As the Covid-19 pandemic has played out, lessons have begun to emerge about our society which, in blissful ignorance over the past seven decades, we have evolved in the interests of growth and efficiency in ways that are now proving to be dangerous – dangerous to our health, our economy and even civilization as we know it.
Globalism and Global Supply Chains:
Nothing became more readily apparent as the virus took hold than our inability to produce even the most basic medical supplies – masks, face shields, gowns, medicines and ventilators. Why couldn’t we just crank up the capacity at our factories? Because we don’t have any. Like everything else, we’ve made ourselves totally dependent on foreign sources for these items. Why couldn’t those foreign sources crank up their factories and just send us what we needed? Because they were in the same boat and needed them themselves. The whole world quickly found itself in the same boat. “Globalism” has provided the perfect mechanism for spreading local outbreaks across the world almost overnight and has rendered us nearly incapable of fighting them.
At the beginning of the outbreak in the U.S., we were critically short of N95 masks, a shortage that, while being addressed, threatens to persist. So just make more, right? Some companies are tooling up to do just that. But that’s the problem. It takes time to “tool up.” We haven’t been making any such masks in the U.S., so there’s no factory where we can just add more shifts or crank up the output. The manufacturing has to be tooled up from scratch.
How hard can it be to make simple masks? Start with the fabric. No fabric of any kind is made in the U.S. any more. It has to be engineered to screen out a minimum particle size. Now it has to be thermoformed into the shape of a mask. That takes special molding tooling. To make that tooling requires sophisticated machining equipment. We have that equipment, but almost all of it is foreign-sourced. So what happens when that equipment breaks down? Multiply that level of complexity a thousand-fold in order to produce ventilators which also aren’t made in this country (at least they weren’t until Ford, GE and GM began building factories recently to do it).
The same goes for test kits and pharmaceuticals, all of which until now have been foreign-sourced.
President Trump recently vented his frustration with this situation in one of his daily White House briefings. He vowed that while we can engage in trade with everyone, we can never again let ourselves be dependent on anyone. Others have made the same observation. Complex global supply chains that depend on pulling together materials from all over the world in order to keep society functioning is a recipe for a disaster.
It’s interesting how quickly those who, in the past have mocked others as “protectionists” and “isolationists,” have resorted to exactly those measures to stem the spread of this pandemic. Now, isolating ourselves is our only hope for saving hundreds of thousands of people and, while doing so, we’re put at risk by the globalism that they championed.
No Spare Capacity:
Global competition has fueled a relentless drive for efficiency, just-in-time delivery supply chains and cutting costs to the bone. That means squeezing every ounce from every capacity available, whether it’s labor capacity, factory capacity, and even the capacity of our health care system. Everything has been functioning with virtually no capacity to spare. Even in the best of times, the intensive care units and emergency rooms at our hospitals function at near-capacity. Most of you have visited hospitals before all this started. How many empty beds did you see as you walked down the halls? How many times did you pass a patient on a gurney in the hallway?
How many times have you gone to a store – any kind of store – and found that you were fortunate enough to get one of the few remaining items you’re looking for that are left on the shelf? Maybe there are none, and you’re told that more are arriving tomorrow. It’s because inventory management systems have cut to the bone the amount of inventory in the warehouse. We’ve even learned that the stockpiles of critical items maintained by FEMA and the CDC, while sufficient for smaller local or regional disasters, are woefully short of what would be needed for any kind of major disaster. (And isn’t it interesting how our definition of “major disaster” has just changed?)
That’s all great for minimizing costs, but now we can see just how risky that can be. People are paying for that kind of efficiency with their lives. There is a role for government to play in assuring that a certain minimum amount of spare capacity exists throughout our supply chains – supply chains that are not dependent on other nations – that can be readily tapped in the event of national disasters like pandemics, wars, etc.
The Risks of Dense Populations:
Consider where this virus originated and where it’s hit the hardest. It originated in a country with one fifth of the world’s population, a country so densely populated that it’s people, at least in some quarters, rely on live animal markets as a source of food. China is four times as densely populated as the U.S. Pause and think about that. Imagine if the U.S. had four times as many people. Imagine New York city with four times as many people. Or Chicago. Or any other city you can think of. Imagine our rural areas with four times as many people. They’d no longer be so rural.
Where has the virus hit hardest? Italy is almost twice as densely populated as China. So too is Germany and the U.K. Most of Europe is as densely populated as China. Major cities in the U.S. and around the world are hundreds of times more densely populated.
Even in the best of times, living in a densely populated area is a little risky. With a sky-high cost of living (especially housing), and with many (perhaps most?) people living paycheck-to-paycheck, you’re at constant risk of finding yourself homeless. The supply of basic necessities relies on complicated supply chains that are vulnerable to disruptions. In the worst of times – and what we’re enduring right now, while bad, is probably not even close to being “worst” – living in such densely populated conditions is downright dangerous. Diseases can spread like wildfire. Natural disasters or wars could cut off supply lines.
What’s the solution? Live in a less densely-populated society. How is that possible? Modern civilization requires both urban and rural areas. Cities are needed to pull together labor forces to manufacture goods and provide certain services, while rural areas are needed for farming, forestry, recreation, etc.
The way to achieve this is with fewer, smaller cities and more rural, wide-open space. Consider countries like Canada and Australia – each with the same size as the U.S. but with one tenth or less population density. Though each is dealing with coronavirus outbreaks, they’re no where near the scale of what the U.S. is facing. Why? Because they were already more isolated to start with.
On the other hand, think about India – a place so densely populated that it’s almost impossible for them to practice any kind of social distancing. Will they pay the price, or will the fact that India is a hot climate where the coronavirus, like the flu, can’t survive to any great extent spare them? No one knows. Only time will tell.
Then there’s cruise ships. Before any of this happened, we were already hearing constant stories of norovirus outbreaks that sickened passengers, cut cruises short and necessitated thorough cleaning of the ships. Now we’ve seen that, given a deadlier virus, those ships are death traps. And each is just a small-scale example of what can happen in a densely-packed society.
Secure Borders:
Together with the advocates of free trade and globalism, the open border advocates have also gone silent. Our failure to quickly shut down international travel exacerbated the spread of the virus in the U.S. How much worse could it have been had we not been able to shut down the borders at all? How much worse could it have gotten had we not already taken steps to secure our southern border? Now we can see the value in maintaining secure borders, and the need to further tighten down on illegal immigration.
Beyond these, there are many, many other lessons to be learned about preparedness for major disasters. One lesson that will only become clear as our economy begins to recover is that we’re going to pay for decades for the folly of allowing our economy to be siphoned away to drive growth in the rest of the world. Our dependence on deficit spending to offset the drain of the trade deficit had already become dangerous as our national debt swelled to an unsustainable level. We were already bailing as fast as we could to keep our leaky boat afloat. Now, the $2 trillion stimulus package, together with the $4 trillion in additional debt that the Federal Reserve is issuing, will blow the transom off the boat. It will prove impossible to keep the economy afloat while maintaining a trade deficit. It’s critical that we get serious about restoring a balance of trade, both to reinvigorate our manufacturing base and to stop the hemorrhaging of our national debt.
Economists have long boasted that “mankind is clever enough to overcome all obstacles to further growth.” At the same time, survivalists have built bomb shelters, amassed stockpiles of food, ammunition, batteries and other gear, and have practiced survival skills. Suddenly, the latter group looks a little less wacky and the economists seem a bit humbled. Mankind is not clever enough to overcome all obstacles to growth because, in a finite world, it’s impossible for so many reasons that they can’t even be listed. Try as we might to keep growing the population, nature will find a way to restore balance in ways that we can’t even imagine, and likely with consequences too horrible to contemplate.
We’d better learn these lessons, because next time it could be much worse. Though this virus is very contagious and much deadlier than the flu, it’s not as deadly as it could be. In 1918, the Spanish flu killed approximately 50 million people at a time when the world’s population was just 3 billion. In 2003, the SARS virus killed 10% of the people it infected. Luckily, SARS was only contagious when it when symptoms became obvious, making it easy to identify and isolate those infected, which limited the number of cases to just over 8,000 world wide. Then there’s ebola, a virus that kills half of everyone it infects. Imagine if a virus emerged that was that lethal and was just as contagious as the novel coronavirus. It could wipe out three billion people or more and threaten the very survival of mankind. It might be a hundred years from now. It might be tomorrow. But fail to learn these lessons from this virus, and that’s what’s going to happen.
Posted by Pete Murphy 
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