Column: Are we doing the right thing about COVID-19?

For a moment, let’s consider not collapsing the global economy, bankrupting thousands of small businesses, throwing millions into the unemployment lines and instead quarantine the people who are at risk of serious complications including death while everyone else keeps working. 

Italy has been devastated with COVID-19. That’s possibly the result of culture and a large aged population. In two thirds of the cases resulting in death there those dying were of an age above the normal life expectancy of people in the U.S. 99% of those that died had another illness. 

In my own experience, life over age ninety in failing health is not a happy place to be, and as of now, the U.S. has not figured out a graceful way for our elders to exit life on their own terms. 

If a vast majority of people are at little risk of death, why are we haphazardly following a course of action that far exceeds the calamity of 9/11, the 20 years of wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan?  

With leadership at the national level we could be tested and either isolated or allowed to return to work. That kind of program may prove far less disastrous and allow many more people available to see to the needs of the sick. 

Once China clamped down effectively on its population, a week later, the rate of new coronavirus infections started declining. Now we have no consistency from state to state, we have a terrible storm coming without a competent helmsman.