public-health officials, even when experts disagree, should be taken seriously and assessed. But decisions to severely restrict our normal liberties and mandate certain behaviors are political decisions and need to be made by politicians. This is one thing that Trump seems to understand about his job during the pandemic.

 

The bottom line is this. As you vote next week, there is no coherent strategy for dealing with COVID-19 on the ballot. There are just contrary impulses (“We’re turning the corner” or “No, we’re not”) joined almost at random to policy ideas. Better hope that those vaccine trials come in soon.