Questions about when to reopen the economy are being raised as the Small Business Administration announced Thursday it has run out of money to fund a popular emergency loan program.
Senate Republicans warn a longer economic shutdown would do more harm to the country than COVID-19 itself. But Democrats, like Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, say it would be even more harmful to restart the economy only to shut it down again if the potentially deadly COVID-19 coronavirus re-emerges for lack of social distancing.
“So much depends on whether we have the infrastructure to test,” Bennet said during a telephone town hall Thursday.
Mark Learned, vice president of primary care and urgent care at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, agreed that without the adequate testing and monitoring infrastructure, reopening the economy is dangerous.
But the U.S. Senate has yet to reach an agreement about how to increase funding for the small-business loan program, and unemployment numbers are soaring. According to the Department of Labor, 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the past four weeks, the biggest rise in unemployment in the nation’s history.
Republicans and the White House want to simply refill the funding, while Democrats advocate for new restrictions to ensure that money goes to minority-owned businesses and people who are self-employed. They also want to add more funding for hospitals, food-stamp recipients, and state and local governments struggling with lower revenues.
“I don’t envy lawmakers having to walk the line between public health and economic health,” Learned said. Waiting for a vaccine to be widely available would take too long, so the question is how to negotiate a partial opening to avoid a second peak.
Even if individual counties have low case numbers and establish solid testing infrastructure, people will flock to places that are open and where there is work, bringing a resurgence of the virus with them, Bennet said.
“We need to be guided by science,” Bennet said.
Both Bennet and Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., are working with the president to fill that gap.
“We are going to be guided by the public health experts that have gotten us to avoid the surge that we were afraid of in the early models, and so we’ll continue to work with them,” Gardner said Thursday on Fox News. “But testing absolutely is key here.”
The American medical device company Abbott Laboratories is developing a new COVID-19 test for mass screening, and Gardner is pushing the Food and Drug Administration to authorize emergency use to get the new technology out quickly.
“I would like to see testing so ubiquitous going forward that you can go buy your Big Gulp at 7-Eleven and you can get your COVID-19 test at the same time,” Gardner said.
President Donald Trump announced Thursday new guidelines for states pushing to reopen the economy, but ultimately the decision lies with state governors and local leaders.
Earlier this week, Gov. Jared Polis acknowledged keeping the current stay-at-home order in place is not sustainable long term and promoted a gradual approach to reopening the economy and lifting social-distancing measures. But people will travel, and working with officials in bordering states to limit the spread of COVID-19 is another key part of reopening the economy, he said.
Polis said Colorado is experiencing a plateau in the number of cases, but health experts say maintaining stay-at-home measures for at least two weeks after the curve begins to drop is paramount.
Little is known about COVID-19, and it will take more data to understand how the virus works.
“You have to have the virus for a while to test positive, but we don’t know the window yet because we don’t have the resources to study it,” Learned said. “You can test positive for one month after contracting the virus, too.”
Public health officials and major laboratories say they are also already working on antibody testing, but many of these tests are flawed.
In light of all the uncertainty, the economy can’t rebound after it opens until people feel confident leaving their homes and frequenting businesses again.
Greg Stasinos, response and operations chief at the Colorado Office of Emergency Preparedness and Response, said new protocols will need to be developed for different industries to make that happen.
Until then, “we need to keep social distancing up as long as possible in order to return to some level of normalcy,” Stasinos said.
Emily Hayes is a graduate student at American University in Washington, D.C., and an intern for The Durango Herald.