Corona conundrum: Finding elusive balance between saving lives and jobs

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If you want to look at the bright side:

Anthony Fauci tells “Today” that “it’s in the realm of possibility” there could be a coronavirus vaccine by early next year, based on a new government initiative.

If you want to look at the dark side:

More than 30 million Americans have filed jobless claims in the last six weeks, based on figures released yesterday, their jobs wiped out by the shuttered economy.

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If you want to look at the bright side:

Jared Kushner tells “Fox & Friends” that “the federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story.”

If you want to look at the dark side:

More than 62,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, and there are now more than a million cases in our country, despite the president’s early insistence that it could vanish by April.

Kushner, who is in charge of getting medical equipment to the states, was talking about progress in flattening the curve, but got hammered for being tone-deaf.

And while the number of deaths is stunning and absolutely heartbreaking, it’s obviously better than the model the White House cited in early April, showing the potential for 100,000 to 240,000 deaths.

That’s the thing about this utterly frustrating pandemic. If you say something a bit optimistic, you get hammered for being insensitive to the human carnage. If you say something a bit pessimistic, you get denounced for ignoring the gains we’ve made by locking down most of the country.

The same is true in the economic realm. If you say we need to start reopening the economy and getting people back to work, you get accused of indifference to the fact that more people will die. If you say we have to keep social distancing rules for now to save lives, you get lambasted as unconcerned that millions of people are being pushed into poverty (which would also harm their health).

And you will not be surprised to hear that these attitudes are often colored by partisanship. Supporters of President Trump tend to believe, with him, that we’re making great progress and it’s time to put America back to work. Trump’s detractors tend to believe that he’s bungled the crisis and is risking too many lives with his push to jump-start the economy (except when he chastised Georgia’s Republican governor for moving too fast).

As someone who doesn’t take partisan sides, I’m willing to believe that Trump and Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence and Joe Biden, governors and mayors who are Republican and Democratic, want to both save lives and protect our livelihoods. I may disagree with particular decisions or comments, but I give them the benefit of the doubt.

Politico’s John Harris grapples with this when he writes that “I am willing to accept that some people must die in order to accommodate the return to whatever the post-pandemic version of normal is.” And that’s true in many realms: We don’t shut down airlines, carmakers or factories even though we know all carry a certain degree of risk for passengers, drivers and workers. We simply try to get that risk as low as is practical in a civilized society.

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Since leaders don’t know “specifically who will die of coronavirus makes their choice of how fast to open less excruciating but no less profound in its moral implications,” Harris writes.

He says conservatives have long accused liberals of moral relativism, but that the pandemic has cast this charge in a whole new light. We should all admit that “averting some number of tragic deaths from coronavirus is in tension with the need for a much larger number of people to resume life—sometime after it is no longer reckless to do so but sometime before it is perfectly safe.”

That seems reasonable, whether you’re on the bright side or the dark side. It’s also not the way our politics works.

And I write this from home, trying, like everyone who has the opportunity, to balance personal safety with the need and desire to keep working.