Disappointing

The President's speech last night, that is.

I had no problem with any of the specific proposals the President made.  Many of them are needed.  But there was a giant hole in the middle - specific actions to stop gatherings and events with large numbers of people, whether legal under the President's authority or just strongly making recommendations and setting an example (stopping his rallies for two months and asking all politicians to do the same), were absent.

Stopping travel from Europe is fine but of marginal impact.  Travel is already collapsing.  The real issue is that COVID-19 is already here in the United States and widespread.  The most important issue for the country is taking steps to stop the exponential growth (case tripled in the past three days), make the top of the curve as low as possible, and bend the curve down.  The math is simple; every day is critical.  The failure to do so will put unbearable pressure on our healthcare system and deaths will skyrocket as we've seen in Italy.

The world is conducting a real time experiment in competing approaches to dealing with COVID-19.  China's draconian actions have stemmed its growth, at least for now.  We'll see what happens as that country reopens for business.  Using aggressive, but far less draconian, strategies Hong Kong, Taiwan, and now South Korea and others have had some success.  Italy was reactive and we are seeing the results; the rest of Europe sat around and watched for two weeks - in the past six days cases in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Spain increased sixfold and deaths/critical cases increased 8x.

The good news is that a lot of organizations are taking action on their own.  Yesterday morning we cancelled our monthly meeting of the Scottsdale Civil War Roundtable (I'm on the Board).  It seemed commonsense to us that bringing together 250 people (average age around 70) with a speaker who just got off a plane from Ohio was not a good idea.

This morning Mrs THC and I made our last supply run to Costco.  It was much more crowded than during our other recent visits.  It looks like yesterday's events (NBA, March Madness, Tom Hanks) may have created a needed tipping point, the moment when, as Martin Lawrence said to Will Smith in Bad Boys 2:


Stay safe!