As the coronavirus contagion subsides, traumatized nations are embarking on social experiments that will put the trusty adage, “Better safe than sorry,” to the severest test it has ever undergone. Donald Trump garnered withering contempt for his lament that a US national lockdown cure for coronavirus could be worse than the disease, but it does not take a gun-toting Trump fanatic to see that he has a point, even if for highly suspect and self-serving reasons.

The egomaniacal Trump has a knack for making any opponent look good, no matter how questionable their own record or reasoning may be. The solution, routinely urged by well-heeled health experts, of shutting societies not just for a month but for many months (and, some say, years) may well be more destructive than anything Trump has done.

While sincere and credentialed people insist that it is absolutely heartless to do anything except continue to shelter in place, a dilemma is unfolding that no one can safely ignore, and it grows more acute by the day. The agreed tradeoff is a temporary economic shutdown in exchange for slowing the spread of the virus, yet to what extent and where exactly is the end point?

If hospitals are at last acquiring resources to handle the bad cases, and no vaccine is on the horizon, then the huge costs of sheltering cannot help but be weighed against the rate of serious new cases. The elderly and medically fragile ~ over 80 per cent of all deaths ~ obviously must be kept out of harm’s way, but what of everyone else?

Since most of the infected are not symptomatic or experience mild symptoms and thus go unreported, we really have no accurate idea how many of us are infected, but very likely it is much more, and probably a multiple of, the official figures. (Sweden, by contrast, estimates over a quarter of the population already has had the virus). The more cases there have been, the wider the so-called ‘herd’ immunity, and the lower the death rate will turn out to have been. If so, and it is an “if,” social clamour will only intensify for a return to normal, and far sooner than some experts would like.

In the US the elderly, minorities and the poor suffer the most not only in terms of virus fatalities but in lost jobs, small business collapses, what is daintily termed food insecurity, and eviction threats. Authorities in the US and Europe have wary eyes cast on Sweden, where the Covid- 19 statistics are no worse than elsewhere despite its relaxed guidelines. In six months or so, as tallies are made, it may be the case that the relentless drive for safety will look eminently rational, rather than panicky and authoritarian.

But there is every chance too that critics. especially ones backing dolts like Trump, will revel in blaming ‘liberal’ establishments for their overreaction. Even social democracies with national health care systems are hard-pressed to pay for shutdowns for long, though they are best positioned to do so. In an ideal world every nation could, like Germany, pay workers two-thirds of their wage for as long as it takes to snuff out the virus. The predicament is that it is not only the coronavirus that can wreck, ruin and take lives.

We are hardly the first to note that studies consistently show that every percentage point rise of unemployment carries with it a rising death toll from ill health (especially where private health care systems reign), depression, coronaries, and suicide. Another recent report estimates that even a 5 per cent increase in unemployment in the US (at 16 per cent now) over 5 years would kill 300 thousand people, only they would die unnoticed as usual in the embedded systematic violence of a deeply inequitable society.

The best outcome of this unprecedented crisis is an ample rewarding of the lowerwage workers who held everything together, and an adoption of universal public health care as a right, but these aims will not be achieved without a protracted fight. After conservative regimes such as the US and UK unwillingly opened the spending spigots to steady their economies (disproportionately benefitting the richest constituents), we soon will witness screams from these same quarters for cuts in services and tax rises for average citizens to pay for it all.

Untouched will be the cumulative tax cuts for the rich (including a 79 per cent drop in US billionaires’ taxes since Reagan arrived in 1981). Calls for austerity will ring out everywhere as conventional politicians, including Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden, instinctively strive to return to a normality of inequity, insecurity, and injustice for average citizens.

Face masks won’t save any of us from that fate. A reckoning is coming and the outcome is unclear. There is so little we know right now. Sam Husseini in Salon even points out that while the coronavirus may not itself be bioengineered, diseases in the wild are manipulated in laboratories to be “upgraded” for military use, so that a lab origin for Covid-19 cannot be ruled out. We just can’t be sure. We are about to find out whether it is possible to be too safe. Be careful what you wish for, you may get Trump, and his kind elsewhere, re-elected.

(The writers are well-known commentators and the authors of Parables of Permanent War and No Clean Hands, among many other books)