The flu season stretches as long as from October to April, although it usually peaks between December and February. In other words, the more effective a lockdown would have been, the more opposed Bennett and Leibsohn would be to it.Īs for the flu comparison, it isn’t as telling as Bennett and Leibsohn believe. If we had shut down the country a month sooner and there had been, say, only 2,000 deaths, then on their terms they’d have even a stronger argument, i.e., “We did all this and there were only a couple of thousand fatalities?”
Of course, it was precisely the actions we took that caused those welcome outcomes.Ĭonsider the perversity of their line of reasoning a different way. We didn’t lock down the country to try to prevent 60,000 deaths we locked down the country to limit deaths to 60,000 (or whatever the ultimate toll is) from what would have been a number multiples larger.īy Bennett and Leibsohn ’s logic, we could just as easily ask: Why did we expend all that blood and treasure fighting Hitler when he couldn’t even take Britain or conquer Moscow? Why did we adopt tough-on-crime policies, when crime rates are at historic lows? Why did we work so hard to find a treatment for HIV/AIDs, when so many of the people with the disease now have normal life expectancies? If we are going to have 60,000 deaths with people not leaving their homes for more than a month, the number of deaths obviously would have been higher-much higher-if everyone had gone about business as usual. This is such an obviously flawed way of looking at the question, it’s hard to believe that Bennett and Leibsohn don’t realize it. For this, they thunder, we’ve scared Americans and imposed huge economic and social costs on the country. Then, they note that about 60,000 people died of the flu in 2017-18. They cite the latest estimate of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state that the current outbreak will kill 68,000 Americans. Paranoia and Fear.” Bennett and Leibsohn are intelligent and public-spirited men whom I’ve known for years, but they’ve got this wrong, and in rather elementary ways. It is titled, tendentiously and not very accurately, “Coronavirus Lessons: Fact and Reason vs. While there’s no doubt there have been absurd lockdown excesses and we should want to return to normal as soon as plausible, the case against the initial shutdowns is unpersuasive-contradictory and based, even now, on denying the seriousness of Covid-19.Ī good example of the genre is an op-ed co-authored by former Education Secretary William Bennett and talk radio host and author Seth Leibsohn. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Ken Buck of Colorado-is slamming the shutdowns as a panicked overreaction and agitating to end them, hoping to drive a wedge between President Donald Trump and his more cautious advisers. A growing chorus on the right-from conservative talk radio hosts to Republican lawmakers like Reps.
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