The only advantage that the most famous virus of the 21st century has reached the United States is that the prodigious biomedical machinery of that country has gotten to the bottom of the pandemic swamp that overwhelms the world. Much of the scientists' job is to dissuade their president, Donald Trump, from taking counterproductive measures, either by executive order or via Twitter. Trump, a construction magnate rather than leader of a country of 330 million inhabitants, began trying to delay the containment measures and, when he saw that this could not be, concentrated on advancing the recovery of the activity as much as possible.
He had reasons for this: more than three million workers had signed up for the unemployment benefit in March, and that would be little compared to those who could not even sign up. Trump wanted to announce the end of confinement for mid-April, with the very understandable purpose of limiting damage to the economy, but then something extraordinary happened. The chief of infectious diseases at the NIH (National Institutes of Health, the world's largest public biomedical research machine), and chief scientific adviser to the White House, convinced him that relaxing the measures on that date would kill two million Americans. No one but a psychopath would shoulder such a carnage. Trump has rectified, and will extend the national paralysis until the end of this month, despite the flow of money that the country will lose. Deaths will thus drop below 100,000, even if losses soar.
It is just one example, albeit a remarkable one, of the devil's dilemma facing governments these days. Much has been said about the British premier , Boris Johnson, who initially chose to protect the economy at the cost of enduring a multiplication of mortality. He came to apologize to his citizens for the unfortunate losses they would suffer among their relatives. Without citing them, he was referring above all to the elderly, who would have to disappear from the map for the good of the national economy. Johnson also doubled. But we have much closer examples. The Spanish Government itself has been divided on the confinement and closure of companies since the first microsecond of the crisis. The economic part has spent a month trying to reduce, delay or alleviate the measures against contagion. It does not seem a coincidence that the President decided to put the Minister of Health at the head of the crisis cabinet, who has always defended the opposite option.
I am not trying to mock these divisions and rectifications, nor to proclaim the superiority of science over economic rationality. The devil's dilemma doesn't grace me, because an economic downturn can be even more damaging than the coronavirus itself. It can leave a lot of people on the street, without work or resources, once again mortgaged, evicted, crushed by history. The planet's rulers face very difficult decisions, where you cannot help everyone and you have to choose between some victims and others. I have never wanted to be a minister, but now I love him less than ever. How awful.
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