[August]

Pro-lockdown extremists in denial about why we did it in the first place

By Rich Lowry



We will be in a fight against the novel coronavirus for months, if not years, and yet it is time to declare mission accomplished on one very important goal.
The lockdowns of much of the country were undertaken “to flatten the curve” and largely to prevent the hospital system from being overrun. It was a near-run thing in New York and New Jersey, but the dykes held, thanks to the incredible sacrifices of front-line health workers.
Now, the rhetoric around the shutdowns has shifted, and not very subtly — flattening the curve and saving the hospitals are “out,” and not allowing any additional cases to emerge is “in.”
It’s difficult to remember, but flattening the curve was never supposed to be about eradicating the disease. A piece in the progressive Web site Vox featured a widely circulated version of the flattening-the-curve graph and noted that shutdown measures “aren’t so much about preventing illness but rather slowing down the rate at which people get sick.”
A viral Medium piece published in mid-March famously called the period of lockdowns to squelch the disease, the Hammer, and the subsequent period of living with it after the worst had been averted, the Dance. The article didn’t deny the seriousness of the disease; if anything, it was alarmist. Yet by the standards of the current debate, the piece is unacceptably lax.
“The time needed for the Hammer,” it said, “is weeks, not months.” After that, it predicted, “our lives will go back close to normal.” And it contemplated living in a fuzzy realm of trade-offs between important goals — or, as the author put it, “a dance of measures between getting our lives back on track and spreading the disease, one of the economy vs. health care.”

https://nypost.com/2020/05/04/pro-lo...e-first-place/