Idaho View: Little is overreacting to the coronavirus; good
On Wednesday, Idaho Gov. Brad Little finally issued a statewide 21-day stay-at-home order in response to the cororavirus pandemic.
Good for him.
Others, notably Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, acted more quickly. As of Tuesday, Little seemed to bristle at criticism from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and others that he was dawdling too long by insisting his state was too diverse for such a top-down mandate. For more than a week, calls from educators to close the schools and from restaurant owners asking for a shutdown order went unanswered.
But the growing rate of infection — closing in on nearly 100 cases — brought a new urgency.
“Our health care and public safety workers are putting themselves in harm’s way to respond to the coronavirus emergency and we owe it to them to do our part by following the statewide stay-home order,” Little said.
This required conviction, if not courage.
Unlike Democrats Inslee and Brown, the Republican Little is gambling with his political base.
National polls suggest fewer Republicans have taken the pandemic as seriously as Democrats or independents.
Republicans were less likely to stop attending large gatherings and more inclined to view the threat as some kind of media-generated hype.
That’s why you won’t find a stay-at-home order in place in such Republican strongholds as Texas, Kansas or Missouri.
Among those who apparently agree with that view is Idaho Freedom Foundation President Wayne Hoffman.
Friday, Hoffman urged Little to avoid following the course of New York and California.
Wednesday, he doubled down: “It is wrong, and we at IFF assert, unconstitutional, for the government to take away people’s right to earn a living, to assemble, and to move about freely. You correctly noted a couple of weeks ago, ‘history will remember our reaction’ to this virus. It is worrisome that what people will remember is how people were forced to surrender their freedom for the notion of security.”
The flaw in Hoffman’s argument is that biology does not give a fig for ideology. Further delay on Little’s part only encouraged a patchwork response. Universities went online. Individual school districts closed, followed by a State Board of Education directive. Some cities — notably Boise and Moscow — shut down nonessential businesses and meeting places; others did not. And as Inslee discovered earlier, the lack of a statewide emergency declaration conveyed a lack of gravitas, inviting some to carry on with social activities at parks or beaches.
In the absence of available widespread testing, you can’t separate the infected — asymptomatic or not — from the healthy. So the tools to check this pandemic come down to buying time. Self-quarantining, social distancing and stay-at-home orders are aimed at slowing down the infection rate enough to prevent overwhelming a health care system that is unprepared for a pandemic.
To those who argue rural Idaho is a haven from a contagion that is spreading more rapidly in population centers, let them consider the following:
l Blaine County, with 47 confirmed cases of COVID-19, is no urban center.
l As the Lewiston Tribune’s Kathy Hedberg reported, people from Ada, Blaine and Nez Perce counties were seeking out camping sites at Shorts Bar east of Riggins to escape the outbreak. Wednesday, Idaho County reported its first confirmed COVID-19 case.
l Meanwhile, communities from McCall to Owyhee County are asking people to stay away.
“Please do the right thing and stay home,” Owyhee County commissioners wrote. “Don’t endanger our citizens, our law enforcement, search and rescue, and emergency medical personnel by your selfish action.”
No Idaho community has a robust number of hospital beds. High Country News reported recently that only a quarter of Idaho’s 44 counties — mostly urban centers —have a ratio of at least 0.003 beds per resident.
But 100,000 of Idaho’s residents live in 11 counties with no hospital beds at all. Among them is Lewis County.
That leaves about half of the counties in the state somewhere in between having no hospital beds and only a few.
Meanwhile, it’s in rural Idaho where you find the greatest concentration of senior citizens — those older than 65 who are most at risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from the coronavirus. In 16 of Idaho’s rural counties — including Clearwater, Idaho and Lewis counties — more than one of every five residents is at least 65 years old.
Under the circumstances, Little erred on the side of caution. He really has no alternative other than to follow National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci’s advice: “If it looks like you’re overreacting, you’re probably doing the right thing.” — M.T.