We’ve had a year of a smothered human existence in reaction to COVID, with some advocating its extension with no end in sight. I’m starting to worry about what we have done to ourselves. Our understandable desire for an immediate, near-term gain – stop the pandemic cold – probably has come at the expense of a long-term slide into a more desperate reality. What we did was novel, and worryingly portentous. In the end, we neither stopped the pandemic with the shutdowns, or the costs. Dark clouds loom.
To this day, it’s surprising to me how blithely the population accepted the decrees from political figures who are inherently enthralled by a new class of janissary, the bureaucratic “expert”. It’s the bane of Progressives: they can’t help themselves. They long ago surrendered their judgment, and the independent judgment of free citizens in a free republic, to blinkered specialists with great power.
Now look at what it’s gotten us. These lockdown measures – universal mask-wearing, shutdowns of life, school closures, an amputated social existence – may have irreparably damaged our children’s psyche and their long-term prospects. What have we done to our kids after a year, or more, of sentencing them to solitary confinement during an important slice of their developmental years?
The worries don’t stop there. Others have tried to put numbers to the future devastation. Taking into account the avoided medical procedures, sacrificed productivity and earnings, disrupted educations, isolation-induced stress and abuse, the National Bureau of Economic Research calculates a 3% increase in the mortality rate and .5% drop in life expectancy in the next 15 years. Stretched out over 350 million people, that’s a carpet-bombing of a noticeable portion of the commonwealth.
And just think, none of these measures stopped the disease, if you compare jurisdictions across the country who varied quite dramatically in their response. No discernable positive impact can be detected for the worst that the likes of Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer – and now Biden – have inflicted on their people. It came down to herd immunity – something disparaged by those in a panic – which was facilitated by the discovery of a vaccine.
Shutdowns, social distancing, and mandatory mask-wearing look to be, at this juncture, irrelevant . . . and destructive. And remember, that’s not all: the hyperinflation of 1923 Weimar Germany may be waiting in the wings. All the chickens haven’t fully roosted yet.
RogerG