The Next Pandemic. Betsy McCaughey

      AMERICA IS SUFFERING through two public health crises, one caused by a viral pandemic from halfway around the globe, and the other we’ve brutally slammed on ourselves.

      “Suffering” understates each of these crises. Coronavirus is a vicious disease. Most of us have never before witnessed scenes like the corpses piled up behind hospitals in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic. The virus’s victims, mostly elderly, drown when their lungs fill up with fluid. They die alone, because even their families are barred from visiting their bedside. Their bodies are deposited in bags and forklifted into refrigerator trucks.

      Each death is a tragedy, and tens of thousands have already died that way, with more to come.

      But the second public health crisis – the shutdown – is almost certain to kill even more Americans. And their deaths will be gruesome, too. Deaths of despair. Leaving behind families who are emotionally broken and destitute.

      The shutdown is almost certain to kill even more Americans than Coronavirus. And they will be gruesome deaths, too. Deaths of despair.

      Tens of millions of workers have been laid off because of the government-imposed shutdown. Before the virus hit, America’s unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, the lowest in fifty years. Now Goldman Sachs predicts unemployment will be at 15 percent by midyear. A St. Louis Federal Reserve economist grimly predicts 32 percent unemployment – which is worse than during the Great Depression.

      No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1 percent hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3 percent increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99 percent increase in suicides, according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on past experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32 percent, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs.

      Then add the predictable deaths from alcohol abuse caused by unemployment. Ioana Popovici of Nova Southeastern University and Michael French of the University of Miami found a “significant association between job loss … and binge drinking … and alcohol abuse.”

      The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing, and drinking. Overall, the death rate for an unemployed person is 63 percent higher than for someone with a job, according to findings in Social Science & Medicine.

      Not to mention the tragedies of people who spent decades building a small business, only to see it destroyed in weeks because of the shutdown.

      Shutdown-related deaths are likely to far outnumber deaths due to coronavirus.

      This comparison is not meant to understate the horror of the coronavirus for those who get it and their families. Or to second-guess public officials, who have acted with the best of intentions.

      But America should never have to endure another shutdown. The shutdown wasn’t caused by the virus. It was a frantic response to America’s unpreparedness. The nation’s Strategic National Stockpile of medical equipment was nearly empty. Our medical supply chain put us at the mercy of China for masks, antibiotics, and medical supplies. Hospitals were unprepared to stop the spread of infectious diseases. Nursing homes with minimal infection control were destined to become death pits once the virus hit.

      The shutdown was originally justified as a way to “flatten the curve,” allowing time to expand our health care capacity, so that lives would not be needlessly lost in an overwhelmed, undersupplied system.

      The time was well used. Through herculean efforts by governors, the White House, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Defense Department, and private-sector companies all across the United States, hospitals in hot zones like New York City got the ventilators they needed and field hospitals took in the patient overflow.

      But that begs the question, why was America so unprepared?

      Washington politicians can hardly wait to appoint a commission, launch hearings – preferably televised, of course – and piously demand answers to that question. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris already have introduced a bill to set up the investigation, claiming the “federal government was unprepared.”

      They’d like to pin the blame on Donald Trump, but these politicians need to look in the mirror. Nearly every single year for the last two decades, commissions and committees have warned Congress that the medical stockpile was inadequate, our dependence on China was fraught with danger, and our health departments were unready for a pandemic. The Congressional Research Service, the US Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and many others sounded the alarm again and again.

      Their findings were ignored, their reports gathered dust, and the very members