A Collection of Thoughts About Coronavirus Shutdowns

This isn't the first epidemic in my lifetime:

In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.

Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a healthier population with low obesity. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see.

“In 1968,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”

And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.

I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?

Nothing closed. Schools stayed open. All businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.

Stock markets didn’t crash. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses.

Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue.

Until this article I'd never heard of that epidemic.

Shutdowns are now driven more by politics than science:

In March, Americans started to stay at home in what began as a voluntary movement. Governments issued lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, but Americans understood the threat of the Wuhan Chinese coronavirus from China was significant enough to take drastic measures. Thanks to these measures, America’s health care system was not overwhelmed by the global pandemic, and Americans across the country are demanding an end to the lockdowns.

Embattled Democratic governors are defending extended coronavirus lockdowns by citing the all-important “science"...

This is a tremendous dodge. Lockdowns are a fundamentally political decision. When medical professionals insist that people wash their hands and avoid large gatherings, they provide an important service. When the government tells citizens they cannot leave their homes, go to work, go to church, or get a haircut, however, it is going beyond the bounds of medical science.

Governors justified the lockdowns by focusing on “flattening the curve.” That meant slowing the transmission of the disease to prevent the kind of medical-system collapse experienced in Wuhan and Northern Italy. This goal has arguably been achieved...

Furthermore, a recent study showed that Democratic governors were three times more likely than Republican governors to impose a lockdown. This would make sense, given the Democratic control over many population centers experiencing large outbreaks: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., for example. However, the study found that “counterintuitively, the percentage of the state’s population infected with COVID-19 had the weakest effect on the governors’ decisions of all the four variables"...

Liberals often use “science” as a talking-point to advocate their agendas, even if those agendas arguably conflict with the best science (see abortion, climate predictions, and transgender activism). It appears the tide of science is turning on coronavirus lockdowns, and Democrats are not adjusting with it. As Republicans suggest plans to slowly reopen America while preserving tight social-distancing measures, Democrats insist that the full lockdowns must continue.

While the lockdowns began as a public health measure, their continued extension appears to have more to do with power than safety.

Maybe the lockdowns were entirely unnecessary:

Professor Michael Levitt, who teaches structural biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

And according to Levitt, coronavirus data show that sweeping lockdown measures were an overreaction that may actually backfire.

Levitt has been analyzing the COVID-19 outbreak from a statistical perspective since January and has been remarkably accurate in his predications. The data show that the outbreak never actually grew exponentially, suggesting harsh lockdown measures, which have drastically impacted the world economy, were probably unnecessary. 

Doubling down on stupid, though, is Gruesome Newsom, governor of the Demokratic People's Republik of Kalifornia:

As unrest continues to mount over stay-at-home orders amid the coronavirus pandemic, some counties and towns are taking matters into their own hands by bucking their governors' edicts and reopening segments of their economies.

In California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has faced protests from Huntington Beach to Sacramento over his statewide restrictions on nonessential businesses and outdoor activities, three counties in the northern part of the state are defying the orders and opening up...

Newsom’s shelter-at-home mandate is a statewide order, but it is unclear what actions – if any – the governor will or could take against the counties going rogue.

Newsom seems shocked, shocked, that local government would defy his orders--after he defies Washington so much that the DPRK is a so-called sanctuary state for illegal immigrants.  Live by the Resistance, die by the Resistance, I guess.

Update, 5/5/20:  Stay-at-home orders were supposed to be temporary.  If there was ever a curve to flatten, we've flattened it to a pancake:

Science would tell us not to cling dogmatically to our beliefs, that we should adjust those beliefs when presented with more information.  We have much more information now than we did 7 weeks ago, when I was sent home from work and told to stay home.  We should be acting on that new information, not digging our heels in deeper "because I said so".