This New Zealander Sees Things Clearly

So much of what he says applies to the US as well:

The latest series of Covid-19 blunders is a timely reminder that the entire premise of the lockdown was hubris. The bureaucrats went from flattening the curve to believing that they could eliminate the virus and quarantine a population of 5 million people indefinitely from the 7 billion other people on the planet.

They can't. The inevitability of this program's failure, however, does not mean we will abandon it easily. But we will abandon it.

Governments don't walk away from a policy merely because it isn't working. They simply re-double their efforts, imposing more costs and stripping away more freedoms while the populace cheers them on to ever-greater acts of idiocy until we all exhaust ourselves and move on to the next crisis.

Nailed it.  The most recent exhibit for the court is California Governor Gruesome Newsom's mask "requirement".

For the moment, however, we are at war with a virus and believe that our public officials can keep out a microscopic bug when they can't prevent cocaine from being smuggled in...

With modern techniques we can sometimes isolate particularly virulent outbreaks, such as SARS and Ebola, but once the genie is out of the bottle eradication is almost impossible. AIDS, a difficult condition to catch, still claims over 700,000 people annually.

If we cannot stamp out a virus that requires intimate contact to be transmitted, humanity isn't going to prevent one that can live on the keypad of an eftpos machine for up to 12 hours.

I looked it up.  AIDS still kills over 13,000 people in the US each year.

We are also a trading nation. Ultimately, if we want to sell stuff, we need to visit the people who do the buying, and they need to come here. Locking every visiting businessperson in the Novotel for two weeks is a more effective tariff barrier than anything Muldoon could have dreamed up.

Eventually, isolation means penury. If we cannot trade and travel our economy will become increasingly detached from the rest of the world. Commercial relationships will atrophy. Domestic tourist sites will become abandoned and new facilities will not be constructed. As the rest of the world moves on from Covid-hysteria, we will be left behind.

This will not stop us cowering behind our seawalls nor prevent us from hunting down CCTV footage of wayward tourists to see if they visited the toilets at the BP in Taihape. We have invested so heavily and paid such an incredible cost to maintain our purity we will hold on to it at almost any cost. We don't want to admit that it has been a mistake...

We have seen how quickly the global focus has moved already, from curve flattening to statue toppling.

We still have a global recession to deal with, a possible war between India and China, the drama of the Trump-Biden election and, of course, Kanye West is overdue for some controversy.

Like our protracted effort to control cannabis, pornography and NZ First, we will persist for far longer than we should, even after it has becomes obvious that the effort has failed.

Because that's what politicians do when they live in fear of being blamed for something.

Update, 6/23/20:  This Brit sees things pretty clearly, too, and much of what he says about the British government applies to many of our state governors:

The root of the problem is the uncomfortable relationship between the Government and its scientific advisers. The Government has repeatedly claimed to be ‘guided by the science’. This has in practice been a shameless attempt to evade responsibility by passing the buck to scientists for what are ultimately political, and not scientific, decisions. Scientists can advise what measures are likely to reduce infections and deaths. Only politicians can decide whether those measures make sense in economic and social terms too...

Ministers press them for the kind of unequivocal answers that will protect them from criticism. Scientists cover themselves by giving equivocal answers, which reflect the uncertainty of the science. The Government responds by avoiding any decision for which it would have to take political responsibility, until the pressure of events becomes irresistible, when it lurches off in a new direction...

Indiscriminate lockdown was a panic response to the now-notorious statistical model produced on March 16 by Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College. Panic responses leave little room for reflection. No serious consideration appears to have been given to the potentially catastrophic side effects. In fact, the Imperial team did identify the main problem about a lockdown. In an earlier report to Sage, they had pointed out that once a disease had taken hold in a population, ‘measures which are too effective merely push all transmission to the period after they are lifted, giving a delay but no substantial reduction in either peak incidence or overall attack rate’...

Experiments by the Department of Health (reviewed by Sage) indicate that the risk of airborne transmission is low outside a healthcare setting. It is being maintained because the Government wants scientific cover and Sage cannot rule out some risk that prolonged face-to-face contact at less than two metres might cause some infection. No one in government was grown-up enough to confront the real issue: does a low risk justify a huge economic cost?

Politicians live in fear of losing popularity, and too many of them have shown they're not bright enough to be given authority.