Time for Shutdown 2.0

Recently, 150 public health experts called on the federal government to shut down all non-essential businesses across the nation. Listen to and follow these scientists' and doctors' advice. It is long past time for Shutdown 2.0.
Actually we never had a real national shutdown, just as we have never had a national mask mandate. We did have a brief slow-down-to-contain phase. This failed to contain the virus because we could not contain our desire to get back to normal life. But life is not normal and we cannot simply wish normality into being.
We must contain the virus and that means accepting a truth bomb. All but essential workers need to stay home for an extended period. We need to dial way back on our social and work activities. This is how other countries have managed the virus and it has worked fairly well. They have flare-ups but they are manageable.
This shutdown needs to be comprehensive and simultaneous. It does little good to shut down some states and not others; to have bars open in one state but open next door. Folks will just go next door. This needs to be federal and include restrictions on interstate travel.
Reopening schools is a hot topic right now. How can we do it safely? Right now, we can't. Just can't.
But take the short term pain right now of closing for a month and in-person school may become possible. Otherwise, we condemn ourselves and our fellow Americans to many months of climbing death tolls, exhausted healthcare workers, many thousands of people with long term post-Covid health problems, a devastated economy, and millions of destitute unemployed people. Is this really what we want? Why would anyone want this?
An extended shutdown, painful as it sounds, is the fastest, cheapest, least disruptive way to handle Covid and open the door to a post-Covid (or at least contained Covid) future.
The federal government and states' governors need to do what is right for the American people - and the economy. Follow the example of other industrialized countries who had the good sense to shut down early in their outbreaks, provide income for citizens to keep food on the table and bills paid, enforce the lockdown and then slowly, carefully emerge. Many of these nations are reaping the rewards of their national sacrifice by reopening schools, lifting gathering limits, relaunching sports.
All this requires qualities that are, to put it kindly, not seen in abundance in our federal government just now, qualities like empathy, compassion, logic, courage. The current plan of having no plan cannot be allowed to continue. We tried to skip the hard part and just go back to pre-Covid life.
It will likely take a lot of us joining our voices with those 150 experts to demand our government do the right thing, shutting down the country to shut down Covid.