In April, I wrote several essays and articles about our collective response to Covid-19.

I was worried – and am still worried, honestly – that we weren’t making the best choices.

It’s hard not to feel cynical about the reasons why we’ve failed. For instance, our president seems more concerned about minimizing the visibility of disaster than addressing the disaster itself. We didn’t respond until this virus had spread for months, and even now our response has become politicized.

Also, the best plans now would include a stratified response based on risk factor. Much more than seasonal influenza, the risk of serious complications from Covid-19 increases with age. Because we didn’t act until the virus was widespread, eighty-year-olds should be receiving very different recommendations from forty- and fifty-year-olds.

Our national response is being led by an eighty-year-old physician, though, and he might be biased against imposing exceptional burdens on members of his own generation (even when their lives are at stake) and may be less sensitive to the harms that his recommendations have caused younger people.

I’m aware that this sounds prejudiced against older folks. That’s not my intent.

I care about saving lives.

Indeed, throughout April, I was arguing that our limited Covid-19 PCR testing capacity shouldn’t be used at hospitals. These tests were providing useful epidemiological data, but in most cases the results weren’t relevant for treatment. The best therapies for Covid-19 are supportive care – anti-inflammatories, inhalers, rest – delivered as early as possible, before a patient has begun to struggle for breath and further damage their lungs. Medical doctors provided this same care whether a Covid-19 test came back positive or negative.

(Or, they should have. Many patients were simply sent home and told to come back if they felt short of breath. Because they didn’t receive treatment early enough, some of these patients then died.)

Instead, our limited testing capacity should have been used at nursing homes. We should have been testing everyone before they went through the doors of a nursing home, because people in nursing homes are the most vulnerable to this virus.

I realize that it’s an imposition to make people get tested before going in, either for care or to work – even with real-time reverse-transcription PCR, you have to wait about two hours to see the results. But the inconvenience seems worthwhile, because it would save lives.

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From March 25 until May 10 – at the same time that I was arguing that our limited Covid-19 tests be used at nursing homes instead of hospitals – the state of New York had a policy stating that nursing homes were prohibited from testing people for Covid-19.

I really dislike the phrase “asymptomatic transmission” – it’s both confusing and inaccurate, because viral shedding is itself a symptom – but we knew early on that Covid-19 could be spread by people who felt fine. That’s why we should have been using PCR tests before letting people into nursing homes.

But in New York, nursing homes were “prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

This policy caused huge numbers of deaths.

Not only do nursing homes have the highest concentration of vulnerable people, they also have far fewer resources than hospitals with which to keep people safe. Nursing home budgets are smaller. Hallways are narrower. Air circulation is worse. The workers lack protective gear and training in sterile procedure. Nursing home workers are horrendously underpaid.

The low wages of nursing home workers aren’t just unethical, they’re dangerous. A recent study found that higher pay for nursing home workers led to significantly better health outcomes for residents.

This study’s result as described in the New York Times – “if every county increased its minimum wage by 10 percent, there could be 15,000 fewer deaths in nursing homes each year” – is obviously false. But even though the math doesn’t work out, raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do.

If we raised the minimum wage, we probably would have a few years in which fewer people died in nursing homes. But then we’d see just as many deaths.

Humans can’t live forever. With our current quality of care, maybe nursing home residents die at an average age of 85. If we raise the minimum wage, we’ll get better care, and then nursing home residents might die at an average age of 87. After two years, we’d reach a new equilibrium and the death rate would be unchanged from before.

But the raw number here – how many people die each year – isn’t our biggest concern. We want people to be happy, and an increase in the minimum wage would improve lives: both nursing home residents and workers. Which I’m sure that study’s lead author, economist Kristina Ruffini, also believes. The only problem is that things like “happiness” or “quality of life” are hard to quantify.

Especially when you’re dealing with an opposition party that argues that collective action can never improve the world, you have to focus on quantifiable data. Happiness is squishy. A death is unassailable.

Indeed, that’s partly why we’ve gotten our response to Covid-19 wrong. Some things are harder to measure than others. It’s easy to track the number of deaths caused by Covid-19. (Or at least, it should be – our president is still understating the numbers.)

It’s much harder to track the lives lost to fear, to domestic violence, and to despair (no link for this one – suddenly Fox News cares about “deaths of despair,” only because they dislike the shutdown even more than they dislike poor people).  It’s hard to put a number on the value of 60 million young people’s education.

But we can’t discount the parts of our lives that are hard to measure – often, they’re the most important.