The Wall Street Journal - 14.03.2020 - 15.03.2020

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OPINION

‘Don’t Panic’ Is a Rotten Response

could wind up infected. The president gave a ma- jor Oval Office address Wednesday night aimed at quelling fears; it was generally labeled “unset- tling.” Immediately after, Tom Hanks announced that he and wife Rita Wil- son have tested positive, and the National Basket- ball Association sus- pended its season after a player tested positive. Health professionals and scientists have been on TV explaining what they know, and they’ve been impressive—crisply professional, helpful in conveying the contour of things. This week I spoke to a physician with a small practice on Long Is- land who’s dealing with problems on the ground. He spoke of his biggest immediate challenge: Local health authorities are offering little practical information on how to handle patients or receive per- sonal protective equipment—masks, gowns and gloves. “Regular doctors in a regular practice don’t have big num- bers of these things,” he said. “The hospital sent out an email saying, ‘Go here if you’re having equipment trouble.’ So I did. And within an hour they said, ‘We can’t help you.’ ” “At this point we get an email every few days, and what they’re doing is planning a seminar on Covid-19, which is no practical help.” Doctors are already read in on the disease, they know what viruses are, they keep track of what’s happening in the larger sphere. His biggest worry is that local hospitals aren’t ready—and aren’t ready- ing—for a surge in patients. When he looks at the projections, he fears “health facility inundation and fa- tigue.” He worries that “routine life-

threatening illnesses will not be treated adequately.” He means heart attacks, strokes, infections; he fears such patients won’t receive timely treatment “in overstressed systems.” The great danger to the elderly and immune-compromised is viral pneu- monia. “They will need mechanical help, ventilators and ECMO ma- chines”—oxygen pumps. “This sys- tem probably doesn’t have enough. Who is thinking about this?” Hospitals need to “prepare to be inundated,” he says. “When I talk to doctors and administrators, they’re only thinking within their own walls and own offices. They’re not imagin- ing being overrun.” After we spoke, something came to mind I’d written months after 9/11. Everyone was asking how we could have missed the signs. I remembered the words of astronaut Frank Borman when he was asked in 1967 why NASA had not been prepared for the cata- strophic launchpad fire that killed three astronauts. It was “a failure of imagination,” he said. No one imag-

ined such a thing could happen on the ground. That’s where I think we have been the past few weeks in this epidemic, a failure of imagination. Scientists and doctors say the next few weeks are crucial, that the virus’s spread must be slowed. We have to slow it. We have to be health hawks. Bite the bullet, close the schools a few weeks, and see where we are. Cancel celebrations. Marry, but have the wedding party later. Make the birthday bash twice as good next year. Put everything on pause. The need for social distancing may at this point make the difference between a hard time and hell. Work from home if you have a job that allows you to. Get money to people who are now working sick. This is an emergency, that’s your job if you’re in Washing- ton, make it work. Get. The. Tests. The most obvious advice in the world is still the most helpful. Don’t “wash your hands”; wash your hands like Lady Macbeth with obsessive- compulsive disorder. Wash your face. Carry hand sanitizers and use them after every interaction. Wear protective gloves—don’t be embarrassed. If you can’t get gloves, don’t touch key- pads and screens at the bank or store without covering your finger with tis- sue. Try to cough or sneeze into two or three tissues. If you don’t have them, do it in the crook of your arm, as they say, but stop patting the other person’s coat sleeves affection- ately when you don’t shake hands. That’s where their germs are. Sometimes paranoia is just good sense. Is all this an overreaction? If it is,

we’ll recover. If we’re too cautious we’ll realize after a while and we’ll all get angry at the economic cost of it and have big arguments and fights. But we’ll behereto argue and fight. I wrote in February that I believed the coronavirus will be bad, that it will have a bigger impact on America than we imagine, and that a lot of people will be exposed and a signifi- cant number endangered. I was beaten up a bit and fair enough—to make a prophecy is to summon ani- mosity, especially when men are scared and especially when they see everything as political. My assertions were based on a long reading of history and a close reading of what had happened in China, then Italy. Now it’s time to lose the two most famous phrases of the moment. One is “Don’t panic!” The other is “an abundance of caution.” “Don’t panic” is what nervous, de- fensive people say when someone warns of coming trouble. They don’t want to hear it, so their message is “Don’t worry like a coward, be blithely unconcerned like a brave person.” One way or another we’ve heard it a lot from administration people. This is how I’ve experienced it: “Captain, that appears to be an iceberg.” “Don’t panic, officer, full steam ahead.” “Admiral, concentrating our entire fleet in one port seems tempting fate.” “We don’t need your alarmist fantasies, ensign.” “We’re picking up increased chat- ter about an al Qaeda action.” “Your hand-wringing is duly noted.” “Don’t panic,” in the current atmo- sphere, is a way of shutting up people who are using their imaginations as a protective tool. It’s an implication of cowardice by cowards. As for “abundance of caution,” at this point, in a world-wide crisis, the cautions we must take aren’t abun- dant, they’re reasonable and realistic. Reason and realism are good.

DAVID GOTHARD

T

his coronavirus is new to
our species—it is “novel.” It
spreads more easily than
the flu—“exponentially,” as
we now say—and is esti-
mated to be at least 10 times as lethal.
Testing in the U.S. has been wholly
inadequate; history may come to see
this as the great scandal of the epi-
demic. “Anybody that needs a test
gets a test; they’re there, they have
the tests, and the tests are beautiful,”
as the president said last weekend, is
on a par with “If you like your doctor
you can keep your doctor” as a great,
clueless lie.

Because of the general lack of test-
ing we don’t have a firm sense of the
number of the infected and the speed
and geography of spread. Many peo-
ple would be working sick, afraid of
losing pay or job security if they take
time off. Some would be at home, un-
able for financial or other reasons to
see a doctor or go to a hospital.
In the past few days the World
Health Organization declared a pan-
demic. The physician used by Con-
gress reportedly said behind closed
doors that 70 million to 150 million
Americans will be infected. The Har-
vard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch es-
timated 20% to 60% of adults world-
wide might catch the disease. Cases
are rising in Spain, France and Ger-
many, where Prime Minister Angela
Merkel warned that 70% of the nation

A grave crisis calls for

reason and realism, not

‘an abundance of caution.’

DECLARATIONS By Peggy Noonan

Covid-19 Can’t Spread if You Stay Home

If a modeling study by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Washington state is right, Seattle two weeks ago was approximately in the position of Wuhan, China, on Jan. 1. The big difference, as the Fred Hutch guys also note, is that Seattle’s people have been saturated in warnings that Wuhan’s population only started receiving two months into the epidemic. Stay home, avoid crowds, wash your hands religiously. A few days ago Italians seemed not to be heed- ing the advice. Now they are. Caitlin Rivers, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted this week that “event closures have an important role, but individual behavior changes are even more important.” If this column has been telling you anything since January, it’s that the coronavirus was coming and pro- tecting yourself is the best way to protect the country. During the 2003 SARS panic in Hong Kong, routine cold and flu di- agnoses declined sharply—influenza was down 88%—thanks partly to people practicing safer hygiene. Or take Japan right now: A harsh flu season appears to have abruptly re- versed itself since Japanese citizens began adopting coronavirus precau- tions. Flu visits to doctors are down 60% in relation to past years. Though it’s still early, Japan has lost 19 people to the coronavirus—and 3,300 last year to the flu. To state the obvious, measures that stop transmission of the flu also prevent transmission of coronavirus. The U.S. did a bad job of being ready for Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, the Chinese entry into the Ko- rean War, al Qaeda, Katrina, the

2009 H1N1 flu outbreak. While the press expects government to be far- seeing and efficient, it never is. The stumbles over testing are especially demoralizing but the effect can be overstated. Flu tests are only 50% to 70% accurate: In the early days, we might have sorted through thousands of unrecognized flu cases without detecting a single coronavirus case. Now that the virus is established, testing is crucial so people know whether they are carrying the new virus or the common cold. The mar- kets will be able to price in the real- ity rather than their worst fears.

Thousands of Americans will dis- cover they have the disease without debilitating effect. But nobody needs to be tested to know staying home if possible is a good idea right now even if you aren’t old or otherwise in a vulnerable category. Remember, the stock market is telling us nothing about the coronavirus death rate. It’s telling us about corporate earnings in a context where curtailing economic activity is how we fight the virus. Unfortu- nately, a recession is part of the cure for an epidemic of communicable disease. To repeat, the market meltdown is a function of how we are choosing to fight the virus—in ways that dis- rupt industry after industry, from airlines to restaurants, theme parks, hotels and sports leagues. The World Health Organization has used the word “contain” from the start, but the meaning has

evolved. Increasingly the goal has been slowing the disease’s progress to spread out the impact on health- care providers of those patients who react badly to the virus. When Angela Merkel or your fa- vorite Twitter virologist says 70% of humanity will have it eventually, they mean the virus will take its place among common respiratory infections. With the best of intentions, Dr. Anthony Fauci has linked his name to fatality rates equal to the flu’s or 10 times the flu (which would be about 1%). But notice that South Korea, one of the hard-hit countries, reports 0.6%. When it comes to such degrees of precision, you probably would want to tune out if you knew just how fuzzy the un- derlying flu extrapolations are. For another day let’s save the question of whether the best way to protect those who most need pro- tecting is to cancel televised NBA games. The virus will be a wild card in the presidential race. If New York City (with 12 times as many people as Seattle and they can’t all telecom- mute) shuts down, it’s a different ballgame. But also true: When the federal government finally gears up, it tends to smother problems in money. Refa- miliarize yourself with the acronym MMT, for modern monetary theory. This is the idea, popular with econo- mists on the left, that the U.S. lends itself right now to government print- ing and spending large amounts of money without inflation. MMT is how Democrats like Eliza- beth Warren and Bernie Sanders re- ally expected to pay for Medicare for All. Whatever their differences, Pres- ident Trump and his eventual Demo- cratic rival will be of one mind on spending unlimited sums to cover Americans’ health-care bills, make up for lost income, prop up small businesses, etc.

Unfortunately, a recession is part of the cure for an epidemic of communicable disease.

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Putin Can’t Afford to Leave Office When His Term Ends

V

ladimir Putin is prepared to
run for a fifth term as Russian
president. “What’s the point of
being subtle?” asked close Putin ally
and parliamentary deputy Valentina
Tereshkova, the first woman in space,
in proposing to abolish term limits.
“This is about us and the future of
the country.”
But Mr. Putin left himself with lit-
tle alternative. If he wants to protect
his cronies and avoid a grim histori-
cal reckoning, he cannot surrender
power.

According to Karen Dawisha, au-
thor of “Putin’s Kleptocracy,” 110 in-
dividuals control 35% of Russia’s as-
sets, one of the highest levels of
wealth inequality in the world. Many
of Russia’s billionaires worked with
Mr. Putin in the St. Petersburg city
government, practiced judo with him,
were members with him in the Ozero
dacha cooperative, or served with
him in the KGB. With no visible previ-
ous experience, they began amassing
riches after Mr. Putin became presi-
dent in 2000 and promised support
to those guided by “government in-
terests.”
What this meant quickly became
clear. Gazprom, the Russian natural-
gas monopoly, was put under the
control of Dmitry Medvedev and
Alexei Miller, Putin colleagues from
St. Petersburg. Under their leader-
ship, the transfer of skimmed profits
to company insiders cost Gazprom at
least $60 billion, according to a re-
port by Boris Nemtsov, a former dep-
uty prime minister who was assassi-
nated in February 2015 and Vladimir
Milov, a former deputy energy minis-
ter. At the same time, 6.4% of Gaz-
prom’s shares, with an estimated

value of $20 billion, disappeared from the company’s books. Another Putin friend, Leonid Rei- man, the minister of telecommunica- tions, was found by a Zurich tribunal in 2007 to have used his position as chairman of the state-run telecommu- nications holding company to acquire assets worth $6 billion. Brothers Bo- ris and Arkady Rotenberg were Mr. Putin’s judo partners as teenagers. They received approximately $7 billion in contracts to build infrastruc- ture for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. At the same time, the Putin leadership ravaged private industry. The first round of privatization in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin was won by Soviet-era managers, criminals and former party officials. The second round involved finding flaws in the first round so that an asset could be returned for redistribution by the state. When Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the Yukos oil company, showed political independence, he was accused of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to a long labor-camp term. Yukos was dismembered and sold off cheaply to Mr. Putin’s cronies. In the third stage, local officials, in- spired by what happened to Mr. Khodorkovsky, began seizing property all over the country. Typically, a busi- nessman would be charged with a crime at the behest of competitors who used money and connections to suborn law enforcement. The business- man then was held in pretrial deten- tion until he was ready to accept a be- low-market offer for his property. Ownership became highly monop- olized, stifling competition and guar- anteeing huge profits for those with connections. Mr. Putin was the ulti- mate arbiter of disputes, and his de- parture from office would set off a struggle for power throughout a pyr- amid of lawlessly acquired wealth. He would also be personally vulnerable. At the time he became president, Mr. Putin was the subject of two active criminal investigations in connection with his work as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. One case involved the barter of raw materials in

1992 for badly needed food supplies, which never arrived. The other con- cerned the use of city funds to build private residences in Spain. In August 2000, four months after his election, both cases were quietly dropped. At the same time, there is consider- able evidence that Mr. Putin himself profited from corruption. In 2007 Rus- sian political analyst Stanislav Belk- ovsky told the German newspaper Die Welt that Mr. Putin’s secret assets were worth $40 billion and that the president was in effect the beneficial owner of 75% of Gunvor, a private trading company responsible for a large share of the export of Russian oil. Mr. Putin and Gunvor denied the claim three months later. But Mr. Belk- ovsky’s estimates tracked closely with those of Western intelligence. More serious than his vulnerabil- ity for economic crimes, however, is the possibility that, if he is no longer president, Mr. Putin will be held responsible for political crimes, includ-

ing assassinations and acts of terror. His decades in power have been marked by numerous crimes, includ- ing the 1999 apartment bombings that brought him to power, the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London, the assassination of Nemtsov, and the shooting down in 2014 of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Eastern Ukraine. In every case, there is evidence that the crimes were ordered by Mr. Putin but in each instance, the regime organized massive disinformation campaigns to confuse world opinion and intimidate those trying to estab- lish the truth. In the Litvinenko murder case, however, an independent British in- quiry, taking advantage of Western investigative resources, concluded that Litvinenko was murdered at the direction of the KGB’s successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the killing was “probably” approved by Mr. Putin. On Monday

the trial of four defendants impli- cated in the shooting down of MH opened in The Netherlands. The court heard testimony Tuesday indicating that the crew of the Buk antiaircraft battery that shot down MH17 was Russian and that the operation was carried out in the presence of agents of the FSB. If Mr. Putin were to lose power, new leadership could reveal vast amounts of information about the crimes of the past two decades, with devastating consequences for him and all who supported him. Ms. Tereshkova said that allowing Mr. Putin to run again will have a sta- bilizing effect on Russian society. She is right in one sense. It will certainly prolong the present stagnation. The only question is for how long.

Mr. Satter is author, most recently of, “Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing From Russia and the Soviet Union.”

By David Satter

Surrendering power would

endanger his cronies and

subject him to a grim

historical reckoning.

The Wall Street Journal - 14.03.2020 - 15.03.2020

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