Coordination of lockdowns makes no sense past a county or small state. Do you believe NYC and rural Nebraska should be coordinating schedules when they have vastly different situations over time?
The federal government doesn't need to order anyone to do anything. Fighting a pandemic is in everyone's best interests. It just needs to ensure there's a consistent strategy that everyone is executing.
It doesn’t need to do that at all, any more than the EU government needs to ensure there’s a consistent strategy among its member states that everyone is executing.
Different strategies apply for different states, because they have different elderly populations, different density characteristics, and different health system capacities.
Further, we still don’t know which approaches are the best, since we’re still learning about the disease. The fact that there are 50 separate approaches being tested affords us a wealth of data to operate on to shift strategies. As you said, fighting a pandemic is in everyone’s best interests, and states can and will change their strategies to minimize suffering.
An example: Governor Cuomo employed a fairly disastrous nursing home policy, which is largely what caused New York’s staggering death rate (at this moment, the highest in the Union). To be fair to him, he didn’t know that the virus would have this effect, and upon seeing the results from other states (FL, TX) which specifically protected nursing homes, course-corrected his own State’s strategy. This is a win for everyone, in the long run.
> In Florida, all nursing home workers were required to be screened for COVID-19 symptoms before entering a facility. On March 15, before most states had locked down, DeSantis signed an executive order that banned nursing home visitations from friends and family, and also banned hospitals from discharging SARS-CoV-2-infected patients into long-term care facilities.
> Instead, states like New York, New Jersey, and Michigan actually ordered nursing homes to accept patients with active COVID-19 infections who were being discharged from hospitals.
> The most charitable interpretation of these orders is that they were designed to ensure that states would not overcrowd their ICUs. But well after hospitalizations peaked, governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo were doubling down on their mandates.
> As recently as April 23, Cuomo declared that nursing homes “don’t have a right to object” to accepting elderly patients with active COVID infections. “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that.” Only on May 10—after the deaths of nearly 3,000 New York residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities—did Cuomo stand down and partially rescind his order.
Way to argue against a strawman - please explain where "coordinate" means "everyone all at once with no regard for local conditions".
Neighboring states and counties should be coordinating schedules, travel restrictions, and stay-at-home requirements. Here in the Bay Area alone San Mateo, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties had conflicting requirements for how far away from home you could be and for what reasons.
Most places are already doing that, and have been for a while. See Newsom's orders/recommendations. They could agree if they wanted, apparently they don't for reasons we may not know.
