There is cause for alarm. An epidemiological report from Imperial College London now guiding federal policy suggests as many as 2.2 million Americans could die if the authorities and public make little effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. By isolating the infected and potentially infected and encouraging social distancing from the elderly, it is estimated that the toll can be halved to just over a million dead. The report goes on to suggest that the more intensive measures against the spread of the virus now belatedly underway in several states—widespread social distancing among the general public, the closure of schools and large establishments, bans on mass gatherings—can reduce casualties further, but only if the entire population participates in suppressive efforts until a vaccine is made widely available. This, the researchers noted, could take 18 months or more. Meanwhile, the sick will swamp the nation’s hospitals, which are wholly unprepared to meet the needs of the many thousands or even millions who might require sustained intensive treatment upon infection.



Even those the disease will leave untouched are already having their lives upended by an economic contagion that, as Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin privately warned Republicans, would send the unemployment rate as high as 20 percent without serious mitigating action. The closure of bars, restaurants, and other nonessential businesses and the layoffs that have ensued are already producing spikes in unemployment claims without recent precedent. The losses will not be isolated to the travel industry and the most precarious sectors of the service economy. The range of potentially vulnerable businesses includes all firms that need people to physically gather.

And so we’ve seen this past week not only the closure of thousands of theaters nationwide but also the throttling of television and film production, which has already cost 120,000 entertainment crew jobs according to The Hollywood Reporter. The auto industry has been forced to contend with not just the potential shuttering of car dealerships but, after factory workers began to test positive for the virus, the closure of all General Motors and Fiat Chrysler plants in North America. Goldman Sachs has projected that American gross domestic product could decline by as much as 24 percent in the next quarter, an unfathomable number reflecting the impact of an extraordinary shock in both supply and demand. As long as large sectors of the economy remain shut down, people and firms will have both less money to spend and fewer goods and services on which to spend it.

This is the situation we now face—for all of our economic and technological advancement, for all the privileges of being the world’s lone superpower, for all of our might and all of our swagger, we have been rendered helpless by a disease that, despite the ravages that have faced China, Iran, and Italy, several other countries seem to have successfully contained. For what feels like the hundredth time in 20 years, we are set to be devastated and humiliated by a situation we ought to have seen coming and for which we ought to have been wholly prepared. But we are not. And people will die: needlessly, painfully, and in numbers no single, novel cause or event here has produced in generations. And so, there is cause for alarm.

We are a nation in quarantine. Whether we have been subjected to formal restrictions on movement and activity or not, America is now isolated, pent in, and getting reacquainted with itself. And while the faces we see in the mirror remain familiar, we are becoming, with each passing day, more unkempt and more undone than we would have thought possible.