7 Medical Leaders to Politicians: Save Lives, Not Wall Street

Message from our Dean at Penn; warns that we should not rush to end social distancing too soon, especially in intense outbreak areas; and for those concerned about economy, best way to ensure return to financial health is our ability to constrain the virus’ spread .

My own 2 cents: yes, it is clear that shutting down the entire world economy for 18 months is not feasible, and even not feasible for 6 months or ..., we are only 1-1.5 weeks into the social distancing people and nothing has changed! If we let it spread unconstrained we know what will happen! We don’t even see the effects yet in the data due to lag in disease development and testing effects — we need to keep flattening the curve and let it work so our hospitals don’t become overwhelmed — once we see the effects of our recent steps and see where this is going, and out health care system has a chance to ramp up to handle the coming surge and we see we can handle it, then we can reconsider but NOW IS NOT THE TIME to let down our guard. I am hopeful that the medical views will prevail, which I believe is also in line with the long term economic perspective, and let’s not let our guards down on an individual level as we see the incidence numbers rise around us.