Depending on where you live, the stores, parks, playgrounds, and offices in your area could be shut down for the rest of this summer. Or, they could all be open again right now. State governments have differing opinions on when the best time is to restart normal life (and the economy) even though public health experts are advising us all to continue to shelter in place until we’re fully equipped to test and care for every American who falls ill.
This week on Gadget Lab, we ask WIRED senior correspondent Adam Rogers how we would go about safely reopening the country. Then, a conversation about how we’re all coping with the coronavirus. (Mostly booze, but some other things too.)
Show Notes
Read more from Adam about the White Houses’ plans for easing social distancing measures, and about how state alliances here. Follow all of WIRED’s coronavirus coverage here. Read all you’d ever want to know about alcohol in Adam’s book Proof: The Science of Booze.
Recommendations
Adam recommends the book Forced Perspectives by Tim Powers. Lauren recommends the Showtime drama The Affair. Mike recommends the re-released Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World.
Adam Rogers can be found on Twitter @jetjocko. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Michael Calore: So I must say that the thing that has been really helping me do this podcast process is the “hide self view option” in Zoom.
Lauren Goode: That’s amazing!
MC: Oh, yeah. It’s important. It’s like being in the real world.
[Intro theme music]
MC: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, a senior editor at WIRED. I am joined remotely again by my cohost, WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode.
LG: Hello from home.
MC: We are also joined this week by WIRED senior correspondent, Adam Rogers. Hi, Adam.
Adam Rogers: Hello, also from home.
MC: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re going to be talking about the ways we as a nation are responding to the coronavirus. Later in the show, we will offer up some tips about how to cope emotionally at a time like this and yes, we will probably be offering some advice that doesn’t involve booze, but only some. First, however, we’re going to talk about nothing less than the state of the union. As shelter in place orders keep getting extended, the responses from state governments have varied widely. Some states have formed alliances so they can pool resources and fight the virus more effectively, while others have announced plans to reopen businesses and return to, quote unquote, “normal”, which of course goes against the advice of public health experts.
On top of that, the federal government is eager to lift social distancing requirements without providing any guidelines on how exactly that would work. Now, Adam, about a week ago you wrote a piece for WIRED.com, in which you called the White House’s plans for ending coronavirus restrictions “magical thinking.” Seeing how a week feels like a month these days, how have things progressed since then?
AR: Isn’t that time dilation effect strange? When you’re not bounded by your commute to the office or whatever it is that you mark time with every time? Time gets funny. Things have progressed poorly, I would say. There’s been this real weird schism between … among, I guess, states which are the primary entities that regulate public health. Public health responsibilities fall on states and localities in the United States and the only levers that the federal government has really with public health or money, how much money to give, how much money you can grant to a state. So what’s happening now is that the different states instituted their stay at home social distancing, non-pharmaceutical intervention orders at different times and now different states are feeling some pressure to lift them. That tracks roughly with which states are most dependent on sales tax as opposed to corporate taxes or property taxes.
I just saw some numbers on this. If you’re really dependent on sales tax like Florida and Texas are, for example, then you really need businesses to reopen because you need that money coming back into your coffers. What you hope for is that the federal government might provide some kind of centralizing for all of this, and they haven’t. At various times the president has either said, “This is entirely up to the states. I’m not going to help with ventilators and PPEs and you’re all on your own,” or, “Everybody should go back to work.” In fact, the president tweeted some things about liberating different states and demanding that states lift whatever restrictions they had chosen.
The White House, the federal government, put out this sort of a guideline for when states could lift their restrictions, and this is the thing that I wrote about, but it said things like, “Okay, there’s some gating factors and then there are these different phases you can do, but as soon as everybody has a lot of testing in place and as soon as you have contact tracing and sentinel surveillance, which is looking for a disease popping up, actively looking for it in different groups, then you can start to reopen.” Everybody was like, “Okay, great, but we don’t have that and the states have no way of having that.” States say, “You just told us we had to go by our own tests, and then you got in our faces when we went and bought our own tests, and you’re saying we have to have our own tests.”
So they put this together and there was all kinds of confusion. Then the governor of the state of Georgia said, “We’re just going to reopen on Friday and it’s going to be fine. We’re good.” Now there’s been some reporting that’s come out that said the president and vice president, in a phone call, supported the governor. Then the president went onto one of these press briefings that have been this weird ongoing display of all of the things that have gone wrong here, and said, “Oh, I don’t think they should reopen yet.”
So the messages are worse than mixed. They are pureed, these messages. That’s led to a lot of tension between the states and the federal government. That’s always supposed to exist in a federal system. There’s this cliche, the states are the laboratories of democracy. The states are supposed to come up with the innovations that then spread around, but now they’re being told they’re on their own, and that’s led to a whole bunch of other very strange and almost science fiction sounding outcomes.
LG: Adam, there are also these alliances being formed right now, particularly the ones we saw between California, Washington and Oregon, and then there’s this other faction on the East coast, East coast states that have basically said, “We’re going to make some decisions together.” I’m wondering how these kinds of alliances compare to other responses in times of crises and disasters, maybe ones that are not health related either. I mean, if we’ve ever seen this before with wildfires or hurricanes or geopolitical crises, or is this very specific to what has become essentially the partisan nature of COVID responses?
AR: Yeah, those are all exactly the right questions about these. So there’s the Western States pact, that’s California and Oregon and Washington. There’s a Northeastern one that’s the Tristate area plus some new England states. There’s a Midwestern one that’s not all of the Midwest and also comes with a couple of Southern States. Then depending on how you think about these things, there are a bunch of Southern states that don’t have a formal alliance, but they’ve all said they’re going to reopen really soon and they’re not going to have the same social distancing. So in a way they constitute a fourth coalition, albeit a much looser coalition, and the coalitions that are more formal are supposed to do a couple of things. One is to get all the buying power of those states together to purchase things that they need, like personal protective equipmen