Were the lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes.
Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.” As I noted in May, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 75,000 and 116,000 people in the United States, between 0.04% and 0.07% of the nation’s population then. The 1968-69 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000, 0.05% of the population.
The current death toll of 185,000 is 0.055% of the current population. It will go higher, but it’s about the same magnitude as those two flu outbreaks and less deadly for those under 65. Yet, there were no statewide lockdowns, no massive school closings, no closed office buildings and factories, restaurants, and museums. No one even considered shutting down Woodstock.
Why are attitudes so different today? Perhaps we have greater confidence in the government’s effectiveness. If public policy can affect climate change, it can stamp out a virus.
Plus, we’re much more risk-averse. Children aren’t allowed to walk to school, jungle gyms have vanished from playgrounds, and college students are shielded from microaggressions. We have a “safetyism mindset,”as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write in The Coddling of the American Mind, under which “many aspects of students’ lives needed to be carefully regulated by adults, and that it was far better to overreact to potential risks and threats than to underreact.”
So, the news of the coronavirus killing dozens and overloading hospitals in Bergamo, Italy, triggered a flight to safety and restriction. Many people stopped going to restaurants and shops even before the lockdowns were ordered in March and April. The exaggerated projections of some epidemiologists, with a professional interest in forecasting pandemics, triggered demands that governments act.
The legitimate fears that hospitals would be overwhelmed apparently explain the (in retrospect, deadly) orders of the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan requiring elderly care facilities to admit coronavirus-infected patients. And the original purpose to “flatten the curve” segued into “stamp out the virus.”
But the apparent success in this venture by a few nations that enjoy some degree of geographic isolation (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand) could never be replicated in a continent-sized and globalized nation such as the U.S.
Governors imposing continued lockdowns claimed to be “following the science.” But they followed it in only one dimension — that of reducing the immediate number of COVID-19 cases. There was no care taken for other dimensions of life — for example, the lockdowns also prevented cancer screenings, heart attack treatments, and substance abuse counseling, whose absence resulted in a large but hard-to-estimate number of deaths. What Haidt and Lukianoff call “vindictive protectiveness” turned out to be not very protective after all.
Examples of “vindictive protectiveness” include the shaming of beachgoers (even though outdoor virus spread is minimal), the extension of school close-downs (even though few children get or transmit the infection), the closing down of gardening aisles in superstores, and the banning of church services (even when inevitably noisy and crowded demonstrations for politically favored causes are given the green light).
The new thinking on lockdowns, as Greg Ip reported in the Wall Street Journal last week, is that “they’re overly blunt and costly.” That supports President Trump’s mid-April statement that “a prolonged lockdown combined with a forced economic depression would inflict an immense and wide-ranging toll on public health.”
For many, that economic damage has been absolute or nearly so. Restaurants and small businesses have been closed forever, even before the last three months of “mostly peaceful” urban rioting. Losses have been concentrated on those with low incomes and little wealth, whereas the lockdowns have added tens of billions to the net worths of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Attitudes on lockdowns are highly correlated with partisan politics. Democrats tend to be more risk-averse and want lockdowns continued until there’s a vaccine. Republicans are less risk-averse and want most restrictions lifted.
As a result, since governors and mayors make these decisions, it’s heavily Democratic central cities (New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco) whose civic fabric is being rent and cultural capital is left in ruins, with much less devastation in the exurbs and the countryside.
This fouling-your-own-nest extends to voting. Many more Democrats than Republicans want to vote by mail, even though the risk of voter error or non-counting of their vote is higher than for those, most of them Republicans, who want to vote in person.
The anti-lockdown blogger (and former New York Times reporter) Alex Berenson makes a powerful case that lockdowns delayed rather than prevented infections and that current plunging hospitalization and death rates suggest we’re approaching herd immunity, where the virus fades out for lack of new targets.
There are old lessons here, ready to be relearned. Governments can sometimes channel, but never entirely control, nature. There is no way to eliminate risk entirely. Attempts to reduce one risk may increase others. Amid uncertainty, people make mistakes. Like, maybe, the lockdowns.