By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, March 19, 2020
Blizzards apparently cause Americans to desire French
toast — why else run to the store for milk, eggs, and bread? Coronavirus has,
on the other hand, sent Americans in search of toilet paper and better Wi-Fi
connections.
The parallels are worth thinking about: An epidemic is
like a storm in more than the metaphorical sense.
Consider a hurricane. In a powerful storm, the windows in
your house may leak — even if they are really good ones and properly installed.
But the big variable isn’t leaky windows: It is keeping the roof on. The damage
done to houses that lose their roof during hurricanes is dramatically worse
than the damage typically suffered by houses that keep their roofs on. The kind
of roof fastening that will stand up to a hurricane is overkill in practically
every other situation. It can be expensive — the Institute for Business and
Home Safety, an organ of the insurance lobby, estimates that complying with its
“Fortified Home” program (which addresses hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and
other natural disasters) can add from 3 to 8 percent to the price of a house
compared with complying with minimum local building-code standards. And nobody
wants to pay for that: Builders, who work on relatively small margins, do not
want to bear the cost and are not confident they can pass it on to consumers;
consumers do not want to pay any more for their houses than they have to, and
they pass their risk on to their insurance companies. The insurance companies
do not want to go around writing a lot of six-figure checks for totaled houses
after every major storm, and so they lobby for stricter “wind uplift
resistance” rules in the building code, which means that every homeowner living
under the code gets a more hurricane-resistant roof whether he asks for it or
not.
Somebody has a strong financial interest in making houses
more hurricane-resistant. It isn’t the homeowners, but that doesn’t really
matter: When the roof comes off, somebody pays.
And that is why we are better prepared for hurricanes
than for epidemics.
With COVID-19 sending people around the world into
quarantine — voluntary or involuntary — critical pieces of infrastructure,
public and private, are being tested in the United States and abroad. The
results — as of this writing, early in the episode — have not been
catastrophic, but they do point to weak spots and possible problems.
Begin with the good news: The Internet does not seem to
be having very much trouble with all the extra traffic, although specific
services, such as Microsoft Teams, a remote-collaboration platform, have
failed. (Microsoft’s Xbox network also crashed — not everybody at home is working.
A pornographic site announced that it was offering free “premium” service to
Italians.) A spokesman for Downdetector, an outage-reporting site, told Slate,
“We’ve definitely noticed a wave of outages/issues correlated to coronavirus
traffic spikes.” But the Internet seems to be chugging along, with the notable
exception of a few stock-trading sites. One reason for that is that the
Internet already has a lot of excess daytime capacity — people watch Netflix
and use other video-streaming services, which make up most Internet traffic, at
night, when they are off work. A spike in teleconferencing by home workers is
not going to challenge the communication infrastructure the way the Game of
Thrones finale did. An uptick in online banking or corporate VPN traffic is
not likely to present much of a challenge to the digital infrastructure in the
United States or abroad.
The most notable problem so far has not been virtual
commerce but the old-fashioned kind.
Toilet paper is, at this writing, difficult to find in
much of the country, which should be no surprise: It is a big, bulky item with
a very low margin. How much do you think has been invested in ensuring its
availability during times of crisis?
Hand sanitizer and other hygienic products have
disappeared from the shelves, and there were literally lines out the doors at
grocery stores in New York and other big cities. Some retailers, such as Apple
and Nike, have closed their stores entirely in the service of social isolation.
Others, such as San Antonio–based grocery giant H-E-B, have nimbly responded to
the crisis. H-E-B modified its store hours, closing early in order to give its
overnight crews more time to restock store shelves; the company’s theory is
that the fear of shortages may contribute to panic stockpiling and thereby turn
that fear into reality. The chain also has instituted free next-day-delivery
curbside ordering to prevent crowding in its stores. Like Kroger, Walmart, and
other big players in the market, H-E-B is hiring, from stockers to cashiers to
pharmacy techs. Some grocers have suspended less essential work (such as
stocking the floral departments) in order to deploy those resources elsewhere.
Retailers have some experience with this kind of thing,
because their stores get mobbed a few times a year — at Thanksgiving for
grocers, and at Christmas for businesses of other kinds. The farms are not
going to stop producing food, and, barring some truly catastrophic deepening of
the current crisis, the food-processing factories are not going to stop
preparing and processing what the farms are growing.
The vulnerability is the “last mile” problem, getting
products from warehouses and distribution centers onto store shelves. In 2018,
the American Trucking Associations estimated that the United States was more
than 60,000 drivers short of what was needed. If the coronavirus should
sideline some appreciable part of the U.S. workforce, this could cause
bottlenecks in the distribution network — something that would be of even
greater concern as many households turn to online shopping, which will increase
demand both for commercial big-rig drivers and delivery-van drivers.
But even that kind of risk is reasonably manageable. What
we should be worried about is the resilience and excess capacity of basic
systems: electricity, water, roads and rail. These systems are more vulnerable
than we think: In summer of 2019, a thunderstorm hit Dallas, leaving 330,000
people without electricity for days and 41 percent of the city’s traffic
signals inoperable. A few months later, the same city was hit by three
tornados, which left thousands without power for weeks and took down the traffic-light
system again, with some city streets unpassable and traffic snarled up. In
2017, gasoline pumps went dry all over Dallas when the hurricane that soaked
Houston and shut down 25 percent of the U.S. refining capacity took a major
gasoline pipeline out of commission. That’s just one city in a relatively short
span of time. These things happen, and they can happen during an epidemic, too.
The hurricanes and the viruses are not coordinating their schedules. A
sustained interruption in the local electricity service or gasoline supply in
any part of the country during this epidemic is the sort of thing that sets off
cascading system failures. If the trucks don’t get fuel, the food doesn’t get
to the stores — or the hospitals. If the power goes down, the pumps don’t work.
What to do about that?
This is precisely the kind of coordination problem that
governments exist, in theory, to address. But in reality, political incentives
complicate that. Just a few months before the coronavirus hit, the Trump
administration submitted a budget proposal that included, among other things, a
$35 million cut to the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund’s annual
contribution. For a politician, it doesn’t pay to sock away money as a hedge
against some future crisis. Presidencies last, at most, eight years; more
realistically, they operate on two- to four-year timelines. The same kind of
immediacy bias infects politics at all levels, which is why Democrat-dominated
states (and some Republican ones, too) are facing the prospect of insolvency in
the face of retiree obligations they spent decades refusing to fully fund.
Go back to those hurricane-resistant roofs: Without the
building code, a more libertarian settlement would permit homeowners to do what
they really want to do, which is cheap out on roof fasteners and upgrade their
kitchen countertops to marble instead. On a case-by-case basis, that would be
tolerable, but hurricanes hit everybody in their path at the same time, and all
those roofless houses and suddenly homeless people create a social crisis — an
externality — that can overwhelm local resources. People would prefer not to
face the risk of hurricanes, but the risk appears to them manageable because —
they assume — even if the roof comes off, everything else in the world is going
to be working more or less as it should. We Americans have long assumed that we
can get by with barely sufficient electrical and transportation systems because
they are fine, short of an unexpected national crisis. And here we are.
The contours of the crisis are impossible to predict in
any detail. But the fact of recurrent crises is not impossible to predict — it
is impossible to miss. And that is why an intelligent society fortifies what is
fortifiable (including its public finances) in order to have room to maneuver
and assets to exploit when disaster strikes. Coronavirus is not going to be our
last national crisis. And, despite cheap partisan claims to the contrary, these
problems are not going to be solved with any of the old bromides: Italy has a
“universal” health-care system, but that is no insurance against what the
Italians are suffering right now. This is a genuine test of American leadership
at home and abroad — and American leadership has been found wanting.
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