So it’s been a rough week around here and I didn’t really have the time or energy to sit down and write a long essay. But some of the stuff I was busy with did give me some thoughts.

…This weekend was also host to “Mardi Growl,” a Knoxville parade in which dog owners and their pets parade in costume through downtown. Three years ago, Helen and I had rented a condo downtown for the weekend for a getaway and Mardi Growl was underway, and I remember thinking at the time that this coronavirus thing was likely to shut down events like that for a couple of months. And, in fact, a week or two later the city was locked down and the University went suddenly online over Spring Break. (I took my seminar out to a bar for their last meeting before the break because I had a suspicion that they might not be seeing themselves, or me, in person for a while.)

I was right about all that, though it was worse than I anticipated. And yet Covid was, it turned out, not as bad as I anticipated. In the early days, I was a Covid hawk, but I was wrong to be. It seemed right at the time. The Chinese called it a “grave” threat, and their tendency had always been to downplay bad things in China. There were reports of death rates ranging from 4% to 10%.

Sure, Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi and Bill DeBlasio were telling us not to worry and go visit Chinatown, but I lacked confidence in them. (Hey, I was right about that.) They reversed course like a week later.

It turned out, of course, that Covid’s mortality rate was significantly less than 1/10 of those early reports, and those deaths were mostly concentrated among the obese, the elderly, and those with heart failure and diabetes. (Even in those early days, just about exactly three years ago now, my yoga teacher told me that her son-in-law, an ER doc in New Orleans, said that all his Covid ICU patients were morbidly obese). Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, really, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience, and colossal economic destruction.

In retrospect, I should have been more skeptical. It’s hard to believe that I, of all people, trusted the government too much, but there you are. Well, lesson learned.