Do We Understand Covid Yet? Part Two

Our pandemic outcome would have been better with more debate, less censorship

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"In late January and early February 2020, I channeled what experts were thinking about the then-novel coronavirus. Most infections were mild or even asymptomatic and weren’t being properly counted. The virus was likely already rampant in places it wasn’t yet detected, like New York City. It couldn’t be stopped at a cost a sane humanity would be willing to pay. It was also far less deadly than was being reported.

But then things turned weird. This balanced assessment, roughly universal among experts, was shelved in a bandwagon frenzy that deserves more attention than it’s gotten. Dr. Anthony Fauci, in a recent interview with the New York Times, insists it wasn’t him but politicians who opted for lockdowns and school closures. His remarks, though widely panned, provide part of the answer: Voters and elected officials didn’t want realism in handling Covid. They wanted a fantasy about the virus being defeated."

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from day one explained that most Americans would encounter the virus in a matter of months. This advice was eventually scrubbed from the CDC website perhaps because this column mentioned it too many times, but it continued to appear on other government websites, including those of the U.S. military."

"Covid’s defining feature wasn’t lethality but speed and ease of spread. Covid’s threat to the social order lay primarily in the number of cases that might hit medical providers at the same time. Looking back, the explosions in Wuhan, Northern Italy and New York City seem best explained by a virus rampant in populations that hadn’t yet been warned about its existence, and by medical providers accidentally helping to transmit it to the most vulnerable."

"Our steps did not significantly impede its spread even as our efforts miraculously quashed the annual flu. In year two, despite vaccination, as many Americans died as in year one. Yet further healthcare meltdowns were avoided. Vaccines clearly saved lives; if lockdowns and masking mandates contributed by keeping people alive until they could be vaccinated, though, the effect is hard to sort out from the voluntary measures an informed public would have taken anyway."

"Among the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid, their average age was 74 and they lost 12 years of life. Nobody yet knows the total years lost to younger people due to “excess deaths” from substance abuse, suicide, homicide, accidents, lack of cancer screening and other non-Covid causes. Only with the arrival of the Biden administration did it become expedient to acknowledge a truth known from the start: The virus was something we would have to “live with,” not defeat with indiscriminate social and economic curbs."