Businesses in New York City reopened yesterday. Our side of the Hudson is coming back to life, too. There was a party on the block this weekend, and I don’t think anybody really minded. A few countries have managed to knock out the virus altogether, at least for now: New Zealand, for instance, announced a temporary eradication. Some European cities that were bracing for a June spike have found that the second wave hasn’t materialized. Some lockdowns have been lifted, others have just been allowed to lapse. People are back out on the street in Jersey City, and New Jersey in general, some masked, some unmasked, many absolutely determined to have a summer as long as the pathogen cooperates.
Elsewhere, the picture isn’t as pretty. The Johns Hopkins tracker reveals that America has flattened its logarithmic curve, which means that the virus isn’t spreading exponentially anymore. But new cases, new hospitalizations, and new deaths keep right on happening. Attention has turned to the protest movement, and the coronavirus has become something of an afterthought, even as the American case count reaches the two million mark. We might be forgiven for taking our eyes off the ball: it’s been a grueling three months, and if the epidemiological models are accurate, we may face another tough period ahead once the summer is over. Nevertheless, it’s more than a little dispiriting to see American officials behave as if the mission has been accomplished.
It has not. In New York and New Jersey, the caseloads continue to decline, but they’re hovering quite a bit above zero; the plane hasn’t touched ground yet, and we all feel the lurch of every sudden updraft. Elsewhere in America, the picture isn’t too pretty. The rolling five day case average in Texas reached a new peak last week. After a May plateau, numbers are climbing in Florida again, and Florida has consistently underreported and obfuscated, so it’s a safe bet that conditions are worse than the government admits they are. North Carolina, which never completely closed, is reporting three times the number of coronavirus cases as it did in mid-April. I don’t even have the stomach to look at the Arizona graph. My hope is that none of these places will have to suffer the extreme hardship that we did: we’ve got a better transmission model in place now, and viruses don’t like June weather. But it helps nobody to pretend that the crisis is over and it’s time to move on to juicier stories.
We don’t know yet whether the protests will drive a surge in cases. I believe those of you who’ve argued that activists have taken prophylaxis more seriously than the government did, and those who’ve distributed sanitizer and face masks at the rallies are definitely doing the Lord’s work. Most of the protesters have been young and healthy, and even as they’ve chanted in unison, and many of them have respected distancing suggestions. Nevertheless, given what we know about asymptomatic spread, it’s virtually certain that some transmission is happening at the street actions — especially when authorities have become confrontational and tipped the marches into chaos. The action in Jersey City drew a huge crowd to City Hall this weekend: people came to say things that they were absolutely driven to say, even in the face of lethal peril.
My sense is that some of my neighbors will call that an irresponsible thing to do, and I certainly understand why. But the plan was never to stay inside forever. We were trying to buy ourselves some time to figure a few things out, break old habits and learn some new ones, and apply what we’d learned to any subsequent re-engagement with public culture. That work is incomplete at best. But we’re not Taiwan, and we’re not New Zealand. In America, we get by on a little bit of information, a little bit of prayer, and a whole hell of lot of unstoppable forward momentum.