Don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say here. I think some form of slow down / quarantine / stay at home / social distancing rule was right and necessary (even though probably unconstitutional). The medical experts say this is a very contagious and deadly virus, and without a pause of some kind, the death toll could have been very bad.
Having said that, the after-action review is going to be interesting. (If it’s honest.)
There are a lot of strange components to this story.
People who are dying from other causes, who are also infected with coronavirus, are being counted as having died from coronavirus. Is that right?
I’ve also heard that suicides are way up. Losing your job can push some people over the edge, and lots of people have lost their jobs. So it’s not just “the economy vs. saving lives,” as some people have said. It’s one kind of harm vs. another kind of harm.
And then there are the models. The models were used to scare us into hibernation, and now that they’ve turned out to be very wrong, they’re spinning it as “that’s how bad it would have been if we hadn’t taken measures.”
Yeah. I don’t believe it. I think the models took mitigation measures into account.
So will someone review the models to see what went wrong?
Once this whole thing clears up, we’re going to need a multi-disciplinary, non-partisan panel of experts to look over it all and figure out what really happened.
And re: my comment above about the various government orders being unconstitutional, I think it’s possible to say that some of them were both necessary and unconstitutional. Which means we need to clarify how to handle such emergencies in the future.
Somewhat along these lines, this is an interesting read: The Stress Pandemic.