The Perfect COVID Strategy Still Has Something to Teach Us

Say for a second we had actually wanted to fight COVID. What might we have done differently?

Well, just about everything, which might seem pointless to think about, but there will be another pandemic and if not that, then some other emergency that requires everyone to work together. To that end, let’s let ourselves dream about what might have happened if we’d had the right strategy.

1. Give everyone a positive goal.

A lot of the early response (when it wasn’t occupied with the task of ignoring or minimizing the threat COVID obviously posed) involved telling people things they couldn’t do, and people predictably rebelled. I can’t leave my house? Just watch me. I can’t go out to dinner? This sucks.

What if federal authorities had announced a national goal and struck an optimistic tone? Hey, everybody, we’re aiming for zero cases. We can do this, and we’re going to save us all a ton of misery. Let’s figure this out and get back to normal sooner, more reliably.

Give people something positive to anchor off of.

2. Be consistent about masks.

There weren’t enough N95’s to go around when the virus first hit, and the CDC didn’t want a run on scarce supplies. All well and good, but the way they chose to forestall that buying frenzy was to lie: masks don’t help. Instead, they should have simply told the truth: masks help, and we need them for healthcare workers. Heck — pass emergency legislation preserving them for medical workers. Undermining the most practical tool for fighting the pandemic was really, really stupid.

3. Promulgate visible standards for masks produced by private manufacturers.

Not helping the mask situation was the proliferation of masks and the individual interpretation of what kind of mask was helpful, combined with a general desire to look “cool.” Okay, I get that you want to look like a bank robber or a cast member of Watchmen, but buffs and bandanas were only slightly better than useless. If there had been a national standard for a cloth mask and if that had been provided to manufacturers in a way that allowed them to innovate in look and feel while getting a visible certification, we could have all enforced consistent standards that people may have been more willing to follow, instead of resisting the stigma of looking “weak” in public (which is stupid in the context of millions of dead worldwide, but we’ll pretend it’s not). Put an insignia on it showing it’s a certified mask and make it easy for places of public accommodation to enforce wearing the right kind of mask.

4. Build public trust in contact tracing and offer incentives to participate.

Americans will give up all their information to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Heck, they’ll surrender all their personal data to the government just to skip the security line at the airport. We tell Google our deepest darkest secrets in return for answers to questions.

But if the government says they want to track us or intrudes on our lives at all, we immediately shout about tyranny and the nanny state yadda yadda yadda. There was no way we were going to let the government trace our contacts.

The government should have funded a couple of independent vendors to develop competing contact tracing programs with some nice incentives for people who enabled the most contacts to be traced. Choice + competition? Americans are in. 5-page privacy agreement? Suddenly, no one cares.

5. Fast track the development of effective vaccines.

It’s the one piece we got right.

6. Don’t make the vaccine the entire strategy.

The right way to stamp out the pandemic was to do as much as we could to stop the spread, not the most we thought we could get away with. With the latter sort of attitude, we were always bound to rely on the vaccine to the exclusion of every other thing we could do, which was dumb. 1.) The vaccine took a long time, and in the meantime, the virus mutated. We just got lucky it didn’t mutate more than it did. 2.) The vaccine isn’t 100% effective, and once you subtract for vaccine hesitancy, it’s much less effective in aggregate — it will never reach every arm. 3.) Kids. The vaccine has been a false hope that has let us let our guard down too soon instead of following through until the virus was wiped out.

7. Close all the restaurants and gyms and bars — AND THE AIRPORTS — and keep them closed until the goal is achieved. Pay them to stay closed.

Hey, I missed going out for dinner as much as anyone, but it’s a small sacrifice to avoid a bunch of people dying. Just me? It was a bigger sacrifice for people who own or work in a restaurant. Make it less painful to keep them closed, but for God’s sake — keep them closed until the epidemiology says it’s safe to reopen. The tortured logic we used instead was abhorrent. “Well, there aren’t that many cases. I mean, the hospitals aren’t overflowing with the sick and the dying, so I’d say let’s loosen up the reins until there’s too much misery to stand again.” Who thinks like that? We do, evidently.

Ah well. As it’s been said before: for of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ Maybe next time — and mark my words, the next time is here already in the form of a warming world — maybe that time, we can get it right.