Avoiding a Corona Virus Post-Apex Crisis

To the Honorable Governors: Cuomo, Murphy, Whitmer, Newsom, Edwards, Baker, DeSantis, Wolf, Pritzker, Inslee

Dear Governors:

As the Governors of the top ten states by number of confirmed Corona virus cases (as of 4/4/20), you are arduously working to manage the growing demands being made on your states’ personnel and resources. Simultaneously, I’m sure you are struggling to balance the critical pressures to contain the virus’ spread with sustaining the economic base of your states. While the virus is the most immediate problem because it threatens not only the public but also was and is a direct threat to your economy itself.

With the immediacy of containment, you enacted “Stay At Home” policies and are planning for your respective Apexes. Once having achieved a successful containment (as defined by a decline in new corona cases) your states will enter into the post-Apex period which will allow for relaxing the Stay At Home policy and engage your administrations in restarting your state’s suppressed economies. As you struggle to balance these competing forces and chart a course forward there is an urgent need to have the Post-Apex plans laid out and more importantly have actions and tasks required by those plans not just identified but in many cases enacted or engaging in implementation of what needs to be available for restarting public and private activities.

I would assume that each state has a Post-Apex planning team/task-force that is working to put that plan together and is engaged in implementing the tasks needed now to be ready for getting everyone back to work to recover the economy. If you don’t have a team focused on this dimension of the current crisis then it is imperative to address this need immediately. Consider the following facets of a Post-Apex social and economic environment that you need to have accounted for:

· How soon after the Apex or how low does the contagion rate have to be to ‘restart’?

· What are the requirements and criteria for a given business area to re-open?

· What equipment, resources, procedures and policies are needed for businesses to operate?

· What are the measurements and data needed to determine if the Post-Apex period is maintaining an ‘acceptable’ level of Corona virus cases?

· What tools are needed to respond to Post-Apex cases?

These are just some of the questions that need to be prepared and these are broad and high-level questions. To address any one of them, the task-force will need to go much deeper and consider many special cases and different situations and variable. The answer will likely be different for each state but will have a commonality of scope. There may be some benefit to coordinating and sharing plans so that concepts and ideas that are identified by one task-force are not overlooked by another.

There are consequences to not having a Post-Apex plan, just as there was to not having earlier plans for confronting the onset of the Corona Virus pandemic.

I hope this has been of some value to you.