Adjusting As We Learn

For John, BLUF:  We still don't fully understand COVID-19, and thus are current actions may, as we learn more, turn out to be wrong.  In the mean time wear your mask and keep your distance and wash your hands frequently.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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A Failed Experiment

Here is the sub-headline:

The lockdowns must end.

From City Journal, by Reporter John Tierney, 7 October 2020.

Here is the lede plus two:

Lockdowns are typically portrayed as prudent precautions against Covid-19, but they are surely the most risky experiment ever conducted on the public.  From the start, researchers have warned that lockdowns could prove far deadlier than the coronavirus.  People who lose their jobs or businesses are more prone to fatal drug overdoses and suicide, and evidence already exists that many more will die from cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, and tuberculosis and other diseases because the lockdown prevented their ailments from being diagnosed early and treated properly.

Yet politicians and public-health officials conducting this unprecedented experiment have paid little attention to these risks.  In their initial rush to lock down society, they insisted that there was no time for such analysis—and besides, these were just temporary measures to “flatten the curve” so as not to overwhelm hospitals.  But since that danger passed, the lockdown enforcers have found one reason after another to persevere with closures, bans, quarantines, curfews, and other mandates.  Anthony Fauci, the White House advisor, recently said that even if a vaccine arrives soon, he does not expect a return to normality before late next year.

He and politicians like New York governor Andrew Cuomo and British prime minister Boris Johnson profess to be following “the science,” but no ethical scientist would conduct such a risky experiment without carefully considering the dangers and monitoring the results.  After doing so, a group of leading researchers this week called for an end to the experiment.  In a joint statement, the Great Barrington Declaration, they predicted that continued lockdowns will lead to “excess mortality in years to come” and warned of “irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

This is a "big hand/little map" approach to the disease.  It is about saving lives by focusing on many causes of death, and not just COVID-19.

Here is a good summation:

Early in the pandemic, Scott Atlas at the Hoover Institution and researchers at Swansea University independently calculated that the lockdowns would ultimately cost more years of life than Covid-19 in the United States and Britain, and the toll seems certain to be worse in poor countries

This broader picture would be a hard sell in the best of times, but at our current political impasse it will be even harder.  Maybe, as John says, it will all clear up after the voting on 3 November.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff