While these cases illustrate that some people and processes have been broken by COVID, they are relatively trivial. At the outer extreme, you could reside in a place like Australia where police will beat you bloody for failing to comply with draconian limitations on your movement. You know, to protect your health. Here in the States, we aren’t so brutish. Instead, our leaders fire health care workers when they are supposedly in short supply for refusing to be vaccinated. But perhaps the most outrageous news of late is a report by a Brown University pediatrics researcher suggesting that children born during the pandemic suffer from developmental gaps so significant, they are usually characteristic of cognitive disorders.

The good news is that our experts have finally started to acknowledge that there is little value in obsessively tracking new cases of COVID, and that we should instead focus on deaths and hospitalizations. Of course, non-experts could have told them long ago that this ‘learn to live with COVID’ approach was more sensible. Ordinary people still remember when the shared understanding was that everyone would likely get COVID at some point, and the modest goal was to avoid overloading the health care system.

The expert class brought about not a Great Restructuring of our lives, but a Great Restriction. They psychologically shattered people by promoting crippling fear of a virus that thankfully leaves most of us unharmed. They hobbled the economy and our ability to get the goods and services we need. They isolated our children and made them stupider. They have ruined lives in ways for which there can be no recompense. All the while, they have peddled the idea that we have been presented with some opportunity for a better life.