michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt, and this is “The Argument.” [MUSIC PLAYING] This week, a firsthand experience with coronavirus testing.

ross douthat

They took a very quick nose swab from each of us, and we were supposed to get results in three days. And I took my son home.

david leonhardt

Then, what is the right government response to the looming recession?

michelle goldberg

Clearly, we need to start sending people money and sending people more money than we’re sending them.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

ross douthat

There has to be a period between collapse and sleep, and that’s what television is for.

archived recording (reporter) A new drive-through coronavirus testing site is up and running in the metro Atlanta area. news clip As the number of cases grows, there’s a new warning tonight. The U.S. does not have enough coronavirus test kits to meet the current demand. The White House plans to set up 47 drive-through testing facilities in 12 states.

david leonhardt

It first showed up in the United States two months ago just north of Seattle. Now coronavirus has been detected across all 50 states. By the start of this week, almost 50,000 Americans had confirmed cases, and the number was rising rapidly. Ross, you’re one of those people who have been tested, and we want to start with your story. You and I last saw each other in New York two weeks ago, and my sense is that you started feeling sick shortly there afterwards. Is that right?

ross douthat

Yeah. We did the live show on a Monday. And as regular listeners know, I have both been an alarmist about the coronavirus, but I’ve also been on book tour. So in addition to being in New York for our live show, I had been in Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C. twice, and so on. So in that sense I was, I think, in a high-risk category. And I got home — I guess it was the Wednesday that the N.B.A. canceled its season and things started to lock down. And I started feeling sort of achy and strange. And by the next morning, I had woken up with pain in my throat, chest pain, and a dry cough. So knowing enough about the coronavirus and its symptoms, I went to the at that point still pretty empty emergency room in New Haven and saw two doctors, both of whom, actually, to my surprise, seemed very confident that I had it. Both of them, not to my surprise, told me that I wasn’t eligible for testing because I wasn’t running a fever and didn’t seem to need to be admitted to the E.R. And so they told me to go home and self-quarantine and try and stay away from my very pregnant wife and kids. So I did that. And unfortunately, within that day, my wife also had a dry cough. And two of my kids were pretty clearly sick. And so that basically began our family self-quarantine, which is now technically on, I guess, day 12 or 13.

michelle goldberg

Did you have that thing of not being able to smell or taste?

ross douthat

No, I didn’t. So I didn’t have that, which is kind of — yeah, the most sort of creepy — creepy of the initial symptoms. And as I said, I didn’t have a fever. And from that point on, over the next few days, I developed— I’m not sure if it’s technically shortness of breath. I wasn’t gasping for breath regularly, but whenever I talked to anyone on the phone or tried to read a book to my children, it was like I had, you know, climbed a 50-foot flight of stairs by the end. So at that point, I felt pretty sure that we had it, but then we had to figure out if we could get tested. And we ended up being able to get a script from a doctor to take me and my son, who was the sickest of our kids, up to Waterbury, Connecticut, which for listeners who don’t know, is an old industrial town probably an hour and a half from New York in the Western part of the state, not the first place you would expect to have a drive-through testing facility set up.

david leonhardt

Definitely not.

ross douthat

Definitely not. But we — and it’s possible that I should have waited until Yale New Haven opened one, but I felt pretty anxious to get one. So we went up there, and it was the full nurses in space suits, tents routine. And they took a very quick nose swab from each of us, and we were supposed to get results in three days. And then I took my son home, and then we waited for more than three days.

david leonhardt

Can I just pause you there? Because, I mean, one of the things we’ve heard a lot about is the lack of available tests, which is certainly a problem. But it’s interesting to me that there was a place, albeit not that close to your home, where there were tests available for drive-through. I mean, you didn’t — it’s not like you used connections to get a test, right?

ross douthat

No, although I used — you had to have a doctor who was willing to write you a note, basically. So I used that connection. The E.R. doctors wouldn’t have written me a note. And when I got there, I will say that — this was, I guess, a Monday, so five or six days into the lockdown era. And they told me that they had run 100 tests, and they were about to run out.

david leonhardt

And so what happened with your test results?

ross douthat

So mine came back, I guess, five days later. And there was apparently some confusion where they had switched from using LabCorp to using Quest or vise versa between one day of testing and the next. So my doctor didn’t know where the test results were. And when they called, they called the wrong office. Anyway, so — but the upshot was that I was negative. And my son’s results were delayed for another three days, so we just got them — we’re taping this on Tuesday. We got them literally last night as I was finishing up a column about this, except we didn’t get them, because apparently — and I still haven’t gotten the whole story, but apparently they needed to go back and do a retest on them. I’m assuming maybe they were inconclusive. But they hadn’t taken enough nasal material in the initial test to redo the test. And so since, again, none of us have been hospitalized— and thank god our kids are feeling better — I don’t think he’d be eligible for retesting anyway.

michelle goldberg

But you don’t feel like your negative results are conclusive, right?

ross douthat

No. I mean, you know, whenever you get a negative test in a situation like this, you don’t want to be the guy claiming that you had it and being melodramatic.

michelle goldberg

Right, but didn’t you say there’s a fairly high rate of false negatives?

ross douthat

So there’s — there certainly are false negatives. And, I mean, all that I can say is if it had just been my kids, I would have said it was a very bad chest cold. They had really mild fevers. But for me, I mean, if it was a flu, I have literally never had a flu that did anything like that to my lungs in 40 years of getting lots and lots of sicknesses, because we have small children. And we have — I mean, again, this is anecdote, but our friends in Minnesota, similar experience. The husband had breathing problems, got tested, was negative. We know people across the street from us where — another couple with a kid where the husband was exposed to people in his work, and the whole family got sick. And they too had chest tightness, and he tested negative. So obviously, I have my suspicions here that we actually had it.

michelle goldberg

So how were you thinking about it? I mean, so I’ve— because I’ve — I mean, obviously, I believe you, and it seems likely that you had it from what you’ve described. At the same time, everyone I know, I feel like, feels like they’re experiencing some of these symptoms.

ross douthat

Yes. And this is more of my wife — you know, I’m much more confident that we’ve had it than my wife is. My wife, who, in fairness, also had milder symptoms than I did, is more likely to say, well, 50-50 or something. And when I got the negative test, I spent a certain amount of time that evening trying to convince myself that this was good news, and I didn’t have it. And then the next day, I had a relapse. So it’s been sort of an ebb and flow where I’ll feel like I’ve turned a corner, and then I’ll get a little chest pain the next day, and with a general decline across the 12 or 13 days.

david leonhardt

Well, I have to say I’m grateful — however this turns out with your test, I’m really grateful for how seriously you took it. I mean, when you and I saw each other about a month ago, when we were saying goodbye to each other on the streets of Washington, I stuck out my hand. And I remember you looked at me with a big smile and you said, yeah, no thanks.

ross douthat

Yeah, no, no, I was —

david leonhardt

You were the first person to basically refuse to shake my hand.

ross douthat

That was — I was an early adopter for that. It didn’t help. Well, maybe it helped me. I mean, if we didn’t have it, it helped me. But there was definitely a moment, even on the book tour, the first event, or one of the first events I did, I felt like I had to shake everybody’s hand. This was probably three weeks ago. And then I became more comfortable saying no. And then by the end, everybody was elbow bumping and so on, which is still, I think, not really recommended, because it gets you within that 6-foot range. And I bumped elbows with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. after our live show, so hopefully he’s OK.

michelle goldberg

How are you guys doing with homeschooling?

ross douthat

[LAUGHS] Sorry.

michelle goldberg

I feel like maybe, Ross, it’s probably something you’ve always dreamed of.

ross douthat

Terrific, yes. Finally I get to impart my bizarre world historical views to my four suffering children. I mean, look, our school is doing a great job of trying to do video chatting and supplying work and keeping tabs, but we’ve got three kids of various ages. We’ve been sick. You know, it’s incredibly hard to juggle all these things. So I consider it a good day if I have — my older kids do a couple of worksheets at the dining room table and have them do reading time for half an hour. And then I’m trying to teach them state capitals.

david leonhardt

A friend of mine has a great idea, which is— she said she felt really embarrassed about the fact that she had not yet taught her teenagers how to do some basic cooking things, like boil pasta and stuff like that. And boy, are they going to learn it now. And that’s basically a version of what we’re trying to do, which is— I’m really impressed with how my kids are handling it. I told them that if I had to choose between enduring this as an adult or as a kid, I would definitely choose to endure it as an adult. I think it’s harder on them than us.

michelle goldberg

See, my kids think that we’re on vacation. They’re enduring this perfectly fine. They’re not unhappy about the situation. But even just — our school has been very good. They’ve been communicating with us a lot. But the sheer number of platforms and apps that we’ve been asked to install — I feel like even if I didn’t have a job, I don’t think I could keep on top of it. I mean, it’s weird. I feel like even though we’re stuck at home doing nothing, I actually feel much busier than I felt in my normal life before, because I have to do a lot of stuff that I used to outsource.

ross douthat

It’s certainly a — a pre-1990s kind of American experience, at the very least.

david leonhardt

And I think the hard thing is that we still probably have much, much longer of this than we’ve had so far. Well, Ross, we are glad that you are feeling better, and you’ll have to keep us posted about— if anything changes with the test results.

ross douthat

I absolutely will. I mean, my hope is that someday, there will be, you know, blood tests that can test for antibodies, and we can go back and retest at least myself to try and get more of a handle on what happened. But that’s obviously a long way off. And as long as we’re feeling better, we’re content with that result.

david leonhardt

And boy, it’s another reminder that the shortage of tests and all of the flaws with the tests in this country is a massive part of the problem for us right now. So we will leave it there and take a quick break and be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] The American economy now appears to be shrinking at the fastest rate since the Great Depression. Some economists are forecasting a 20 percent or even a 30 percent fall in G.D.P. in the second quarter of this year. Congress has responded by taking up a massive stimulus bill. We’re taping this on Tuesday when the final outcome of that stimulus bill is unclear, but almost any plan seems likely to be centered around checks that will be sent to all Americans below a certain income level. And I want to start here, because I think that this idea has bipartisan support. And I’m not saying that I’m opposed to it. It probably makes sense at the very beginning. But I think it’s a big mistake for us to imagine that going forward, that the right response to this is going to be sending people cash. If people get $1,000 or $2,000, people who are doing OK aren’t going to spend that money, and people who’ve lost their job, $1,000 or $2,000 isn’t nearly enough. And I guess my take on this is that the response, the economic response really needs to be, first and foremost, a public health response, because we just can’t get the economy started, no matter how many checks we send people, until we break the virus. And it feels to me like some of this response is too much predicated on the idea of this being a normal financial crisis, an economic crisis as opposed to one that is caused by a virus. And I’m interested — Michelle, why don’t you start? I’m interested in whether you think that we basically have something that looks like a good response from Congress.

michelle goldberg

Well, I don’t think we have a good response yet. But look, I think clearly, we need to start sending people money, and sending people more money than we’re sending them, right? I mean, a lot of people, the rent is about to come due. And they have been sent home from work. There’s no prospect of going out and getting another job. And to create some kind of complicated means testing formula is just going to slow the whole thing down. And so I think you send people money, and then you tax it back from the rich later. And then I think we should be doing what a lot of other countries are doing, which is subsidizing payrolls, which is basically saying that we — and people are doing it in different ways. One way you can do it is say that you will bail out these companies as long as they continue paying their workers or just directly pay workers 80 percent of their salaries. I mean, you’re right that you’re not going to fix the economy until you fix the underlying public health crisis, which clearly Republicans, at least the Republicans in charge, seem to not realize. Because there’s been, in the last few days, this really insane move to basically say, the cost of social distancing has been too high on the economy. And if some people have to die for our economy to get moving again, so be it, which is amazing to hear from the people who ranted about death panels when they were worried about Obamacare, but increasingly seems to be the direction that the administration is going in. So you do have to solve the public health crisis, but people can’t wait for you to solve the public health crisis. They need food and shelter and to be able to take care of their material needs right now.

david leonhardt

I mean, I guess that as a first response, the idea of shoveling $1,000, $2,000 out to people— I get that. But I think going forward— I don’t think, if this continues— and I think it will— I don’t think Congress should do it again, because I think it’s too much money for people who have kept their jobs, for those people that they don’t need $1,000 right now, and they’re going to save it, which is to say it won’t help the economy. And for people who’ve lost their jobs, it’s not nearly enough. And so like you, I’d like to see much more of the government essentially subsidizing payrolls. I’d like to see them make it really, really easy for businesses to get loans. And then I’d like to see extremely generous unemployment relief. And to me, the future responses should be more based on those things and less based on sending everyone a check. Ross, where are you on this?

ross douthat

So, I mean, I would say I mostly agree with what seems to be the emerging consensus, the European approach of trying to effectively encourage companies to furlough workers rather than fire them to maintain — basically, to try and freeze the economy, in a sense, like you’re turning off a car and planning to just sort of restart it and leave it as is. And that means that — yeah, I probably agree that a one-time check followed by generous unemployment plus the sort of small business loans that Marco Rubio and others have been pushing — I assume, I think, part of this package, but you need more of it. I think on the question of reopening the economy, I guess I would distinguish between some of the crazy and stupid things that are being said by some people on the right where it’s essentially saying, oh, it’s just a problem in New York and a couple of cities, and we need to reopen things everywhere immediately, because the economy will die. I think that’s ridiculous. But I do think it’s reasonable to set goals at this point and say that we want to be assessing, every two weeks, what we can do and whether we can start to reopen things, and also assessing differences between states. I do think that rural states are going to have a different experience of this and may — you know, the policies that are necessary in New York are not necessarily the policies that you’re going to want in Nebraska.

michelle goldberg

Right, but you already have that difference, right? I mean, it’s the governors that are making these decisions about shutting down schools and businesses and the like. So —

ross douthat

Absolutely. But things like — just on that example, one, this is why, even if the president wants to just open things up and go full throttle in two weeks, it’s not going to happen— because he doesn’t have that power. But things like — the governor of Virginia announced that schools will be closed for the remainder of the year. I mean, my basic view is that we need to ramp up mass production to insane levels. And then if you could get to a point where, in major cities, people were just wearing masks as a matter of course, you could imagine opening things up.

michelle goldberg

Well, I mean, I agree with you that there should be goals. But they don’t — they’re not — they don’t seem to be setting public health goals that would then get you to a place where you could then open things up, right? I mean, obviously, it would be much — it would be preferable if we could start, you know, doing mass testing, having temperature checks at businesses the way they’re doing in South Korea. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of plan to get out of it in a rational manner. It’s more just, let’s see how much the hospitals can take.

ross douthat

I mean, my assumption is that if we are right about the likely pace and spread of the disease, that this kind of argument will be very quickly overtaken by high death rates in red America as well — not necessarily in the more rural areas, but the major cities in Texas will look— again, if they don’t continue to implement closures, they will look like New York and New Orleans seemingly are about to look. And, I mean, I don’t mean this as a sort of sanguine interpretation of what’s going on in conservatism. I think that there is a kind of totally rotten kind of, like, baby boomer-era conservatism that is making a spectacle of itself over the economy right now. I also think that people in my faction of conservatism, the sort of Rubios and Josh Hollys and even Mitt Romneys, have been doing a really good job.

david leonhardt

But Ross, I don’t agree that Marco Rubio and other Republicans are handling this well, because here’s the problem. Yes, you’re right that if large parts of red America basically don’t take this very seriously for the next couple of weeks, the virus will get worse, and then they will start taking it seriously. But this is an urgent moment. And the fact that we don’t have the president of the United States getting up and urging people to take it more seriously, that he’s instead kind of talking about when it might end, and that Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley aren’t willing to defy the president of the United States, means that there are —

ross douthat

What do you mean by defy the president of the United States? I mean, Marco Rubio’s statement about what’s going on— I mean, Lindsey Graham, who’s not on my team, whatever my team of conservatives would be, came out yesterday or the day before and said, we obviously can’t restart the economy without getting the coronavirus under control. I mean, lots of Republicans are saying reasonable things. They are admittedly not getting up and giving speeches denouncing Trump, but then again, neither are blue state governors, because they desperately need him to help them. I mean, this is— the bottom line is that Trump is the president, which is not something that I ever desired to happen, but he is. And as long as he is, getting in a war with him rather than trying to prod him towards taking correct action seems like the reasonable thing. Someone like Tucker Carlson, who’s the one Fox News host who took this seriously from the beginning, went to Mar-a-Lago and tried to talk Trump into taking this seriously and basically devoted a bunch of monologues on his show to advertisements to Trump to take it seriously. Now, is that ideal? No, it’s not ideal. But would it be more helpful if Carlson just denounced the president every night? I doubt it. But again, it would be better — it would be better if he wasn’t president.

david leonhardt

But some of the urgency that Tucker Carlson— and I can’t believe I’m saying this— but some of the urgency that Tucker Carlson showed about just how serious it is is the kind of thing that I think we need to see more from national, prominent Republicans. Even if they don’t want to pair it with criticism of Trump because they don’t want to criticize dear leader, I’d take it. But I just—

ross douthat

Right. I mean, the Republicans in Congress are about to pass a $2-trillion, economy-wide bailout, right? I mean, that does seem to suggest that they’re taking it seriously. And people like Hawley and Rubio and Romney were out front trying to fix the things in the bill that you were— or maybe Michelle was criticizing where you had— the initial draft of the bill had standard Republican ideas about means testing and benefit cutoffs. And a bunch of Republicans said, don’t do that. Just, like, plow money into the economy.

michelle goldberg

Well, the other problem with the initial draft of the bill, or I guess the bill that they’re negotiating as we speak, is that they want this — what is it — $500-billion slush fund for Steve Mnuchin to dole out as he sees fit.

ross douthat

Yes, although my understanding is that a big chunk of that ends up administered by the Fed rather than Mnuchin. But I think that from the point of — you aren’t getting some kind of— outside of some marginal circles, you aren’t getting some kind of rigid, small government, we’re not going to bail out the economy response from Republicans at all. So I think that’s good.

david leonhardt

Yes. Let’s leave it there. Before we head to this week’s recommendation, which will come from Ross, we want to take a moment to hear from all of you. Last week, we asked how coronavirus was affecting your thoughts about voting in the 2020 election.

voicemail Hello Hi.

david leonhardt

And here is what you had to say.

voicemail Hi. So I was actually a poll worker in Florida at the last minute in terms of vote by mail. The thing that concerns me the most is it works in some states like Washington and Oregon, but can we really trust, say, the government in Texas or Georgia to send out all the ballots to all the people who should be getting them? Hi. My name is Jane Pratt. I’m from Cincinnati, Ohio. And I do worry that the Trump administration — that they would make it so tenuous for people to vote. I just worry that anything that the Trump administration can do to cause voter suppression in November, and with a Republican-held state that I live in, I just worry that it would be used to suppress any Democratic vote. My name is James Lofton. I feel like Alabama’s legislature needs to finally pass some kind of vote by mail. The legislature is a Republican-led legislature, of course, and they will not change. Hello. This is Cathy Savage, and I live in South Carolina. And I was traveling during our primary, so I voted by mail. So easy, squeezy, peasy, or something. Anyway, it was very easy. Hi. My name is Peter, and I live in Oregon. And I joined the military right out of high school. And I was able to vote by mail in my home state for the entire 24 years that I was in the military. But when I retired, I came to live in Oregon, and Oregon has vote by mail. And I realized that I had never stood in line to vote in my entire life, and I’ve still never done that. My name is Mindy Halsey. I’m a resident of Utah. We vote by mail, primarily, and it has been immensely successful. Hi. This is Marilyn Blumenstein. I’m in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. And my recommendation under the circumstances is to expand the number of days for in-person voting beyond the one Tuesday in November to up to a week. Hi. This is Barry Ross calling. And voting traditionally happens indoors, understandably. If there’s a way of giving people numbers when they first come so they can go back to their cars and maybe look for a lighted sign someplace that tells them their number is approaching so they can get out of their cars and come over to the voting table, this could be done indoors as well, I suppose. Thanks. That’s that. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we make a suggestion that is meant to take your mind off of the news — not an easy thing in these times, I recognize. Ross, it is your turn. What do you have for us?

ross douthat

I mean, I’ve been to so many Connecticut state parks that I really can’t choose just one to recommend. [LAUGHTER] And I was going to recommend something for homeschooling, but my homeschooling is so incompetent. So I’ll just recommend a Netflix show. My wife and I have been taking our mind off the collapse of Western civilization by watching “Narcos,” which is Netflix’s drama about the Medellin cartel and Pablo Escobar and the D.E.A. agents who tried to take it down in the 1980s. And it spends a lot of time trying to explain the complex history of Colombia. And there’s a little too much sort of throat clearing and stuff, and the American lead is not great. But the guy who plays Pablo Escobar, Wagner Moura, who’s from Brazil, is terrific. And the show is just like — it’s just sort of escapism in this — you know, the problems of drug smuggling and the horrible crimes and the terrible assassinations of politicians and so on. I mean, it’s all terrible, but it seems very familiar and ordinary. Yeah. It’s been decent escapism for us over the last week or so of our own excitement.

david leonhardt

That sounds good. Has either of you noticed any problem with Netflix streaming times? I haven’t, but I’ve heard that something other people are experiencing now that the whole world is basically trying to entertain themselves online.

ross douthat

This is the ultimate problem of privilege.

michelle goldberg

I’m jealous of you guys that you have time to watch Netflix.

ross douthat

Well, there’s an hour after the kids go to bed, I guess.

michelle goldberg

I guess. I feel like after the kids go to bed, I make our dinner, and then we collapse.

ross douthat

Yeah. I mean, we’re collapsed. We’re in a state of collapse when this happened. But there has to be a period between collapse and sleep, and that’s what television is for — sweet, sweet television.

david leonhardt

Ross, what’s the recommendation?

ross douthat

“Narcos” on Netflix.

david leonhardt