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By Jon Coupal
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down with massive disruptions in virtually every aspect of human life. With some notable exceptions, humanity has pulled together to vanquish this silent killer. It’s amazing how quickly both the private sector and public health experts have moved to confront this serious threat. For this, we can all be thankful.
But politics is politics and the controversies over government’s response to the crisis are legion and will continue long after the virus disappears. At the international level, China must be held accountable to the rest of the world for both its actions and omissions that led to the spread of the virus.
In the United States, debates swell over whether our response was too slow. Many of the same critics of President Trump’s handling of the crisis by underestimating the severity of the pandemic are the same people who criticized his barring of international flights into the country. In hindsight, both the administration as well as America’s health-care experts failed to respond in a timely manner.
When our political leaders reacted, they did so with a sledge hammer, essentially shutting down the economy with strict shelter-in-place orders. Whether this was an overreaction will only become clear in the future when we know more about this particular virus, but the government-imposed shutdown was based on the best information we had at the time.
Nonetheless, the nationwide shutdown has come with its own huge negative impacts on the economy and employment. And because it was government that ordered society and the economy to come to a screeching halt, it had the obligation to make individuals, businesses and institutions whole — or as close to whole as possible.
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