No will whatsoever

America is waiting for a message of some sort or another:

The whole “stay at home for X weeks if you’re not an essential worker and then gradually get back to semi-normal” plan made sense, to the extent it did, only in the context of doing a bunch of stuff (contact tracing, isolation of infected people, including removing people from their families, etc), that the US as a whole seems to have almost literally no interest in trying to do.

The coronavirus is obviously highly infectious, and in addition many people are contagious when they’re completely asymptomatic. As Frum says, testing lots of people — and we’re not even doing that yet, not really — is just a first step toward doing a bunch of other things. But those other things are really hard and expensive and unpleasant, and we (meaning the American ruling class) don’t do hard and expensive and unpleasant.

So you get lots of stuff like this article from the president of Brown, about how colleges and universities have to open in the fall because otherwise there will be no money to pay for things, so they have to do X Y and Z, except even doing X Y and Z in the context of a university campus almost certainly wouldn’t be adequate, and in any case there is as far as I can tell no actual movement toward doing X Y and Z.

The real “plan,” such as it is, is to let a lot of people die.