New Social-Divide: Stay-At-Home vs ReOpen-"X"

To: America,

In times of crisis, stress, or fear in a society, it is common to see different groups forming around their perspectives and interests associated with the conditions. The Corona virus pandemic is perhaps the clearest and most definitive instance of this phenomena in over a decade. As the nation reaches a brief period where the nation’s governors have imposed fairly strict isolation and containment measures In their respective states, the inevitable cracks formed and the divides have begun.

These divides were and are partly a forgone conclusion. The Corona virus may be the same biological threat to every state and every individual; but it does not stop at being a biological threat because of your opinion, ideology, political party, or economic circumstance. Yet, somehow these social dimensions have, in yet another case, become a debate about something that distorts or ignores the facts about the biological threat because it’s inconvenient and perhaps beyond the ken of a wide swath of a nation’s citizens.

So, predictably different threats have emerged during the national efforts to confront and manage the biological threat. There is of course the political threat where the pandemic is being used to criticize and blame the opposition for everything that’s upsetting or problematic, but more importantly to avoid any responsibility or accountability on one’s own part. Once the politicians get involved in “leading” their constituents and supporters the multitude of differences spread and mutate almost as pervasively as the virus. The virus may not know or care about this diverse set of societal, economic, political, governmental, or other dimensions in America or for that matter the world. For politicians however this is an opportunity to demonstrate leadership, competency, intelligence, and judgement; or of course to fail in one or all those areas.

This makes the Corona Virus a form of Leadership Testing. Like the SAT that high-school students take. The Corona Virus (CV) test will cover many areas of executive leadership and competencies. Unlike the SAT, the CV test will not determine if a political leader get to be a leader. Those who pass the test will have saved lives, restored economies and protected our society. Those who fail will cause more deaths, burden economies, and damage our society. Some of those taking the CV test will do better on some areas and worse on others; and some will spend more time seeking to avoid accountability and blame others. This of course begs the question of how does one grade any given leader that is taking this test whether they realize it or not?

Grading a leaders’ CV test is both easy and difficult because it would be based on produced results. That of course means that you must have the data that demonstrates those results. For the CV test, this partly come from some basic information: infection level, infection rates, deaths, duration of epidemic, and ability to meet or beat projections from the leader’s control/mitigation plans. This should be data that is being collected and thus available, so that an easy aspect of the test. But of course, ‘should be’ is not the same as ‘is’ which can begin to add the ‘difficult’ part of the assessment. An exceptionally good example of data that would be a CV test instances are the forecasts/projections that leaders are basing their decisions and plan on. Since forecasts are not being presented, this makes them difficult to use but also the failure to provide them is a test, though a failure grade goes with not providing them.

On another front there are the economic facets of a leader’s efforts. These may be harder to both obtain and even harder to interpret. Regardless, they can be used to assess how well a leader is doing if only those leaders present the basis of how their decisions and actions are to produce particular results along this economic dimension. For example, in issuing Reopening guidelines, rules or directions a governor or president should indicate not just what they ‘hope’ will happen but how they will measure whether their acts produced the outcomes they were seeking. At this point it should be clear what is important and critical to assessing the successes or failures of a leader. You have to have both the clarity of a plan and its goals (projections) and to go with those plans the collection and dissemination of the data/results that can be used to measure success or failure. If you rely upon the interpretation of success or failure to be determine by and stated by the leaders themselves than you are betraying yourself, your family, your state, and your nation.

For the Corona Virus epidemic, are you getting the information you need to determine whether your leaders are accomplishing what you expect, what they claim, and what is validated by empirical data? If you are not, then how is the ‘confidence’ that is required to restore the nation’s economy to be attained? If you just accept what your leaders say, I think you are letting the nation down and the consequences that follow are more your failure than that of your leaders.