On Sunday, California became the first state to (re)issue sweeping stay-at-home and lockdown orders. This, in a Groundhog-Day effort to fight the second wave of Covid-19, which is breaking out across the country.
The vast region of Southern California, much of the San Francisco Bay area and a large swath of the Central Valley are about to be placed under a sweeping new lockdown in an urgent attempt to slow the rapid rise of coronavirus cases.
The California Department of Public Health said Saturday the intensive care unit capacity in Southern California and Central Valley hospitals had fallen below a 15% threshold that triggers the new measures, which include strict closures for businesses and a ban on gathering with anyone outside of your own household. The new measures will take effect Sunday evening and remain in place for at least three weeks, meaning the lockdown will cover the Christmas holiday.
(NBC Bay Area, December 6, 2020)
But, as my title indicates, I fear this strategy will prove no more salutary this winter than it did last spring.
Politicians and experts alike seem so fixated on fulfilling their own doomsday prophecies, they seem oblivious to the obvious question: What happens next time?
Are we dimwittingly committing ourselves henceforth to fighting pandemics the way we’re fighting this one — with all of the opportunity costs and collateral damage that would entail each time? After all, we managed to defeat every other pandemic without shutting down the global economy and turning countries into hybrids of ghost cities and police states.
(“Fighting This Coronavirus Is Setting an Untenable Precedent,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 31, 2020)
Mind you, nothing has undermined the credibility of such orders quite like politicians – of all stripes and from every section of the country – continually violating them. This has ranged from the governor of California dining indoors at a restaurant with a large crowd sans mask, to the mayor of Austin flying off on a family vacation.
Of course, no politician has behaved more egregiously in this respect than the president of the United States. Because Trump has willfully ignored CDC rules by doing everything from holding maskless rallies (outdoors but in Covid hot zones), to holding parties and other events (indoors at the White House and jam-packed with nary a mask in sight).
Unfortunately, as the nation’s “Golden Rule” states: As California goes, so goes the country. And other states will surely follow. This, despite clear and convincing evidence that using lockdowns to combat Covid-19 violate the Hippocratic Oath. Because they have shown to be not only unnecessary but harmful – as I presaged in this excerpt from “The Worldwide Lockdown,” March 14, 2020:
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Alas, far too many people are displaying fetishistic yearnings to experience WWII-like conditions. … Of course, WWII lasted six years. I doubt most people can bear living in these semi-quarantined conditions for even six months. This is why stress and anxiety over our radically changed circumstances (especially re jobs and social contacts) will probably end up killing more people than this virus. Indeed, once the novelty of social distancing and self-isolation wears off, mental depression might be competing with economic depression to become a leading cause of death among Westerners …
As I argued in my original commentary, when juxtaposed to the seasonal flu, no closure, quarantine, or state of emergency seems warranted. Yet, given the measures governments the world over are implementing to fight this virus, you’d think we were already in the death throes of not just a 1930s-like depression but a 14th Century-like bubonic plague. My fear is that it is all creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. …
Meanwhile, nothing could prove more controlling and therefore subjugating in this context than prohibiting gatherings for sports, entertainment, educational, ecumenical, and corporate purposes outside the home – as many governments are doing.
Mind you, keeping men quarantined at home with no sports to watch on TV seems a perfect recipe for brewing anti-government resentments. Alas, this also seems a perfect storm for a wave of domestic abuse …
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Sure enough, having suffered an economic depression that rivals the Great Depression of the 1930s and death tolls that could rival the Black Death of the 14th Century, it is fair to say today, prophecy fulfilled. But I cannot overstate that we could have avoided much of the economic pain and many of the Covid deaths.
That is, if only, instead of championing lockdowns, the US government had led the world in simply implementing the four-point plan I laid out in “Medics Complain about Lack of Supplies. Trump Passes the Buck…Again,” March 20, 2020.
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- Outmaneuver all state and local lockdown orders (i.e. to shutdown all non-essential businesses and stay at home) by rescinding his own travel bans. Instead, he should instruct the airline industry to enhance airport screenings/testing and reinforce new socio-hygienic awareness to prevent the spread of this and other viruses as much as practicable.
- Assure the American people that he will marshal all government and private resources to fight this pandemic — just as previous presidents did to fight others like bird flu and swine flu without willfully destroying the economy or needlessly quarantining anyone. That would include using executive authority to a) mass produce test kits to do the kind of “testing, testing, testing!” and contact tracing that are making South Korea’s battle so much more effective; b) mass produce PPEs to make our frontline healthcare soldiers more confident and effective; and c) fast track possible vaccines and treatment therapies to make living with corona similar to living with the flu.
- Tell state and local officials to let the American people get back to work and resume their normal lives. (Not least because I can already smell the smoldering of a French-style revolution in the air during my daily walks. After all, expecting Americans today to stay home and watch nothing on TV except politicians and pundits droning on about a virus is rather like expecting Frenchmen back then to sleep on the streets and eat cake … if they could steal it.)
- Have the surgeon general assure the public not only that common sense is sufficient to determine self-isolation and social distancing, but that over 98 percent of people who get coronavirus survive it after experiencing relatively mild symptoms. But Trump himself should prevail upon the American people to accept wearing masks and washing hands (obsessively) not only as new (patriotic) norms, but as second nature.
All else is folly. That’s why, instead of passing the buck, as Trump has done every day of this crisis, I can think of no better way to show fidelity to his oath of office than to execute these points. And I cannot overstate that, if we can live with the scourge of nicotine and gun violence, we can live with this far less deadly pandemic of coronavirus. Put another way, fighting Covid-19 does not require locking down all economic and social activities — with all of the destabilizing and potentially deadly consequences that portends. Executing these points might not help Trump win re-election, but they might redeem what little regard anyone has ever had for his presidency.
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The problem, alas, is that most people now associate these prophylactic measures with untenable loss – not only of life-sustaining jobs but of democratic freedoms too.
Therefore, imagine my exasperation to hear no less a person than David Nabarro, the World Health Organisation’s special envoy for Covid-19, now parroting my anti-lockdown points. Because here is what he said recently:
It’s terribly damaging for societies to put them into lockdown, it’s not good for anything. So what I’m saying is that there must be better ways to deal with this virus than all the time lurching into lockdown.
The basis for my saying that is the positive experience of what we’re seeing in East Asia where by having defenses [aka my four-point plan] in place for society … you can avoid the need to go into lockdown … you keep life going despite the virus.
(BBC Hardtalk, November 23, 2020)
Truth be told, if I had a dollar for the number of times I’ve had cause to say “I told you so,” I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams. But never before has having cause to say so made me feel more exasperated than vindicated. Because only an unconscionable buffoon like Trump would find some reason to gloat (and golf) despite the global death toll, which the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center tallies (as of this writing) at 1,541,788, and the global economic impact, which the United Nations calculates will be at least $8.5 trillion.
Still, believe it or not, I am humble enough to acknowledge that Dr. Monica Gandhi, the HIV and infectious disease expert at UCSF, has proffered an even more compelling case for prophylactics instead of lockdowns. Simply put, she argues that telling people to lockdown to combat Covid makes about as much sense as it would have been to tell people to stop having sex to fight HIV. Put another way, lockdowns were as doomed to fail as Prohibition was to curb alcoholism, or the ‘Just Say No’ campaign was to combat the ‘War on Drugs.’
To be fair, though, Trump did voice concerns about lockdowns being a cure worse than the disease. Unfortunately, he did not champion any of the defenses Nabarro now wishes Western leaders had emulated East Asian leaders by implementing. Instead, Trump spent much of the time since the outbreak of Covid-19 pretending it would miraculously disappear or did not exist.
Finally, apropos of I told you so, I warned in “Covid-20 Is Coming. What Happens Then…?” on April 23 that, just as the flu vaccine has not prevented tens of thousands from dying each year, a Covid-19 vaccine won’t either. And the experts keep telling us that this coronavirus is at least ten times deadlier than the flu.
But far too many of those same experts are giving the impression that vaccines, which many pharmaceutical companies developed at warp(ed) speed this year, will be a panacea. Because that clearly will not be the case.
Related commentaries:
worldwide lockdown… setting untenable precedent… domestic violence…
four point plan… Covid-20… Covid thread…