When you live in forced isolation in an effort to flatten the COVID-19 curve, life can get pretty parochial. In my case, I wake up, fall out of bed and drag a comb across my head before finding my way to a 15,000-plus-square-foot office that, at its peak these telecommuting days, has a population of five. After settling with a cup of British Breakfast, I scroll through a steady bombardment of emails and e-newsletters—all of which presently are pretty depressing—while trying to get some actual work done. Eight, nine or 10 hours later, I drive home, toss something in the oven and mindlessly drift off watching a streaming rotation of Joe Exotic, Ozark, Babylon Berlin, Sunderland ’til I die and The Stranger on Netflix.
Such is a day in the life when mitigating a pandemic.
Living life this way has a tendency to mask what’s happening in the world of isolation around us. Yes, it’s stunning to see the escalating number of positive cases. Yes, reading or watching the news is distressing. Yes, it’s concerning to see pretty much every retail store in town temporarily—allegedly—shuttered. Yes, it’s clear anyone associated with a restaurant has some very real financial troubles. And, yes, it’s pretty obvious that when Baton Rouge is a ghost town and that your only ability to connect to the outside world is through social media or Zoom that other businesses must surely be hurting.
Yet in a world of one—when isolation becomes another word for “detachment”—it can be tough to link intellectual knowledge with emotional feeling. Especially when the paychecks are still arriving, the bills are getting paid and everything you pretty much need—except toilet paper and Lysol—is findable at the grocery store.
That all changed in a big, big way shortly after 8:30 a.m. on April 2. That’s the morning reality gave me a jolting slap across the face.
During a webcast I was moderating on the CARES Act—and the Paycheck Protection Plan in particular—with Rep. Garret Graves and LABI’s Stephen Waguespack, the 1,200 or so nameless, faceless people who were watching online instantly got a name … and a face … pretty much the second some 300 of them began submitting questions for the panelists.
Many of the names I knew. Some are pretty good friends. Others I didn’t have a clue. But collectively they were all worried and, to varying degrees, crying out for help.
Those in the cyber crowd weren’t your middle-manager types. They were business owners, doctors, lawyers, lobbyists, bank presidents, commercial and residential real estate developers, oil company executives, nonprofit presidents and entrepreneurs.
In other words, they are the people who pretty much make the Baton Rouge private-sector economy go.
And their questions made it clear the economy isn’t even close to going right now. Rather, it’s moving with quickening pace toward gone.
It was frightening.
This isn’t just about restaurants and retail shops and the plight of their workers. Almost every facet—save grocery stores and a handful of others—of the Baton Rouge economy is hurting and in need of a financial life line.
Businesses aren’t just hibernating. They are closing down. Call it a layoff or a furlough if you like, but a lot of these workers will never get their old job back.
And we’ve got another month of this—at least?
Which makes me wonder: Is the cure for keeping the coronavirus in semi-check worse than the disease?
Normally, I don’t think much of our elected officials, but these days my heart goes out to them.
Gov. John Bel Edwards and Mayor Sharon Weston Broome wake up every COVID-19 day and face life and death decisions. There is no playbook. No past to call upon. They—and scores of others—are navigating a foggy swamp of uncertainty and fast-changing information.
Thankfully they have some pretty smart public health experts by their side to offer advice, but even they don’t know for certain what’s the right thing to do. How can they? We’ve never dealt with anything like this before.
Make no mistake, public health absolutely must come first, and if we’re going to react, let’s overreact.
But it’s also fair to take a step back and ask: Is our present course still the best course?
Is killing the Baton Rouge economy a fair cost for containing a pandemic?
The answer may well be yes. I don’t know.
What I do understand is that our economy is nosediving into a depression and I honestly don’t think the federal government can throw enough money at the problem fast enough to stop it if we’re going to remain on lockdown deep into May or June.
In the beginning of our quasi-quarantine, the theory was the economy was being put into something akin to a medically-induced coma. Once the coronavirus was contained the economy would be revived and business would instantly spike upward—hence the V-curve that economists mention.
Yet the longer this drags on the clearer it becomes that the social and financial consequences are going to be too great for an instant recovery.
Make no mistake, the solution isn’t to simply call off the shutdown and roll the dice that everything will be all right.
But maybe, just maybe, in a few weeks the governor and mayor could consider a more surgical approach to minimizing the threat of COVID-19 while also bringing some life back to the economy.
The goal right now is to save as many lives as possible without overwhelming the medical system. But destroying the economy in the process creates another kind of human suffering—one that can’t be solved with stay-at-home orders.
Maybe the restaurants do need to remain a dine-in-free zone for an extended period and, certainly, we should isolate those at the greatest risk of contracting the virus. But as the temperature and the humidity rise might it be possible to bring parts of the Baton Rouge and state economy back to life?
The oil and gas sector is pretty much out of our control as long as Saudi Arabia and Russia play chicken over oil prices, but state and local government can target other business sectors and get those up and running again.
It’s a tough call, no doubt. But one deserving of consideration. Our economic future may well depend on it.
