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We’d Be A Lot Better Off If No-One Had Told The Politicians About COVID. We Could Get On With Our Lives.

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Among those who’ve watched the tragic and needless lockdowns unfold over the last 11 months, a frequent question has come up: what if the coronavirus had spread, but had never been diagnosed or detected? Would life have been any different absent the discovery of what has caused a massive global panic among politicians?

It’s not an unreasonable question. Really, ask yourself what politicians and nail-biting media members would have done 100 years ago if the virus had revealed itself. Since work was a destination for realistically everyone, there’s no way there could have been lockdowns. People would have revolted.

As for deaths, life expectancy was already relatively low in the 1920s. This is relevant when it’s remembered that the coronavirus in a death sense has largely been associated with nursing homes. These homes weren’t very common one hundred years ago, and they weren’t mainly because pneumonia, tuberculosis and other major killers had a tendency to get to us long before we reached old age. Translated, there likely weren’t enough old people in the 1920s for the virus to have had any kind of lethal impact. Due to a lack of old people, the virus perhaps wouldn’t have been discovered in the first place. Think about it.

As this column has long stated, the coronavirus is a rich man’s virus. It’s not just that the rich and generally well-to-do had portable jobs that mostly survived the mindless lockdowns, it’s not just that the break from reality we were forced to endure could have only happened in a rich country, it’s also the case that only in a country and world in which the elderly are truly old would the virus have any notable association with death. People live longer today, and they do because major healthcare advances born of wealth creation made living longer possible. We wouldn’t have noticed this virus 100 years ago. We weren’t rich enough.

Which brings us to a recent article by Leah Rosenbaum at Forbes. She wrote about a NIH paper indicating that almost 17 million coronavirus cases went uncounted last summer. In Rosenbaum’s words, this discovery “suggests the pandemic was much more widespread in the U.S. than previously thought.” Well, of course.

Lest readers forget, the virus began spreading sometime in the fall of 2019, if not sooner. The epicenter is widely thought to have been China, and flights between the U.S. and China, along with flights from China to the rest of the world, were rather numerous right up until 2020.

Considering how connected China was and still is to the rest of the world, logic dictates that the virus was infecting people globally long before politicians panicked. In that case, it’s not surprising that estimates made about the number of infected Americans were always way too low. The virus is said to spread easily, even easier than the flu, and it once again started working its way around the world sometime in 2019.

Notable about its rapid spread is that life went on as it made its way around the world. As the closing months of 2019 make plain, people lived with the virus. What is most lethal to older people isn’t much noticed by those who aren’t old. A rapidly spreading virus was seemingly not much of a factor until politicians needlessly made it one.

Indeed, a virus most lethal to the very old has meek qualities when met by younger people. If they’re infected with it, all-too-many don’t find the symptoms worrisome enough that they actually get tested.

That’s what Rosenbaum’s report seems to indicate. The NIH study covered blood tests of 11,000 Americans who hadn’t been previously diagnosed with Covid-19. Of the participants, 4.6% had Covid-19 antibodies, but their actual infection phase was never apparent to them. This is what Holman Jenkins has been pointing out all along. The number of those infected has always well exceeded estimates precisely because the symptoms of infection haven’t been worth going to the doctor over for the vast majority of those infected.

Looking back 100 years once again, ask yourself how many would have consulted a doctor then if something resembling the coronavirus had been spreading. Or better yet, ask yourself how many would have been tested in a U.S. that was quite a bit poorer relative to today. The questions answer themselves. The virus would have spread rapidly within a younger population in the 1920s, and infected people would have developed immunity.

From Rosenbaum’s report it’s not unreasonable to speculate that far more Americans are immune to the virus than is known, and that the best approach all along would have been freedom. Let people live their lives. More important, let them get infected. For centuries they’ve pursued immunity by – gasp – infecting one another.

So, what would have happened if the coronavirus had gone undetected? We will never know, but it’s not unrealistic to conclude that we have an idea. The virus didn’t suddenly start spreading in March of 2020 just because politicians decided it had. The likelier beginning is 2019. Early 2020 too. Life was pretty normal as a virus made its way around the world then.

Politicians made it abnormal. Let’s never forget the sickening carnage they can create when they find reasons to “do something.”

 

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets

Refusing To Give In To The Absurd Dictates Of Politicians And Experts Is The Only Path To Victory.

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Lest you were hopeful that some semblance of normal life will return in 2021, either due to the development of vaccines or the pandemic fizzling out on its own, the New York Times and 700 epidemiologists have news for you. An article that appeared in the paper on December 4, 2020, entitled “How 700 Epidemiologists are Living Now, and What They Think is Next,” with the subheading “They are going to the grocery store again, but don’t see vaccines making life normal right away,” reveals that most in the profession, or at least the vast majority of those interviewed for the piece, believe that masks and some form of social distancing should continue for years, if not forever.

As an aside, I wonder how these scientists believe groceries arrive at their doorsteps, if not by another human being whose safety is, apparently, less worthy of consideration.

While a minority of epidemiologists interviewed for the article believe that “if highly effective vaccines were widely distributed, it would be safe for Americans to begin living more freely this summer,” these relative optimists are vastly outnumbered by those who think that life should not return to normal for many years, if ever. Indeed, only one third of the 700 plan to “return to more activities of daily life” once vaccinated. The others intend to severely restrict travel, gather only in small groups with close relatives, work from home at least part time, avoid crowded places, and wear a mask, all indefinitely, because they are concerned about the efficacy of a vaccine, as well as issues with respect to distribution and reluctance to get it.

One epidemiologist declares that “[b]eing in close proximity to people I don’t know will always feel less safe than it used to.”

I may not have a background in psychology or psychiatry, but I am fairly confident that before March of 2020, this mentality would have been recognized as some form of ailment of the mind warranting intervention. These epidemiologists implicitly embrace the principle that virus avoidance is a singularly important goal. If not life’s sole priority, it is certainly among its most crucial objectives.

This is a dogma that should be resoundingly rejected. As I (and many others) have written before, there is no reason to assign SARS-CoV-2 a special status as a killer virus, or to view it as significantly worse than many other of the world’s problems that typically go largely unnoticed by educated professionals in the developed world. Over the past year, around 1.5 million deaths worldwide have been attributed to SARS-Cov-2. On average, 1.35 million people die in traffic accidents, 1.7 million people die of AIDS, and 1.4 million of tuberculosis, each year (We know that the counter to this — that if we did not take extreme mitigation measures, the virus would spiral out of control and bodies would be falling in the streets — is not borne out by the reality).

Back to our 700 epidemiologists. Unfortunately, because of their profession – expertise in the incidence, distribution, and control of disease within a population– there is a danger that their ideas will be endowed with undeserved authority. Although not expressly stated, that is, presumably, the article’s objective: to encourage readers to conclude that, if this is what the experts are doing, perhaps I should, too. That is why the Times did not run an article about how 700 lawyers or baseball players or receptionists are living now.

I urge readers not to pay attention to the ideas propagated in that article. These epidemiologists are no better equipped to weigh the competing values that inform how one chooses to live during the coronavirus era than individuals are to make their own choices. To the contrary, we should entirely discount these epidemiologists’ opinions on the topic, as it appears that immersion in the world of infectious disease control has robbed them of perspective.

If you are under 70 and in reasonably good health, there is no reason to rearrange your existence and sacrifice activities that are crucial to your happiness and flourishing in the name of virus avoidance unless, perhaps, that was your lifestyle prior to 2020. And if the concern is others, one could devote resources to saving some of the twenty-five thousand people succumbing to starvation each day or the million children who die annually of malaria, with considerably less disruption to one’s life. It is puzzling that these epidemiologists, so concerned with the spread of coronavirus, have not chosen to devote their time and money to these causes.

Thankfully, more and more people appear to be reaching the same conclusion (including many of the politicians who have been exhorting people to stay home and shaming them for refusing to do so), as evidenced by the fact that only four percent fewer Americans traveled long distances for Thanksgiving than they did last year, and there has been increased resistance to illogical, disruptive measures such as closures of schools, playgrounds, and outdoor dining.

Of course, we are far from triumphing over the oppression inflicted upon us by politicians and so-called experts, but refusing to give into their absurd dictates is the only path to victory. The more of us who reject the idea that avoiding the coronavirus should inform virtually every aspect of life, the harder it will be for these epidemiologists to achieve their goal of making the new normal last forever.

Jenin Younes is a graduate of Cornell University and New York University School of Law and is an appellate public defender in New York City.

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