Coronavirus: A Glimmer of Hope
Americans should keep watching the trend in Italy’s outbreak.
American Spectator, Mar 24, 2020, Robert Stacy McCain

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If, like me, you have been laser-focused on this situation for the past week, you mentally braced yourself for Italy to report an even larger number on Sunday, but then breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported that only 651 Italians died of coronavirus. This was small consolation, as Italy — a nation with a population about 60 million — has already suffered more than 6,000 dead in this pandemic, with a total of more than 60,000 coronavirus cases and thousands of new infections still being reported every day. Yet Sunday’s numbers from Italy were a much-needed cause for hope, and this was followed by a further decrease in Monday’s reported deaths — down to 602, a 24-percent decline from Saturday’s peak. Likewise, the number of reported new coronavirus cases in Italy declined Monday.

We cannot yet be sure that this encouraging trend in Italy will continue, but if indeed that country’s crisis has passed its peak, it indicates that America may be less than two weeks away from a similar point in the course of this pandemic. U.S. states began implementing lockdown measures about a week later than Italy, which has become the worst-case scenario in this global health crisis. On Sunday, the United States had 117 reported deaths from coronavirus, our first day with more than 100 deaths from the disease, a point in the pandemic curve that Italy first reached on March 8. It is uncertain how directly data from the Italian outbreak can be extrapolated to the United States, where our population is more than five times larger, and where government-imposed measures are not yet as strict as those in Italy. But there are increasingly tight lockdowns in the hardest-hit U.S. states where the vast majority of infections have been identified.

Let’s be clear about this: More than two-thirds (69.8 percent) of our country’s reported cases of Wuhan coronavirus (41,259 as of Monday, according to CNN) are in five states: New York, New Jersey, Washington State, California, and Michigan. These states also account for 65 percent of U.S. deaths in this pandemic. So far, at least, the risk of contracting this virus is very unevenly distributed across the country. There are widespread concerns about the economic damage from government-mandated closure of so many businesses (see Monday’s American Spectator columns by Bob Luddy and Scott McKay), and we can expect increasing political pressure to get America back to work. The pressure to end the shutdowns will be greatest from those who are not in one of the coronavirus “red zones.” Leaders shall soon be forced to choose between what health officials recommend for disease containment — continued quarantine conditions — and the desire of most Americans for a return to normal conditions.


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