The Trump Administration Presents a False Choice Between Current COVID-19 Control Measures and 'No Intervention'

The COVID-19 projections presented at a White House briefing yesterday imagine two scenarios, one utterly fanciful and the other intolerably vague. With "no intervention," the main graph says, the United States could see 1.5 million to 2.2 million deaths from the disease. But "with intervention," it says, the number of COVID-19 deaths plummets to somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000.

The "no intervention" scenario is clearly counterfactual, since it ignores all the steps governments, businesses, and individuals already have taken to curtail the spread of COVID-19. The "intervention" scenario assumes continued social distancing of the sort currently recommended by the federal government and enforced by state and local governments. What's missing? Anything in between, which is the area that really matters for policy makers.

Governments right now are not deciding whether to do nothing or do something. Rather, they are confronting choices about which restrictions should be imposed, where they make sense, and how long they should be maintained. In this context, a simple binary choice between "intervention" and "no intervention" is highly misleading, since it obscures myriad options for confronting the epidemic, including measures more carefully tailored than mass business closures and stay-at-home orders. Sooner or later, those options will have to be weighed, taking into account not only the deaths they might prevent (or allow) but also their economic impact, which under the current approach is already severe and could get much worse.