Was Killing the American Economy Absolutely Necessary?
Article written by William Sullivan in "The American Thinker":
Like
it or not, this is a question that will continue to be asked, and the
terrible answer has already begun to take a convincing shape.
Recently, Fox News analyst Brit Hume told
Shannon Bream that “it’s time to consider the possibility” that “this
lockdown -- as opposed to more moderate mitigation efforts -- is a
colossal public policy calamity.” He goes on to reference the millions
of jobs, businesses, and incomes lost, and further mentions the negative
“effect on children who don’t have a normal life,” concluding that “we
may never recover from many of these losses for a very long time if
ever.”
He’s
far from the first to muse on the question. Back on March 20, Dr.
David Katz, the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention
Research Center, argued
in the New York Times that our fight against the novel coronavirus
could prove worse than the disease. Armed with what was then the latest
data available from South Korea, he brilliantly argues against the
holistic social and economic lockdown on the grounds that the evidence
clearly showed that only specific demographics were significantly
at-risk of being hospitalized or dying from infection. The evidence
we’d already seen in America had “entirely aligned with the data from
other countries,” he writes, which suggested that deaths were “mainly
clustered among the elderly, those with significant chronic illnesses
such as diabetes and heart disease, and those in both groups.”
He concludes with a warning:
A pivot right now from trying to protect all people to focusing on the most vulnerable remains entirely plausible. With each passing day, however, it becomes more difficult. The path we are on may well lead to uncontained viral contagion and monumental collateral damage to our society and economy. A more surgical approach is what we need.
Those words should be chiseled on the tombstone of this once-booming Trump economy.
Indeed,
in the early days when Dr. Katz offered his prescription, there was
time to tailor public policy to “protect the truly vulnerable” and
restore a “sense of calm” to society, while allowing the vast majority
of people to “develop mild coronavirus infections,” thus advancing
“natural herd immunity.” Now, well over a month since the lockdowns
began, turning Americans’ social and financial lives back toward
normalcy has proven to be about as smooth as a battleship reversing
course amidst a sea of jagged icebergs. And keeping this ship afloat is
proving costly, with Congress mulling a fourth phase of stimulus spending that could exceed an additional $1 trillion, and the Fed is promising
to deploy “its full range of tools” to support the U.S. economy as our
response to the coronavirus pandemic continues to keep it crippled.
This
raises an interesting question. If we Americans didn’t maintain a
popular delusion that our government has an unlimited supply of money to
print and throw at any given problem, might we have been compelled to
approach things differently? And if we had approached this pandemic
with “more moderate mitigation efforts” rather than destroying the
economy and placing much of the populace under house arrest, would the
health outcome have been vastly different?
Well, Sweden responded to the pandemic without shutting down its society or economy, and it hasn’t become Italy. Florida didn’t institute a “draconian statewide lockdown,” and it hasn’t become New York. What does that tell us?
Just
weeks ago, the notion that all-inclusive public lockdowns of healthy
Americans “save lives” was assumed to be a given. In fact, California’s
low number of cases and deaths relative to New York was commonly attributed to it having locked down a couple of days before New York did. But as T.J. Rodgers writes
as the Wall Street Journal, how quickly economies shuttered in response
to Covid-19 “appears not to be a factor” in the severity of their
respective outbreaks.
“We
ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to
shutdown,” he writes, “which ranged from minus-10 days (some states
shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one
of seven states with limited or no shutdown.”
“The
correlation coefficient was 5.5% -- so low that the engineers I used to
employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to
find the real cause of the problem.” While he concedes that New York,
given its “population density or subway use,” may have uniquely
benefited from its shutdown, “blindly copying New York’s policies” in
other places “doesn’t make sense.”
Perhaps
even more important is the example of Sweden. The policies it adopted
are “much less economically destructive than the lockdown in most U.S.
states” or its neighboring countries. Knowing the demographic targets
of the disease, “Sweden asked only senior citizens to shelter in place,”
while the rest of the country continued operating stores, restaurants,
and most businesses. The Volvo plant was shut down for a brief time,
but has since reopened, “while the Tesla plant in Fremont, Calif., was
shuttered by police and remains closed,” which is among the many factors
which prompted Silicon Valley tech tycoon Elon Musk to openly characterize California’s lockdown policy as “unconstitutional, outrageous, and fascist.”
The
toll on Sweden’s economy was mild compared to ours, to say the least,
but what of its Covid-19 toll? Much in keeping with the other data
we’ve long seen, the virus harmed a very specific demographic, and not
significantly more so than other countries which completely locked down.
“Sweden’s
death rate,” writes Rodgers, “without a shutdown and massive
unemployment -- is lower than that of the seven hardest-hit U.S.
states,” all of which, “except Louisiana, shut down in three days or
less.” Relative to its European neighbors, Sweden is “in the middle of
the pack.” Its death rate per million is “comparable to France; better
than Italy, Spain, and the U.K.; and worse than Finland, Denmark, and
Norway.”
Rodgers concludes:
We should cheer for Sweden to succeed, not ghoulishly bash them. They may prove that many aspects of the U.S. shutdown were mistakes -- ineffective but economically devastating -- and point the way to correct them.
The data show that the Swedes quite possibly got it right, and we very likely got it wrong. How did that happen?
Johan Giesecke, the former State Epidemiologist for Sweden, gives us a clue.
Consider
that our own Dr. Anthony Fauci was, on or around March 10, moved to
push for “sweeping new recommendations” to “sharply limit” Americans’
social and commercial activities as a result of Imperial College of
London’s epidemiological model, which predicted that 2.2 million
Americans could potentially die without “drastic restrictions on work,
school and social gatherings for periods of time until a vaccine was
available, which could take 18 months,” according to the New York Times.
Epidemiological
models are notoriously unreliable. Even those that defend their
usefulness readily admit that fact, as Zeynep Tufekci perplexingly writes at The Atlantic: “Right answers are not what epidemiological models are for.”
Professor
Giesecke, similarly, explains that such models are “very good for
teaching,” but they “seldom tell you the truth.” And perhaps that’s why
he and his successors advocate crafting public policy in response to
what they can discern as truth, rather than in response to outlandishly
predictive and academic models.
Not
only does Professor Giesecke seem to understand the nature of
epidemiological models better than Dr. Fauci, but he also seems to
better understand the societal and economic impact of the lockdowns,
which Dr. Fauci has flippantly referred to as “inconvenient from a societal standpoint, from an economic standpoint.”
Over
half of the Covid-19 deaths in Sweden occurred in nursing homes, and
Johan Giesecke admits that “there are many things that could have done
better a couple of months ago” to protect that group of Swedes. But
asked whether he believes that the lockdowns seen around the world are
misguided, and whether they have the potential to do more harm than
good, he’s quite clear:
Yes. I think so, on the whole. What I’m saying is that people who will die a few months later are dying now and that’s taking months from their lives so that’s maybe not nice. But comparing that to the effects of the lockdown… what am I most afraid of? It’s the dictatorial trends in eastern Europe; Orban is now dictator of Hungary forever; there’s no finishing that. I think the same is popping up in other countries; it may pop up in other more established countries as well. I think the ramifications can be huge from this.
All
of this presents a serious problem for anyone defending the continued
assault on the world’s largest economy in favor of widespread social and
commercial lockdowns to combat Covid-19.
In
spite of the efforts of those who have a vested interest in justifying
the lockdowns and the economic damage, the truth is snowballing, and it
all suggests a very disturbing conclusion -- America could have achieved
a similar health outcome without destroying millions of businesses,
incomes, and lives, without weakening our nation’s fiscal solvency by
trillions of dollars, and most importantly, without compromising our
most fundamental American rights.
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