We Cannot "Reopen" America - The Bulwark
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The movement to “reopen” America is a fallacy based on a fantasy.
The fallacy is the notion that lifting stay-at-home orders will result in people going back to their normal routines. This is false. The state-issued stay-at-home orders did not determine most people’s desires to stay home—they merely ratified behaviors that the vast majority of people and institutions were already adopting in response to COVID-19.
The fantasy is that we can go back to what the world looked like 12 weeks ago. This is not possible now and will not be possible until we possess a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
Understand that I am not saying that stay-at-home orders should be indefinite. What I am saying is that whenever the stay-at-home orders are rolled back—whether it is tomorrow or a month from now—it will not result in anything like a “reopening” of the country. And the sooner people grasp how completely and fundamentally the world has changed, the faster we’ll be able to adapt to this new reality.
Let’s take a close look at just a couple of examples.