Three years ago, on a metro ride home on March 9, I scrolled through tweets documenting overwhelmed emergency rooms in Italy. The next morning, March 10, I canceled my planned trip to Ohio, which was to include a campus speech and covering
Joe Biden
and Bernie Sanders speeches. Within hours, the campus where I was supposed to speak canceled all events, as did Biden and
Bernie
.
On the evening of March 11, Tom Hanks and NBA player Rudy Gobert announced they had COVID. The NBA and the NHL suspended their seasons, and suddenly, we realized what was about to happen: Everything was going to get canceled. In that moment, mass closure of life made sense to me.
I wrote
this
:
Every major public event that happens — every NHL game, every preseason game, every parade, every conference, every protest, every Mass — has a likelihood of spreading the virus not only to attendees but then to those who subsequently come into contact with the attendees.
If would-be attendees stay closer to home, they prevent (or at least delay) the spread of the virus from the places where it’s already present to cities and towns where it’s absent. If you keep your kids home from school, they are less likely to get it and less likely to give it to someone else. If you cancel your pick-up basketball games, you decrease the odds that your neighbor with the coronavirus will give it to others.
According to
models
, a 25% reduction in contacts yields a 50% reduction in infections….
I granted at the time that the lockdowns might be an overreaction, but in March and early April, I went along with them. Personally, my family stayed away from other families. Professionally, I tried to
convey
to my readers that “the coronavirus” wasn’t merely a flu.
I had even
expressed
wary openness to school closures.
I never doubted that the lockdowns would do harm. I
wrote
on March 12, “The coronavirus shutdown will hurt America on a far deeper level. It will exacerbate our most acute preexisting condition: the cancer of loneliness and alienation.”
The public, I wrote, has “been ‘social distancing’ for decades, and the result is an affliction as lethal as the coronavirus. Now that social distancing appears necessary in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, it will get worse, right when we need each other the most.” “Loneliness, isolation, and alienation are deadly,” I added.
Knowing the harms of isolation and alienation, why didn’t I immediately oppose these lockdowns with all my heart? Why was it mid-April before I started to
buck
at harmful and
pointless
closures?
For starters, there were those videos from northern Italy and the threat of exponential growth. It seemed in March that the virus spread without ceasing and that it killed a huge portion of those infected.
But also — and this is where I should have known better — I believed the public health officials when they said the government interventions would be targeted and brief. I believed “
15 days to slow the spread
.” I believed the “flatten the curve” story. I believed that our government officials were “trusting science.”
I shouldn’t have believed any of this, of course, because it was wrong. The government will grab power whenever possible. Bureaucrats and policymakers will always promise limited interventions and humble aims before shifting the goalposts to extend their interventions without limit.
I started to become radicalized against lockdowns in late April, when commentators began defending even restrictions that they understood to have no effect on slowing the spread. Newspapers and prominent politicians made it clear that they had never believed that “flattening the curve” was the goal.
New York has fewer new cases every day. The rest of the U.S. has a plateau or a slight increase. So the rest of us did exactly what we were supposed to do. NY is the model of failure. Yet we’re being scolded? https://t.co/4o2R6mN3d8
— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) May 7, 2020
CNN and the New York Times praised states such as New Jersey and New York that had very high, very steep infection curves that then dissipated quickly, and attacked states such as Florida that had slow, steady curves that in turn lasted longer. “Flatten the curve” was like the “weapons of mass destruction” of the Iraq War. The easy story was used to sell an unprecedented intervention.
Soon enough, the arguments for lockdowns were based, implicitly, on the impossible: zero COVID.
It took me until late April or early May 2020 to realize that the lockdowns wouldn’t work, that the lockdowners were pretending to know things they didn’t know, and that lockdowns had more moral significance than medical significance. The lockdowns had become not a way to stop the spread but to show that you felt really bad about people dying from COVID — and that was never a good enough reason for ruining everyone’s lives.
Knowing how governments and moral panics work, I should have known all of that in March. I pray I never make the mistake of trusting our government and our media that much again.
