The failures of the legacy media, the Left, and the experts during COVID carried enormous consequences. We’re only beginning to understand just how harmful shutting down the country for months on end to combat a virus with a 98% survival rate was. I can’t possibly cover all the consequences of lockdowns and beyond here. But I think it’s important to try to capture what we’re already seeing.
And of course that isn’t to say that all the damage inflicted on American life in recent years was attributable to lockdowns. A global pandemic caused plenty of damage, too, and it can be hard to unwind specific causality from the multicausal calamity. I’ve tried to delineate where harm stemmed from as a result of mitigation efforts – versus consequences of COVID directly – as much as possible.
Perhaps most depressing of all is we knew – or should have known – so many of the consequences of shelter-in-place restrictions and other harsh attempts at mitigation before the decisions were made to extend the lockdowns beyond the initial 15 days; before schools were closed (and in some cases, re-closed); before social isolation, rather than a virus, destroyed so many lives.
In December 2020, in a piece titled “What Has Lockdown Done to Us?” for the New York Times, I tried to raise some of the reasons why the instinct to reinflict severe mitigation efforts was misguided. From the health and social consequences of shelter-in-place restrictions to the downsides of remote learning, we had every reason, early in 2020, to be wary of just how much harm lockdowns could do. Even so, as I was writing the piece five and a half years ago, states were considering – and in some cases, reanimating – lockdowns all over again.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member