On February 29, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams took to Twitter to admonish Americans:  "Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus ..." A little over a month later, Adams finally got around to asking the Centers for Disease Control if perhaps he'd been talking through his hat when talking through a mask might have been smarter.

Anyone who tries to tell you that the COVID-19 pandemic, and its associated social, political, and economic panics, are good things is  an idiot, or trying to sell you some kind of snake oil, or both. Society-wide disasters are always net negatives, or we wouldn't think of them as disasters in the first place. Silver linings are never as shiny as the clouds they run through are large. That doesn't mean silver linings don't exist, though. They do, and some of them are significant.

"[A]s the top US watermelon-producing state prepares for harvest," Reuters reports, "many of the workers needed to collect the crop are stuck in Mexico .... Without the workers, crops could rot in fields throughout the country,” starting in Florida and California where major harvests begin in April and May.

On March 23, 14 US Senators from both major political parties asked US Attorney General William Barr and Michael Carvajal, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, to "transfer non-violent offenders who are at high risk for suffering complications from COVID-19 to home confinement." It's a smart idea, and one local jails and state prisons around the country are already implementing. But it raises an important question and also points to an important opportunity.