Why DeSantis’s Covid Policy Remains Relevant

America’s still living with the damage done by lockdowns. Now China’s endgame is coming.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.. Excerpts:

"Columbia University’s Jeffrey Shaman and colleagues produced a study in 2016-18 showing that only 5% of cold-symptom sufferers and 21% of people with flu-like symptoms sought medical attention.

Had the data been available in the pandemic’s earliest days, it would have reinforced what should have been everybody’s first assumption after reflecting on their own medical behavior. If most people with mild symptoms weren’t seeing doctors, not only was Covid less deadly than being reported, it was likely already out of the bag globally and unstoppable even in countries where it had yet to be formally identified.

And any epidemiologist would have told you as much in the first weeks, before it became systematically necessary to pretend something else for political reasons. You can still see the results in certain journalistic accounts three years later, framed by a presumption that only the terrible incompetence and failure of our leaders allowed Covid to spread at all. In his latest book, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward portrays himself demanding of then-President Donald Trump, our failing national daddy, “Do something!”

The story of Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is the story, in contrast, of a grown-up. After initially adopting stringent measures, he returned to first questions. Was the virus stoppable? Would trying materially pay off in terms of reduced mortality and suffering? No, he concluded. As a result, Florida experienced roughly the same Covid outcomes as other states while piling on fewer of the costly, impotent gestures that were adopted elsewhere mainly to show that politicians were very, very concerned."

"As the Atlantic Monthly delicately put it long after the fact, “Do strict lockdowns simply fail the cost-benefit analysis?” The accumulating answer appears to be strongly: “Yes.” Our authoritarian heroics only left communities poorer, more crime-ridden, and with the next generation’s prospects damaged by interrupted schooling."