The American response to the Covid pandemic was an unprecedented disaster— surely the costliest public-policy mistake ever made in peacetime—but most of the politicians, public-health officials, scientists, and journalists responsible still refuse to acknowledge the damage they caused. Many still pretend that the lockdowns and mandates were effective. Others argue that they did the best they could under the circumstances and dismiss critics as partisans trying to score political points. It’s time, they plead, for all of us to move on…
The Big Fail totes up the lockdown’s damages and shows that they enriched Silicon Valley’s corporate behemoths and protected the affluent and well-educated. At the same time, they disproportionately harmed small businesses and the vulnerable groups liberals profess to care about. While many private schools stayed open in blue states, most public schools closed, leading to drastic declines in student scores, particularly in high-poverty areas. Six thousand restaurants in New York State and 20,000 businesses in California closed permanently. Nationally, 2.5 million restaurant workers permanently lost their jobs. High school graduates’ unemployment rate soared to 17 percent, a number even higher among black and Hispanic workers and twice the college graduate unemployment rate.
“Maybe—maybe—the social and economic disasters that lockdowns created would have been worth it if they had saved lives,” the authors write. “But they hadn’t. Imposed without any prior evidence of their efficacy, lockdowns helped ‘flatten the curve’ in the short term, which was certainly beneficial for beleaguered hospitals, but their long-term utility was negligible. To look at a list of countries and their death tolls, you would scarcely be able to guess which ones used lockdowns as a mitigation strategy and which ones didn’t.”
ConservativeChick
Article URL : https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-covid-catastrophe