"But perhaps if for two weeks you really made everyone stay home except for soldiers delivering meals and taking people to hospitals?"
Think about this for a little bit and you will rapidly see the reason any general lockdowns were doomed to fail if your plan is to 'stop the spread' or even slow it down.
Who is staffing those hospitals? You need doctors, nurses, and support staff like janitors. They need supplies of all sorts as well as food so you need to deliver those, too. You need to keep the lights on so you need the people who run and maintain power plants, and electric and natural gas distribution systems, as well as coal for plants that use it. They need supplies, too, that need to be delivered. Those supply deliveries come from all over so you need to support all the people operating transportation systems. Stuff breaks down (MV Dali has entered the chat) so now you need to have mechanics and supply them with parts to perform repairs. Need I go on, and I haven't even started on where you're getting the food to distribute. The best estimates I've seen are that most urban areas have less then a week's supply of food on hand so you're not going to lock down for more than a few days at best, certainly less than a month and probably not even the magic two weeks (another number Brix and Fauci likely pulled out of their nethers, like six feet.)
On the other hand, maybe they didn't fail because they were designed to give the feeling of being protected to the people who were demanding the most protection, the laptop class (and teachers unions). If those deplorables would have just known their place was to risk infection, illness, and death so the laptop class could stay sequestered everything would have been fine.
The "Covid Virus" was already circulated in the the United States. It had already spread. The Pandemic panic was based on multiple critical lies. These lies included:
(1) Lockdowns would "slow the spread"
(2) Everyone was at risk of the virus
(3) Treating Covid required novel, specialized care (care that actually killed people)
(4) Typical cold & flu therapies were not only unhelpful but banned
Biggest FUBAR in government policy EVER. And no one is going to be held accountable, except for Gov. Cuomo. But he was fired for being a womanizer.
Let's say there were a truly deadly virus that killed 5% of the population uniformly across all age groups. This means 95% of people will survive the virus and have immunity. So in the extremely worst case a real pandemic would be very deadly, but at the same time the vast majority of people would survive and be immune.
The farce of the Covid pandemic response was the notion that the answer was to have everyone avoid the virus. This was stupid first of all as the authorities had no curiosity of determining who was actually already immune to the virus. Secondly, the authorities had no curiosity of how vulnerable people actually were to the virus. It turns out that for healthy people of all ages, most were not vulnerable. What a waste of human life to tell people to be afraid of a thing that did not threaten them!
The more time passes, the more I see the Covid pandemic response as utterly stupid. So stupid it must have been deliberate.
And let's not memory-hole that other Serious Proposal, since those have a way of popping up again - the insane idea to make the nursing home caregivers *live at and be unable to leave* the facility where they worked. That's right, a group usually derided by the bien-pensants for not providing the level of care - and sometimes for some loss of patience, amounting even to abuse - which is captured on the cameras trained on them - that the bien-pensants would *obviously* provide were they inclined to do so themselves, which they are not - this group of folks would have had their largely unappealing job made worse by being actually imprisoned with it.
And now: a piece about the importance of the word "enslaved" versus slave - the additional three letters have a magic quality about them, which transcends material reality and goes to the heart of where humanity really lies: in our academic jargon.
China, Australia and New Zealand did manage to eradicate the virus without disrupting food supplies. But in the case of the US this would've required a massive gear up of border patrols to ensure no one sneaks in from Mexico - or convincing Mexico to do a hardcore lockdown of their own. The Chinese were more than willing to shoot anyone on sight for daring to cross the border without undergoing quarantine. The US would've been forced to do exactly that or it would've all been for nothing.
I feel like I'm losing my mind - did China not have some huge number of deaths the moment it ended its lockdown "experiment"? I guess that could be read either way - but surely one way is that they should *still* be locked down.
Of course, this is muddied by the evidence that there is more Asian resistance to Covid to begin with?
I smiled a little at that "soldiers delivering meals" - as if we had realized the Jetsons' meal-generating machines.
But I'm overall surprised at the tone of the piece because as disconcerting as the whole experience was, I supposed all of us felt glad we were not in China for the duration. Remember the whole "bolting shut their doors from the outside" business? This could be, maybe was, fake news and I would find it no less disquieting if it represented some impression people had of their confinement.
For a brief moment, if possible, if we set aside the usual political analysis, and look at it from how practitioners and institutions related to immunology, epidemiology, public health are trained and set up, we find lots of common patterns across countries.
Shows deaths per Capita. Yes some countries lack infrastructure to reliably collect and report stats, but overall it's a decent collection.
Curiously the countries at the top and bottom of the list both had lockdowns. Peru during the initial weeks and New Zealand for an extended period. A big factor was capacity of the health system to treat a sudden increase in infections. Peru had little capacity, for example. Another important factor was level of voluntary compliance, which correlates with more advanced and high-trust societies. The United States was neither the worst nor the best, outcomes closer to Peru than to New Zealand, and I'd guess with about average levels of social strife.
Precautionary measures and protocols are derived from immunology and not from political preferences. Countries around the world instituted these measures to varying degrees, most having never heard of Dr. Fauci or the expression "laptop class".
Lockdowns were implemented largely because no other response was available to a novel virus, people with resources to get other people to take the risks pushed for them, and no government wanted to be seen as doing nothing.
As Guest User points out above, nobody was getting treated in hospitals for COVID. The usual response early in the pandemic of putting people on ventilators was later established to be counterproductive. COVID death rates varied significantly across many different groups based on age and comorbidities, and would need to be factored into any claim the difference in death rate is solely or even significantly influenced by lock down status.
Avoiding people suspected of having a disease is a response to epidemics that humans have been implementing since before recorded history, and is often somewhat successful. What irks me to no end is the 'just so' stories that people keep coming up with to claim that this time the response was driven by some sort of 'spirit of community' or 'rational scientific analysis', and not simply naked fear of the unknown and self-interest, especially since it involved sequestering the healthy rather than the sick.
This is a fair critique imo. I'd say "influenced by reduced community transmission" instead of "solely or even significantly influenced by lock down status". This is almost tautological -- if you can reduce the spread you can reduce the number of infections and reduce the number of people seeking medical care. The purpose was to reduce close contact and it relied almost entirely on voluntary compliance (encouraged through norms). And you do the best you can. It is just the nature of work and unfortunately the status accorded to them where some need to be done on-site and some can be done remotely. Some high-status professions (doctors for example) also needed to do on-site work. As a member of the laptop-class I was perfect happy to go to work (as I have all my life), but the idea was if you can avoid it to unwittingly be a carrier then why not avoid it. You become an additional vector.
I feel relatively so little was asked of us, and yet it is we who complain the loudest!
Re: "the emotion of happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end." — Rob Henderson
This seems mistaken. Genes don't have "an end." States of nature have causes, not ends. Key causes are mechanisms in natural evolution — genetic variation and environmental selection for reproductive fitness.
My intuition is that happiness, usually, is a mental state that is a by-product (side-effect) of other pursuits.
Happiness may be momentary and occasional. Or it may be settled. Some persons are blessed with a sunny disposition. And some persons just want to be unhappy.
Sometimes, one's own happiness is a conscious end (intentional goal), when one forms a long-range plan for a life well-lived, in the belief that such a course will make oneself happy.
Sometimes, the happiness of others is one's goal — and one might find one's own happiness, too, in the end, as a happy by-product of altruism.
I think Gaza furnishes an interesting example (which, and similar, comes to mind when your anarcho-libertarians wax about how great population growth is, and how much more solvable problems are when it is very, very high).
I believe because of map changes or other issues, the exact figure is uncertain but that Gaza as presently constituted in 1949 held about 80,000 Arabs? But the number doesn't much matter if it is a few tens of thousands more.
Since then while living in supposed conditions of "hell" they've managed to increase their population to 2.1 million. They apparently procreate without regard for plans for a "good life" since their whole schtick is to be miserable and dependent.
From 1949 thru ‘67, Gaza was controlled by Egypt, which did not want to integrate Gazans into Egypt. Pop growth is not always a good measure of the health and especially happiness of the group. But it does indicate genetic thriving.
Well put. It is indeed one of those things you do not _directly_ chase. Relatedly, Arthur Schlesinger in his brief essay "The Lost Meaning of 'The Pursuit of Happiness'" argues that for Jefferson and contemporaries "pursuit" meant practicing rather than seeking.
"Early in the pandemic, I called for a military-style lockdown. It was a “go big or go home” argument."
There was no pandemic until the government and major institutions created one with lockdowns.
We know this because we lived it! Life was going along perfectly normal and then doing the unthinkable - shutting down to "hide from a virus" - was embraced as the way forward. And yet at the time this plan was launched there was no evidence of a pandemic in the United States nor in most of the world! All that existed was two anecdotes: Wuhan and Lombardy. Yet these two anecdotes became the rational for the American and Western officials to embrace the most self-destructive social policy in the history of the modern world.
The great lie of the Pandemic was that a pandemic existed prior to the greatest interruption ever being imposed on the American people. But once the lockdowns / shutdowns happened and mass testing was initiated, then all of a sudden thousands and tens of thousands were dying of a virus that we literally know now was circulating for months before.
What does it mean that the Covid virus was circulating in the United States months before March 2020? It means we were deceived. It means we were fooled. It means we pointed the gun at ourselves and fired.
There was never much of a 'lockdown' in America, though. The only state that sorta tried it was Hawaii, everyone else barely enforced anything for private gatherings, even in Blue states. Police chiefs almost immediately said they aren't going to bust anyone's door for hosting a private party and travel was never restricted in the lower 48 states.
Europeans, Australians and New Zealand residents suffered a much harsher fate because their police actually agreed to enforce the rules.
Suppose that starting in Fall 2019 there had been a "Covid Test" and everyone took it every day. In that scenario, when would the "Pandemic" have started? What would have been the basis for claiming the lives of the general population were at risk?
All the major decisions to shutdown the USA occurred prior to there being any evidence that American lives were at risk and prior to there being mass availability of a test. One of the first big decisions was the NBA suspended its season when a basketball player literally warmed up for the game and then tested positive. Now there is a deadly disease for you!
The Covid test did not reveal a health risk. It merely showed the presence of a certain DNA. And yet the narrative became that a positive test proved lives were at risk. What if the psychology was different? What if people understood that the presence of viral DNA meant there was no need for alarm and no need for panic?
slavery and gender inequality - It's a nice theory and I'm not inclined to disagree but it would be nice to know how that compares to the Americas pre-colonial. Maybe some Asian areas too.
Gender inequality is nearly worldwide. I suppose at one time slavery was too, though maybe a bit less so [than gender inequality] in the last thousand years. How does one compare the resulting [gender] inequality in Africa to somewhere "different"?
> I estimate that our failed response meant we lost almost 550,000 more lives than we should have to Covid
1. You need to calculate QALYs instead of "lives lost". An 85 year old with dementia dying a few months early is not the same as an 18 year old athlete dying in a car crash.
2. You need to calculate the *costs*, not just the benefits of a lockdown. I.e. the current wave of inflation is one such cost.
And by every imaginable calculation the "let it rip" option comes out on top.
It's truly wild that after everything humanity has learned about respiratory illnesses over the last century -- (not to mention the last 4 years) people still think you can stop the spread of a submicroscopic aerosolized virus through central planning or any other means.
The hope that a severe two week lockdown, or the milder approach of “test and trace”, would be able to eradicate a virus that spreads as fast as flu and had already made global inroads was always a very costly pipe dream. The fact that COVID wasn’t eradicated is no one’s failure.
Lockdowns - If one looks at the countries with lowest mortality rates, the list is dominated by warm weather countries with islands thrown in (also mostly warm except Iceland and Greenland) and maybe a handful of highly authoritarian or compliant countries. US is none of these.
I suspect that Kling's idea of military lockdowns with soldiers delivering meals and running people to hospitals is far from practical. Over the horizon, you can't see practical from here kind of far. The supply chain itself wouldn't be able to hold up. The total number of US military personnel is something like 1.5 million all in. There are approximately 126 million house holds across the US. Even assuming the government has enough food on hand or readily available to feed the entire population for two weeks without having access to private warehouses and stores (because remember, all those people are locked down) that is a little under 100 deliveries per military personnel (active and reserve) to be made over two weeks.
And that is before considering that some of those soldiers are necessary somewhere else, like foreign bases. How many are going to be needed to organize the process on an ongoing basis? How many are going to be needed to be on hand to repair the trucks when they break down? How many are going to be operating dispatch? How many are keeping track of who has delivered what to whom? How many are going to be fielding calls from citizens saying they didn't get a delivery? How many are going to be needed to pack, organize and load out all the food supplies to be delivered?
You will be lucky if if that number doesn't go to 200-400 deliveries per delivering soldier, and more likely it will be in the 800s. Supply chain is really hard, and the US military does not have the infrastructure to get all this done.
Oh, and a fair bit of those house holds are not even in well mapped, legible cities. Some are going to be in pokey little apartments that are hard to find from the street. Some are going to be in rural areas in the middle of no where that just barely have GPS addresses. That all slows things down considerably.
How many people are going to starve over the course of two weeks because the military couldn't find their front door, didn't realize there was someone living there, or just failed to deliver but thought they did?
The task might not be impossible, but a huge amount of infrastructure would have to be in place before you could even begin to attempt it without guaranteed failure.
Not so much "half baked" as mis-baked. Restrictions on movement and venue closings should first of all be con on the basis of local conditions, not even state and surly not national and second on the basis of risks of a particular kind of space (ventilation, crowding, etc.), not the activity conducted there. But CDC never gave local decisionmakers the information they could have used to take cost effective action. FDA's foot dragging meant we did not have cheap screening tests for self isolation, and test to enter regimes. Likewise (CDC or FDA?) resistance to first shot first and fractional dosing when vaccine were in restricted supply.
Vaccines mandates? In principle they are acceptable if they prevent transmission, but that was never clear.
LIkewise we never got a clear massage abut who was being protected by masking of different kind of masks.
Thanks to these CDC/FDA errors, the response became symbolic and political, not cost effective.
“I’m not here to praise the Founders—they were at best wise barbarians.” What is a wise barbarian? And compared to Trump or Obama or Biden? I’ll take the Founders.
“Despite recent missteps at some high-profile universities, our education system still ranks at the top in the world. Eight of the 10 best schools globally are located in the U.S. Education, along with opportunity, make this country coveted among immigrants.” What does highly ranked even mean? Like Tyler Cowen says, our universities are dysfunctional. They are also highly politically biased and vulnerable to disruption. I am not a fan of our universities.
“We also need to create opportunities for anti-aging research, enhance ecosystems through wildlife corridors…”. He finishes with a long list of planner/mentality ideas. I’m completely against this type of thinking. We need more freedom not more planning.
"wise barbarians" - yeah, I wonder who - or what - that was a sop to. The meaning is opaque to me as well.
Quite the opposite - if you read their copious personal letters - especially those of Washington - you find in their obsession with personal honor and civility, a pattern (ironically, being rebels - though to be sure it was the king who first declared them so) for the type of Enlightenment hero I think of in connection with what Ford Madox Ford tried to evoke with Christopher Tietjens from "Parade's End", and his alienation from the 20th century.
Or maybe we must now associate such virtues with barbarism, as we must not look for them to come back; they are dangerous in some way to the status quo.
I and my mother live in Oak Ridge, TN. She had an onset of cardiac arrhythmia in July of 2020 and was in an in-patient at the local hospital for a couple of days. The hospital itself was almost completely empty except for a few doctors and nurses. I had been inside this hospital many times over the years prior and it was a bustling place (Oak Ridge is filled with very old white people) with patients in for in-patient procedures, out-patient procedures and tests etc. As far as I could tell, my mother might have been the only patient in the place- I saw no others anywhere- just room after room of empty beds, and this is a large facility.
I'm not sure what view that is different from but it is interesting info. Note that much of that reduction in hospital visits could be a reduced need because people were staying in their homes. Regardless, the point still seems valid.
A cost/benefit analysis requires estimating costs, not just benefits. The numbers you quote are estimating benefits without estimating the costs. Hint: they don't do this because such calculations inevitably show that almost all COVID mitigations (with the exception of rapid vaccine development) were a net loss to society.
"But perhaps if for two weeks you really made everyone stay home except for soldiers delivering meals and taking people to hospitals?"
Think about this for a little bit and you will rapidly see the reason any general lockdowns were doomed to fail if your plan is to 'stop the spread' or even slow it down.
Who is staffing those hospitals? You need doctors, nurses, and support staff like janitors. They need supplies of all sorts as well as food so you need to deliver those, too. You need to keep the lights on so you need the people who run and maintain power plants, and electric and natural gas distribution systems, as well as coal for plants that use it. They need supplies, too, that need to be delivered. Those supply deliveries come from all over so you need to support all the people operating transportation systems. Stuff breaks down (MV Dali has entered the chat) so now you need to have mechanics and supply them with parts to perform repairs. Need I go on, and I haven't even started on where you're getting the food to distribute. The best estimates I've seen are that most urban areas have less then a week's supply of food on hand so you're not going to lock down for more than a few days at best, certainly less than a month and probably not even the magic two weeks (another number Brix and Fauci likely pulled out of their nethers, like six feet.)
On the other hand, maybe they didn't fail because they were designed to give the feeling of being protected to the people who were demanding the most protection, the laptop class (and teachers unions). If those deplorables would have just known their place was to risk infection, illness, and death so the laptop class could stay sequestered everything would have been fine.
The "Covid Virus" was already circulated in the the United States. It had already spread. The Pandemic panic was based on multiple critical lies. These lies included:
(1) Lockdowns would "slow the spread"
(2) Everyone was at risk of the virus
(3) Treating Covid required novel, specialized care (care that actually killed people)
(4) Typical cold & flu therapies were not only unhelpful but banned
Biggest FUBAR in government policy EVER. And no one is going to be held accountable, except for Gov. Cuomo. But he was fired for being a womanizer.
Why would "soldiers" need to deliver meals?
Let's say there were a truly deadly virus that killed 5% of the population uniformly across all age groups. This means 95% of people will survive the virus and have immunity. So in the extremely worst case a real pandemic would be very deadly, but at the same time the vast majority of people would survive and be immune.
The farce of the Covid pandemic response was the notion that the answer was to have everyone avoid the virus. This was stupid first of all as the authorities had no curiosity of determining who was actually already immune to the virus. Secondly, the authorities had no curiosity of how vulnerable people actually were to the virus. It turns out that for healthy people of all ages, most were not vulnerable. What a waste of human life to tell people to be afraid of a thing that did not threaten them!
The more time passes, the more I see the Covid pandemic response as utterly stupid. So stupid it must have been deliberate.
And let's not memory-hole that other Serious Proposal, since those have a way of popping up again - the insane idea to make the nursing home caregivers *live at and be unable to leave* the facility where they worked. That's right, a group usually derided by the bien-pensants for not providing the level of care - and sometimes for some loss of patience, amounting even to abuse - which is captured on the cameras trained on them - that the bien-pensants would *obviously* provide were they inclined to do so themselves, which they are not - this group of folks would have had their largely unappealing job made worse by being actually imprisoned with it.
And now: a piece about the importance of the word "enslaved" versus slave - the additional three letters have a magic quality about them, which transcends material reality and goes to the heart of where humanity really lies: in our academic jargon.
China, Australia and New Zealand did manage to eradicate the virus without disrupting food supplies. But in the case of the US this would've required a massive gear up of border patrols to ensure no one sneaks in from Mexico - or convincing Mexico to do a hardcore lockdown of their own. The Chinese were more than willing to shoot anyone on sight for daring to cross the border without undergoing quarantine. The US would've been forced to do exactly that or it would've all been for nothing.
So we could "stop the spread" if we engaged in China level lockdowns.
But to what end? China had to keep locking down, and eventually even those lockdowns didn't work anything and they had to give up.
You can't beat a highly transmissible respiratory virus in the long run.
I feel like I'm losing my mind - did China not have some huge number of deaths the moment it ended its lockdown "experiment"? I guess that could be read either way - but surely one way is that they should *still* be locked down.
Of course, this is muddied by the evidence that there is more Asian resistance to Covid to begin with?
I smiled a little at that "soldiers delivering meals" - as if we had realized the Jetsons' meal-generating machines.
But I'm overall surprised at the tone of the piece because as disconcerting as the whole experience was, I supposed all of us felt glad we were not in China for the duration. Remember the whole "bolting shut their doors from the outside" business? This could be, maybe was, fake news and I would find it no less disquieting if it represented some impression people had of their confinement.
For a brief moment, if possible, if we set aside the usual political analysis, and look at it from how practitioners and institutions related to immunology, epidemiology, public health are trained and set up, we find lots of common patterns across countries.
For example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
Shows deaths per Capita. Yes some countries lack infrastructure to reliably collect and report stats, but overall it's a decent collection.
Curiously the countries at the top and bottom of the list both had lockdowns. Peru during the initial weeks and New Zealand for an extended period. A big factor was capacity of the health system to treat a sudden increase in infections. Peru had little capacity, for example. Another important factor was level of voluntary compliance, which correlates with more advanced and high-trust societies. The United States was neither the worst nor the best, outcomes closer to Peru than to New Zealand, and I'd guess with about average levels of social strife.
Precautionary measures and protocols are derived from immunology and not from political preferences. Countries around the world instituted these measures to varying degrees, most having never heard of Dr. Fauci or the expression "laptop class".
Lockdowns were implemented largely because no other response was available to a novel virus, people with resources to get other people to take the risks pushed for them, and no government wanted to be seen as doing nothing.
As Guest User points out above, nobody was getting treated in hospitals for COVID. The usual response early in the pandemic of putting people on ventilators was later established to be counterproductive. COVID death rates varied significantly across many different groups based on age and comorbidities, and would need to be factored into any claim the difference in death rate is solely or even significantly influenced by lock down status.
Avoiding people suspected of having a disease is a response to epidemics that humans have been implementing since before recorded history, and is often somewhat successful. What irks me to no end is the 'just so' stories that people keep coming up with to claim that this time the response was driven by some sort of 'spirit of community' or 'rational scientific analysis', and not simply naked fear of the unknown and self-interest, especially since it involved sequestering the healthy rather than the sick.
This is a fair critique imo. I'd say "influenced by reduced community transmission" instead of "solely or even significantly influenced by lock down status". This is almost tautological -- if you can reduce the spread you can reduce the number of infections and reduce the number of people seeking medical care. The purpose was to reduce close contact and it relied almost entirely on voluntary compliance (encouraged through norms). And you do the best you can. It is just the nature of work and unfortunately the status accorded to them where some need to be done on-site and some can be done remotely. Some high-status professions (doctors for example) also needed to do on-site work. As a member of the laptop-class I was perfect happy to go to work (as I have all my life), but the idea was if you can avoid it to unwittingly be a carrier then why not avoid it. You become an additional vector.
I feel relatively so little was asked of us, and yet it is we who complain the loudest!
Re: "the emotion of happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end." — Rob Henderson
This seems mistaken. Genes don't have "an end." States of nature have causes, not ends. Key causes are mechanisms in natural evolution — genetic variation and environmental selection for reproductive fitness.
My intuition is that happiness, usually, is a mental state that is a by-product (side-effect) of other pursuits.
Happiness may be momentary and occasional. Or it may be settled. Some persons are blessed with a sunny disposition. And some persons just want to be unhappy.
Sometimes, one's own happiness is a conscious end (intentional goal), when one forms a long-range plan for a life well-lived, in the belief that such a course will make oneself happy.
Sometimes, the happiness of others is one's goal — and one might find one's own happiness, too, in the end, as a happy by-product of altruism.
His point is to focus on what will enable the gene to reproduce. All emotions, including happiness, are a means to furthering reproduction.
I think Gaza furnishes an interesting example (which, and similar, comes to mind when your anarcho-libertarians wax about how great population growth is, and how much more solvable problems are when it is very, very high).
I believe because of map changes or other issues, the exact figure is uncertain but that Gaza as presently constituted in 1949 held about 80,000 Arabs? But the number doesn't much matter if it is a few tens of thousands more.
Since then while living in supposed conditions of "hell" they've managed to increase their population to 2.1 million. They apparently procreate without regard for plans for a "good life" since their whole schtick is to be miserable and dependent.
From 1949 thru ‘67, Gaza was controlled by Egypt, which did not want to integrate Gazans into Egypt. Pop growth is not always a good measure of the health and especially happiness of the group. But it does indicate genetic thriving.
Too much functionalism — and misleadingly cast in the language of ends (connoting purposes, intentions, goals).
Well put. It is indeed one of those things you do not _directly_ chase. Relatedly, Arthur Schlesinger in his brief essay "The Lost Meaning of 'The Pursuit of Happiness'" argues that for Jefferson and contemporaries "pursuit" meant practicing rather than seeking.
[PDF] https://cooperative-individualism.org/schlesinger-arthur_the-lost-meaning-of-the-pursuit-of-happiness-1964-jul.pdf
"Early in the pandemic, I called for a military-style lockdown. It was a “go big or go home” argument."
There was no pandemic until the government and major institutions created one with lockdowns.
We know this because we lived it! Life was going along perfectly normal and then doing the unthinkable - shutting down to "hide from a virus" - was embraced as the way forward. And yet at the time this plan was launched there was no evidence of a pandemic in the United States nor in most of the world! All that existed was two anecdotes: Wuhan and Lombardy. Yet these two anecdotes became the rational for the American and Western officials to embrace the most self-destructive social policy in the history of the modern world.
The great lie of the Pandemic was that a pandemic existed prior to the greatest interruption ever being imposed on the American people. But once the lockdowns / shutdowns happened and mass testing was initiated, then all of a sudden thousands and tens of thousands were dying of a virus that we literally know now was circulating for months before.
What does it mean that the Covid virus was circulating in the United States months before March 2020? It means we were deceived. It means we were fooled. It means we pointed the gun at ourselves and fired.
There was never much of a 'lockdown' in America, though. The only state that sorta tried it was Hawaii, everyone else barely enforced anything for private gatherings, even in Blue states. Police chiefs almost immediately said they aren't going to bust anyone's door for hosting a private party and travel was never restricted in the lower 48 states.
Europeans, Australians and New Zealand residents suffered a much harsher fate because their police actually agreed to enforce the rules.
"There was no pandemic until the government and major institutions created one with lockdowns."
My rooster causes the sun to come up. I know because every day he crows and then the sun comes up.
QED
Suppose that starting in Fall 2019 there had been a "Covid Test" and everyone took it every day. In that scenario, when would the "Pandemic" have started? What would have been the basis for claiming the lives of the general population were at risk?
All the major decisions to shutdown the USA occurred prior to there being any evidence that American lives were at risk and prior to there being mass availability of a test. One of the first big decisions was the NBA suspended its season when a basketball player literally warmed up for the game and then tested positive. Now there is a deadly disease for you!
The Covid test did not reveal a health risk. It merely showed the presence of a certain DNA. And yet the narrative became that a positive test proved lives were at risk. What if the psychology was different? What if people understood that the presence of viral DNA meant there was no need for alarm and no need for panic?
slavery and gender inequality - It's a nice theory and I'm not inclined to disagree but it would be nice to know how that compares to the Americas pre-colonial. Maybe some Asian areas too.
Gender inequality is nearly worldwide. I suppose at one time slavery was too, though maybe a bit less so [than gender inequality] in the last thousand years. How does one compare the resulting [gender] inequality in Africa to somewhere "different"?
> I estimate that our failed response meant we lost almost 550,000 more lives than we should have to Covid
1. You need to calculate QALYs instead of "lives lost". An 85 year old with dementia dying a few months early is not the same as an 18 year old athlete dying in a car crash.
2. You need to calculate the *costs*, not just the benefits of a lockdown. I.e. the current wave of inflation is one such cost.
And by every imaginable calculation the "let it rip" option comes out on top.
It's truly wild that after everything humanity has learned about respiratory illnesses over the last century -- (not to mention the last 4 years) people still think you can stop the spread of a submicroscopic aerosolized virus through central planning or any other means.
The hope that a severe two week lockdown, or the milder approach of “test and trace”, would be able to eradicate a virus that spreads as fast as flu and had already made global inroads was always a very costly pipe dream. The fact that COVID wasn’t eradicated is no one’s failure.
Lockdowns - If one looks at the countries with lowest mortality rates, the list is dominated by warm weather countries with islands thrown in (also mostly warm except Iceland and Greenland) and maybe a handful of highly authoritarian or compliant countries. US is none of these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
I suspect that Kling's idea of military lockdowns with soldiers delivering meals and running people to hospitals is far from practical. Over the horizon, you can't see practical from here kind of far. The supply chain itself wouldn't be able to hold up. The total number of US military personnel is something like 1.5 million all in. There are approximately 126 million house holds across the US. Even assuming the government has enough food on hand or readily available to feed the entire population for two weeks without having access to private warehouses and stores (because remember, all those people are locked down) that is a little under 100 deliveries per military personnel (active and reserve) to be made over two weeks.
And that is before considering that some of those soldiers are necessary somewhere else, like foreign bases. How many are going to be needed to organize the process on an ongoing basis? How many are going to be needed to be on hand to repair the trucks when they break down? How many are going to be operating dispatch? How many are keeping track of who has delivered what to whom? How many are going to be fielding calls from citizens saying they didn't get a delivery? How many are going to be needed to pack, organize and load out all the food supplies to be delivered?
You will be lucky if if that number doesn't go to 200-400 deliveries per delivering soldier, and more likely it will be in the 800s. Supply chain is really hard, and the US military does not have the infrastructure to get all this done.
Oh, and a fair bit of those house holds are not even in well mapped, legible cities. Some are going to be in pokey little apartments that are hard to find from the street. Some are going to be in rural areas in the middle of no where that just barely have GPS addresses. That all slows things down considerably.
How many people are going to starve over the course of two weeks because the military couldn't find their front door, didn't realize there was someone living there, or just failed to deliver but thought they did?
The task might not be impossible, but a huge amount of infrastructure would have to be in place before you could even begin to attempt it without guaranteed failure.
Not so much "half baked" as mis-baked. Restrictions on movement and venue closings should first of all be con on the basis of local conditions, not even state and surly not national and second on the basis of risks of a particular kind of space (ventilation, crowding, etc.), not the activity conducted there. But CDC never gave local decisionmakers the information they could have used to take cost effective action. FDA's foot dragging meant we did not have cheap screening tests for self isolation, and test to enter regimes. Likewise (CDC or FDA?) resistance to first shot first and fractional dosing when vaccine were in restricted supply.
Vaccines mandates? In principle they are acceptable if they prevent transmission, but that was never clear.
LIkewise we never got a clear massage abut who was being protected by masking of different kind of masks.
Thanks to these CDC/FDA errors, the response became symbolic and political, not cost effective.
See [https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/covid-policy-errors]
Arnold - I hope you won’t call for military style lockdowns again and if you do, I hope people ignore you. Better to listen to Vinay Prisad.
The Will Rinehart piece is a mixed bag.
“I’m not here to praise the Founders—they were at best wise barbarians.” What is a wise barbarian? And compared to Trump or Obama or Biden? I’ll take the Founders.
“Despite recent missteps at some high-profile universities, our education system still ranks at the top in the world. Eight of the 10 best schools globally are located in the U.S. Education, along with opportunity, make this country coveted among immigrants.” What does highly ranked even mean? Like Tyler Cowen says, our universities are dysfunctional. They are also highly politically biased and vulnerable to disruption. I am not a fan of our universities.
“We also need to create opportunities for anti-aging research, enhance ecosystems through wildlife corridors…”. He finishes with a long list of planner/mentality ideas. I’m completely against this type of thinking. We need more freedom not more planning.
"wise barbarians" - yeah, I wonder who - or what - that was a sop to. The meaning is opaque to me as well.
Quite the opposite - if you read their copious personal letters - especially those of Washington - you find in their obsession with personal honor and civility, a pattern (ironically, being rebels - though to be sure it was the king who first declared them so) for the type of Enlightenment hero I think of in connection with what Ford Madox Ford tried to evoke with Christopher Tietjens from "Parade's End", and his alienation from the 20th century.
Or maybe we must now associate such virtues with barbarism, as we must not look for them to come back; they are dangerous in some way to the status quo.
Sorry for the delay. Responding to your comments requires that I look up various words and names. Who are you? :)
I thought the people who required ventilation were those whose lungs were "drowning" due to what we learned was called a "cytokine storm".
I'm not sure very many people get out of a cytokine storm alive so the article is confusing to me, quite apart from the verbiage.
I and my mother live in Oak Ridge, TN. She had an onset of cardiac arrhythmia in July of 2020 and was in an in-patient at the local hospital for a couple of days. The hospital itself was almost completely empty except for a few doctors and nurses. I had been inside this hospital many times over the years prior and it was a bustling place (Oak Ridge is filled with very old white people) with patients in for in-patient procedures, out-patient procedures and tests etc. As far as I could tell, my mother might have been the only patient in the place- I saw no others anywhere- just room after room of empty beds, and this is a large facility.
According to Mother, the word amongst the oldies was *not* to go to a hospital "because then you would never see your children again".
This sort of sentiment is so easy to dismiss when you are not old yourself.
I'm not sure what view that is different from but it is interesting info. Note that much of that reduction in hospital visits could be a reduced need because people were staying in their homes. Regardless, the point still seems valid.
A cost/benefit analysis requires estimating costs, not just benefits. The numbers you quote are estimating benefits without estimating the costs. Hint: they don't do this because such calculations inevitably show that almost all COVID mitigations (with the exception of rapid vaccine development) were a net loss to society.