Is Trump Challenging Mother Nature To A Duel?

Thomas L Friedman’s brilliant article outlines a dangerous flaw in Trump’s reopen strategy:

I try to ground all my thoughts on how to deal with this pandemic in the logic of Mother Nature and the laws of natural systems. If you don’t — if instead you start your analysis with politics or ideology, or the fact that you’re just tired of being locked down so what the hell, let’s throw back a few with the gang at the local bar and the virus be damned — you’re actually challenging Mother Nature to a duel….

All that registers, all that she rewards, is one thing: adaptation. She doesn’t reward the richest or the strongest or the smartest of the species. She rewards the most adaptive. They get to pass along their DNA….

For all these reasons it’s clear, or should be, that the holy grail every nation needs to be looking for is what Dr. David Katz, a public health expert, argued from the beginning of this crisis: a “sustainable strategy of total harm minimization.” That means a strategy that would save as many lives and as many livelihoods as possible at the same time….

We need to reopen and we need to adapt, but in ways that honor Mother Nature’s logic, not in ways that court a second wave — not in ways that challenge Mother Nature to a duel. That is not smart. Because she hasn’t lost a duel in 4.5 billion years.

Read the whole article in The New York Times [here]