The New Threat to Our National Security: Impact of COVID-19 on the US Economy

Our COVID-19 experience of the past several months is telling the story of a new and very efficient biological weapon, namely, an organism of low cost designed to decimate an opponent’s economy without appearing to be a weapon of mass destruction.

Our ability to defend ourselves and project power around the world relies in large measure on a strong economy, without which we become Europe, incapable of defending itself without significant assistance from the United States.

The following comment from the Congressional Research Service suggests a level of damage to our economy which rivals any negative economic event since the Great Depression.

CBO projected GDP will fall by 5.6% in 2020, before growing by 2.8% in 2021. The recovery from the pandemic is projected to be gradual—GDP at the end of 2021 will remain lower than it was in 2019 and well below prior projections, CBO said. Quarterly growth rates are typically reported on an annualized basis; by that measure, CBO projected that second quarter GDP would contract by the equivalent of 40%. This projected decline is about four times larger than the largest quarterly contraction in GDP—10% in the first quarter of 1958—since 1947, when quarterly data first became available. The largest quarterly decline in the Great Recession was 8.4% in the fourth quarter of 2008.  (INSIGHT, Congressional Research Service, May 13, 2020)

A vaccine is being developed and supported by the Trump Administration, with funding for a pivotal study underway to enroll 30,000 people across 90 sites in the U.S. There are still unknowns on how long someone can be protected. Hopefully sooner rather than later a vaccine will be available to the population as a whole.

While I fully expect the US to recover from COVID-19, a second and surely a third virus experience like this would leave us and the world exposed to China aggression on an unprecedented level.  While China could face similar virus-related problems, they view the loss of people in exactly the opposite way we do. We value our people for both moral and economic reasons. China believes that they have too many people, particularly, males of military age.

Act on the national security threat, at the same time we address the health and economic threats. Make no mistake – China is our enemy!

- Seamus O'Neill
  Orange County Resident