The Giants have been a bad baseball team for three years running, and the only reason they’re not a bad baseball team right now is that they’re not playing baseball (It turns out, it is not nice that the Giants aren’t bad this year. Really should have been more specific with the name of this newsletter).
It’s tempting to point to The Thing that will fix them immediately. “Sign this guy right now,” (Bryce Harper before the 2019 season) or “Trade that guy who’s stinking it up,” (always Brandon Belt, regardless of whether he is stinking it up) or a combination of them. These are never practical plans — other actors besides the Giants are also looking to act rationally! — but that’s beside the point, which is that people want so, so badly to believe that there’s a way for things to get better starting tomorrow and the so-called experts in charge don’t realize it.
The experts have plenty of reasons to not implement those obvious solutions. The player the fan wants to sign isn’t as good as the fan thinks, or has skills that are likely to degrade quickly, or wants too much money, or doesn’t want to play here. The guy who the fan wants traded is better than the fan thinks, or they’re hoping he rebounds so he has a little trade value, or the team doesn’t have any better options so trading him would be counterproductive. Even if the experts aren’t fixing things right now, that doesn’t mean they’re doing a bad job. Real solutions take time.
(It also doesn’t mean they’re doing a good job. Your team may very well be employing Jack Zduriencik or Bill Bavasi or Jerry Dipoto or … well, I should stop picking on the Mariners.)
That was a fun few paragraphs without talking about the coronavirus, right? Great. Delightful. Now let’s talk about the coronavirus.
Everyone wants the coronavirus to be over immediately, and it’s natural to hope that there’s a way to do that today. If we just do this one thing right now, then problem solved! Boy, wouldn’t that be nice?
It’s what we’re hearing from the White House. The president is touting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as miracle cures based on a couple of very small studies of people who weren’t very sick, and not letting the doctor at the podium answer questions about it (the doctor has already indicated that they are not miracle cures).
The very act of seizing on unproven drugs to cure COVID-19 is a sign of desperation. It’s a sign that there is no plan. Blustering and telling everyone that we’ve found the key when there is almost no evidence that that key opens the door we need opened is not only foolish and a waste of time, but it’s dangerous.
Because there are people who need those drugs. They’re antimalarial drugs and are also needed to treat lupus, so people who very badly need them are now finding it hard to get them just because so many others are convinced that this is the only thing between them and suffocating to death on a hospital bed. The bluster is not only a lie, but it’s hurting sick people, and their deaths will never be attributed to COVID-19.
There’s even evidence that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine don’t work. The “Yes, they’re good” people are basing that off of two studies and anecdotes, but the “No, they’re not useful here” people have two studies and anecdotes of their own. You can find more details here, but the gist is that doctors tested them on patients who had more serious symptoms, and those patients didn’t get better. These studies don’t prove anything on their own, but neither did the other two, and the White House isn’t letting that stop them from hyping them up.
But I don’t want to harp on Trump, because he’s not an interesting person and never has been, no matter the frighteningly high station he occupies. There are a lot of people who are just as confident that we’ve really, honestly, truly found the answer and we’re achingly close to being able to get things back to normal.
That’s not how the world works, though.
The solution, as with so many things, is to prepare and work. As a country, we didn’t prepare like we needed to, so now we’re paring and working. The work takes time, and the time will mean there’s new work, and the new work will mean more preparation which will lead to, you guessed it, more work over some period of time. It doesn’t stop until we’ve suffocated the virus, smothered it under a pillow after months of agonizingly slow progress.
But that’s not a fun solution. That’s not the one you fantasize about. There’s no hero who bravely defied common wisdom to find a cure, no dramatic swing from a miserable low to an ecstatic high. There’s just slow, plodding progress while numbers tick up, day after day, week after week, until one day the numbers are ticking up slower than they used to, and then eventually much slower, and then after a very long time, they stop ticking at all.
But that all means people will keep dying. We all want the infections and deaths to stop as soon as possible, but this probably won’t be how it happens. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t research it, because research is important, but don’t invest your emotional energy in these drugs.
If I had to wrap this up with a baseball analogy, which I feel somewhat obligated to do since this is ostensibly a baseball newsletter: Using chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 is the healthcare equivalent of trading Brandon Belt. No matter how convinced talk radio callers are that that’s the magic bullet, it’s incredibly likely that it won’t help at all and is fairly likely to hurt.