After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.
Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.
These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Defining Ideas article, “Looking Back at COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes,” Defining Ideas, March 14, 2024.
Another excerpt:
That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.
Read the whole thing, which is longer than usual.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas L Hutcheson
Mar 15 2024 at 9:27am
The unfortunate thing about the restrictions is that the opposition to them was on “principle” their restriction of freedom. But since there was also the “principle” of regulating the externality of spreading infection, the net reul was zero effective opposition.
Opposition should have taken the route of demanding that CDC give individuals and local public policy makers the information and FDA the tools (cheap screening tests) so that THEY could make cost effective decisions and be criticized for them.
Not only did this error lead to unnecessary costs, but unnecessarily made COVID a national political issue.
Jon Murphy
Mar 15 2024 at 10:09am
That’s factually incorrect. Freedom was one argument, but the biggest by far is how damaging lockdowns would be to health, learning development, etc.
That was the argument. But, as your first sentence points out unintentionally, that argument was portrayed as “they just don’t want to do their part.”
Thomas L Hutcheson
Mar 16 2024 at 4:47pm
I mean that opposition to policies was not couched as not worth the benefit or that there were alternative, less costly ways of achieving the same benefits. If one discusses the costs without comparing them to the benefits, the appearance is that one places no value on the benefits.
And I truly mean this as unfortunate. I think most policies were unnecessarily costly. Even vaccine development — certainly the most successful policy — could have benefitted from a more cost-benefit approach.
Jon Murphy
Mar 17 2024 at 8:11am
Again, incorrect. See the Great Barrington Declaration for just one example.
Jon Murphy
Mar 15 2024 at 10:12am
Check out my paper Cascading Expert Failure. In it, I document how there was a deliberate policy choice by the FDA to restrict information and promote poor information.
Craig
Mar 15 2024 at 10:51am
The public debate surrounding it was just another example of just how dysfunctional this nation’s discourse has become.
steve
Mar 15 2024 at 11:31pm
Is there a non-paywall access to the paper.? Early on we didnt have enough tests available so you would have been advocating between surveillance testing and testing to see who actually had covid. Taking the tests away to do surveillance testing may have hampered care early on. That’s a tough trade off to make. On the mask thing while I think Fauci was well intentioned when he lied it’s just not a good thing to do. I can tell you as one on the front line people were selling black market N-95s for hundreds of dollars very early, well ahead of Fauci’s lie so not really sure how much difference in made or costs or access to masks. It did cause a credibility hit.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Mar 16 2024 at 8:17am
True. The epidemiologists were arguing we needed randomized testing to get the characteristics of the disease. When the CDC/FDA ordered that tests only be used for hospital patients, that naturally led to the disease looking more deadly than it was. That information was fed into the models, which were then used to justify lockdowns and other destructive behaviors.
steve
Mar 16 2024 at 9:47am
One of the reasons I would like to actually see your paper is that most practitioners wanted surveillance testing to be done. The lack of it from our POV meant that we were vastly underestimating the prevalence of covid. For many people the symptoms were very non-specific and mild. Your conclusion that it caused an overestimation is a unique one I have never seen before so interested in seeing your math/methods.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Mar 16 2024 at 10:11am
I’m at a conference right now. Drop me an email (jonathan.murphy@nicholls.edu) and I’ll send you the paper.
To be clear, the overestimation was in the danger of the disease, not the prevalence.
Craig
Mar 15 2024 at 10:46am
“After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way)”
And you chose California? Strains credulity. 😉 There’s this place called Florida. There’s 500k people from UK residing in FL alone now and 2.5mn Canadians who own homes whether resident or just snow birds.
Henri Hein
Mar 15 2024 at 1:24pm
He moved in 1972, when California was much freer than it is now. It even had a Republican governor! But I believe David did not move straight to California anyway.
Craig
Mar 15 2024 at 3:33pm
Wow, I wonder if Ricardo Montalban met him as he got off the plane?
David Henderson
Mar 15 2024 at 2:20pm
Actually, Henri has the date right but the location wrong. I moved to Los Angeles in September 1972 to get my Ph.D. at UCLA.
Craig
Mar 15 2024 at 3:36pm
I was close to winding up out there as well. Dated a 6’3″ blonde bombshell from Laguna Niguel. She dumped me on New Year’s Eve on the strip in Vegas. True story, probably because she was a smart woman.
TMC
Mar 15 2024 at 11:22am
While I guess we did do better than Canada, our officials really took the opportunity to seize power. Too much deference was given to the non political parts of the government, at the federal level, showing they type of people who are attracted to government service. I am glad most of the restrictions were left up to the states, proving the 50 experiments model is superior. I have no animosity to those who wanted a 1 month shutdown. We had to understand what we were dealing with. After that, or even 2 months out of an abundance of caution, things should have opened up. What they did to the kids is reprehensible as we quickly knew they we not being harmed, nor were harming others.
David Henderson
Mar 15 2024 at 2:24pm
I agree basically.
I do want to challenge you on one thing. You write:
I don’t have animosity either. I just strongly believe, and believed then, that they were wrong. I have this argument a lot with my one of best friends, and I feel zero animosity towards him on this. But I think people who said we should lock down for one month were being naive about how government works. Once those government officials found they could get away with it, many of them were not willing to let go. By the way, I criticized lockdowns in a radio interview on KCBS in San Francisco in March 2020.
Craig
Mar 15 2024 at 3:49pm
“But I think people who said we should lock down for one month were being naive about how government works. ”
The flip side of that is that the government would want you out there working and producing taxes anyway, no?
TMC
Mar 15 2024 at 5:35pm
“naive about how government works” Yes, you are correct. I’m not sure how I can reconcile it myself, but the thought that Covid could have been much worse weighs on me too. I suppose you are right.
steve
Mar 15 2024 at 11:48pm
Two things.
“The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested.” We had not had a global pandemic with a respiratory virus since the early 1900s. How were we supposed to do studies in the absence of prior pandemics?
Flatten the curve was, from my POV, an attempt to explain what was trying to be accomplished in an easy to understand manner with a simple graph. There was some truth to it as many hospitals were overrun early on. However, since it was a new disease we were also looking for ways to delay people getting sick until we had better ways to treat the disease and/or until we had a vaccine. Within 3 months we had reduced the death rate for inpatient covid by 30% to 50%. So extending the lockdowns for a while likely had a pretty positive effect on death rates. If we had been willing to enforce them as strictly as say China we could have probably had much, much lower death rates.
However, our lockdowns were actually pretty loose and enforcement was spotty. Lockdowns were actually determined at the state level or city/county level and enforced locally. So what really happened is that in states where they were unpopular they ended pretty early. In states where they were supported they sometimes lasted pretty long. IMO some places had them way longer than was merited. So while I have some concerns about medicine being regulated at the state level what it meant in this case is that states that rejected masking and lockdowns could do so and they just accepted higher death rates. States that prioritized those measures generally had lower death rates. Like most of economics it was about the trade offs.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Mar 16 2024 at 8:20am
Pandemics of diseases, and respiratory diseases in particular, are very common. Indeed, I can think of two outbreaks of coronaviruses just in my lifetime (the past 35 years): SARS and MERS. The WHO studied lockdowns and in an October 2019 report determined they were highly destructive with no clear benefits.
steve
Mar 16 2024 at 9:58am
We had not had a global pandemic as I noted in the prior sentence and probably should have repeated in that sentence also but thought it would be understood. SARS and MERs were not global. Though more deadly than covid Their R was very low so it was very difficult to spread. In order to have a real pandemic you need to have a highly infectious organism. With SARS there was only a total of about 8000 cases during 2002-2003. In China it was about 5000 which out of about 1 billion people or 0.0005%. (Really, it’s so many zeros I just guesstimated.) Hard to call that a pandemic. Since its fatality rate was about 10% it got a lot fo coverage and generated a lot of fear.
Anyway, out of this we developed a good plan for handling diseases that are not very infectious but kill a lot of people, kind of like what we did with Ebola.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Mar 16 2024 at 10:12am
I did ignore the “global” part because it was irrelevant (also untrue). The point remains.
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