
Covid has killed millions, and trampled the freedom of billions. For me, the main horror has been the paranoid reaction to the disease, rather than the disease itself. Much of the social life I built for myself before Covid evaporated during 2020. But since this is Thanksgiving Week, I’m reflecting on all the ways that my life has improved since Covid. And the list is not short. Necessity is the mother of invention – and never before have I felt such an urgent need to reinvent my life.
Here are my top positive changes since March, 2020.
1. As a direct result of Covid, I spent about three months in Texas with my family. A great chance to savor this beautiful and action-packed state – and to escape most of the Covid madness of northern Virginia.
2. During my visits, I made dozens of new friends, and took several pre-existing friendships to the next level.
3. My best friends in Texas made herculean efforts on my behalf. The great Steve Kuhn lent my family his house, and my friends at UT offered ample office space and lunch companionship. And they were happy to let their kids play with my kids before any of us were vaccinated. The same goes for Ben Powell over at Texas Tech.
4. I’ve spent far more time than ever before with successful entrepreneurs. I’ve gotten to see first-hand how they think – and how much they do for all of us. Quick version: When I hear normal people tell me their business ideas, my reaction is almost always, “That’s a terrible idea. Don’t waste a penny on it.” When I hear brilliant entrepreneurs like Steve Kuhn tell me their business ideas, my reaction is almost always, “Maybe!”
4. My six-year homeschooling experiment came to a resounding success when Vanderbilt accepted my twins with full scholarships. Hear more about it on Freakonomics.
5. I worked out a new deal with the Cato Institute to write another graphic novel. Just finished the storyboards. This will definitely be the most exciting book ever written on housing regulation! More educational graphic novels may follow; wait and see.
6. I worked out a deal with Middle Tennessee State University’s Political Economy Research Institute to visit eight times per year. A great chance to make new friends, exchange ideas, see my sons, and get to know Nashville very well. All thanks to one of my star students, Dan Smith!
7. I ran an online art contest to illustrate my first fictional graphic novel, Amore Infernale. The winning artist was excellent, and I hired him to draw the whole book. Progress has been slow, but time will tell.
8. My first art contest was such a great experience that I’ve run several more, meeting a bunch of promising artists in the process. One of them, Ady Branzei, is illustrating Build, Baby, Build.
9. Another contest winner, @sengsavane, is drawing book covers for an eight-volume series of my all-time best EconLog posts. Mike Huemer had a great experience self-publishing his new intro philosophy text on Amazon, so I’m going to try the same approach.
10. I homeschooled all four of my kids during the first 15 months of Covid. While aggravating in some ways – I was clearly not born to teach arithmetic – it did bring me even closer to my four favorite humans. Furthermore, homeschooling allowed us to take long trips to Texas and the Yucatan.
11. “Never let a crisis go to waste.” I used the crisis to convince my wife to get a second freezer, which I quickly filled with bulk meat purchases from Costco. I was shocked to discover that their bulk meat tastes a lot better than their regular meat. Indeed, bulk Costco steak tastes better to my family than anything we get in any restaurant.
12. Closely related: My cooking skills improved markedly during Covid. Besides cooking the best steak of my life, I mastered the grilling of fish. And I added multiple side dishes to my repertoire, including grilled peppers and Texas toast.
13. Early in Covid, I started doing about five minutes of weight-lifting per day, and was amazed by the dose-response function. Now I do about ten minutes a day, and seem to be in the best shape I’ve been in thirty years. I got much less bang for my buck back in high school, when I averaged about thirty minutes of weight-lifting per day. Odd, but fortunate.
Yes, I know awful stuff has happened all over the world. I suspect more awful stuff will happen this winter. There will probably be another seasonal Covid spike, leading to another grotesque overreaction. Still, I strove to make the best out of a bad situation, and things have worked out far better for my family than I expected. Remember: Self-help is like a vaccine! If tried, it works.
P.S. I’m hosting an unofficial Econ BBQ at GMU’s Fairfax campus today from 4-7 PM. At the grill by the Harrison and Wilson dorms. All are welcome.
READER COMMENTS
MikeP
Nov 22 2021 at 12:24pm
For me, the main horror has been the paranoid reaction to the disease, rather than the disease itself.
I completely agree. Humanity had been here many times before. A century of public health informed us how to deal with it. No quarantine of contacts, much less noncontacts. No lockdowns. No shutdowns. No travel restrictions. No community masking.
All that was thrown out over a weekend in an unprecedented calamity. Every day that goes by shows that the 2019 pandemic plan was amazingly better than what was imposed on the world by monomaniacal public health officials pursuing an impossible goal with a delusional belief in their power to control a virus and the population.
Heard from the host on NPR this morning:
Really. That you and the rest of the media and the rest of the government upplayed the virus is not even a possibility?
MikeP
Nov 22 2021 at 12:28pm
For me, the main horror has been the paranoid reaction to the disease, rather than the disease itself.
I completely agree. Humanity had been here many times before. A century of public health informed us how to deal with it. No quarantine of contacts, much less noncontacts. No lockdowns. No shutdowns. No travel restrictions. No community masking.
All that was thrown out over a weekend in an unprecedented calamity. Every day that goes by shows that the 2019 pandemic plan was amazingly better than what was imposed on the world by monomaniacal public health officials pursuing an impossible goal with a delusional belief in their power to control a virus and the population.
Heard from the host on NPR this morning:
Really. That you and the rest of the media and the rest of the government upplayed the virus is not even a possibility?
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Nov 22 2021 at 12:39pm
I is possible to know if a reaction is an over reaction without criteria for identifying the optimal reaction?
Yaakov Schatz
Nov 22 2021 at 4:09pm
In Israel people were arrested for not wearing a mask outdoors. As mask mandates have nearly no effect. I think we can say that this was an over reaction.
https://www.facebook.com/yaakov.schatz/posts/10158005297667669
https://www.facebook.com/yaakov.schatz/posts/10157796839597669
and here is the crown in the shame of the Israeli police:
https://www.facebook.com/yaakov.schatz/posts/10157790025827669
The woman being arrested is crying daddy, Mommy.
PaulS
Nov 22 2021 at 3:49pm
No, you don’t need to know the optimal reaction to know whether an actual reaction is excessive, and in the real world you almost never do . The discussion at the second link (https://www.econlib.org/?p=52841) eventually touches on QALYs, quality-adjusted life-years, which are fairly widely used across the world to help understand whether medical treatments are worthwhile or not. There’s no reason not to use QALYs to help understand non-pharmaceutical treatments (“interventions”), except maybe for a certain kind of hysterical, virtue-signaling, strident pseudo-morality.
The original Imperial University “study” that helped initiate the panicked overreactions posited about a three-week loss of life-expectancy (0.06 QALY) – fairly constant with age for mature adults; decreasing for youths. Other estimates settled quickly (within a month or two) to around half that.
So basically the societal “we” has severely degraded, often at police gunpoint, the quality of going on two years of life, for the sake of around 10 days. And really there will be no end to the degradation, since the virus is already so endemic, i.e. spread everywhere, that where I live the natural resources folks caution deer hunters to wear masks while dressing the carcasses. (They claim that brain and lung tissue is often infected enough to be contagious.) And on top of degrading almost two years, the societal “we” has completely and likely forever tossed the notion of human and constitutional rights out the window.
Oh, and it’s not 10 days, it’s nothing at all. Because all the interventions ever did was to drag out the pandemic – ensuring, among other things, that transplant and cancer patients could not possibly seal themselves into their basements (even if they had basements) long enough to avoid or even mitigate the risk. Indeed, nothing at all in the dashboards indicates that the degree of enforced immiseration had any particular correlation with the overall number of cases. At best, the cases were merely postponed. But that only increased the consequences of the disease, which seem to accelerate somewhat more rapidly with age than the fairly neutral effect contemplated in that original Imperial study. (I.e. by putting the risk off, it increases enough that you lose a bit more QALY time.)
If all that doesn’t describe a ridiculously obscene overreaction, I can’t imagine what possibly could – and I need to know nothing about what might have been truly “optimal”.
Oh, and an urgent need that still remains totally ignored and unaddressed is the need to come down like a ton of bricks on hospital and medical administrators, and to a certain limited extent, staffs. Someday a virus will appear that actually poses a serious risk – say ten years or more rather than 10 days – in the manner of pre-20th-century historical pandemics.
After all, if a virus that poses as trivial a risk as Covid is enough to cripple the medical establishment, as the ongoing bellyaching has implied, then a truly serious one will be a truly awful spectacle. Thus the medical managers and staffs need to get cracking yesterday, and actually think seriously and hard about surge capacity, and how they will mitigate the current utter lack thereof.
But alas, doing so would be serious work, rather than the empty, facile virtue-signaling which is oh-so-popular these days.
MikeP
Nov 22 2021 at 5:31pm
This comment is full of all kinds of goodness. But I wanted to comment on one sentence especially, from my experience in California.
Thus the medical managers and staffs need to get cracking yesterday, and actually think seriously and hard about surge capacity, and how they will mitigate the current utter lack thereof.
Recall April, 2020? Hospital ships were moved into major cities. Convention centers were turned into field hospitals.
Very few of those excess beds got used, but the public health establishment was doing their job — spending millions and billions of dollars on health services to save billions and trillions of dollars in lost lives and lost productivity.
Fast forward to December, 2020. The completely predictable winter surge began. Any hospital ships? No. Any overflow field hospitals? No. Instead, the state imposed lockdowns and travel bans gated on keeping regional ICU capacity that shoots over 100% most flu seasons below some arcane formula.
Now the public health establishment costs the economy trillions of dollars in collateral damage and lost productivity instead of billions of dollars in ramping up health care capacity.
In a complete reversal, public health no longer serves the public. The public now serves public health.
Matthias
Nov 23 2021 at 3:50am
Bryan, have you tried sous vide cooking? It produces some interesting steaks, and is also good for eggs and some vegetables
steve
Nov 23 2021 at 8:56pm
“Recall April, 2020? Hospital ships were moved into major cities. Convention centers were turned into field hospitals.
Very few of those excess beds got used,”
I worked on a hospital ship. How about you? They are really designed to treat lots of young men who have had traumatic injuries. They were not designed at all to handle major respiratory illnesses. Sending covid pts to a hospital ship would have been a travesty. (I also worked in an ATH and the same problems would apply. Yes, I served in two branches of the military.) The convention centers just didnt have the ability to handle covid pts either. It is a very resource intensive illness.
In theory they could have been used to offload non covid pts but that had problems. First, what was really needed was ICU beds. The sites you mention weren’t going to effectively offer that. So you had hospitals quickly converting hospital wards and even cafeterias into ICUs. In terms of people and equipment resources it was probably best to keep the extra ICU space needed in an existing hospital. Second, it was easy to provide a huge place and beds, or a specialized hospital like a ship that would treat something other than covid, but communication lines and EMRs made it difficult to transition to using new resources like a hospital ship. Hospitals compete with each other. They dont make it easy to send information to facilities outside of their network. You weren’t going to have very effective IT in these proposed new facilities. Was it better to overcrowd existing hospitals with access to old records or send them to the hospital ship? So, this was actually being worked on and would probably have been resolved fairly quickly but cases started to drop shortly after those were available.
No. It is flat out wrong that most ICUs go over 100% capacity most flu seasons. They dont go over 100% with just flu pts. Sometimes the flu pts plus the other pts already there will fill an ICU. To make it worse you appear to be talking about regional capacity and it is really uncommon that a region will go over 100%. Doesnt happen that often or for that long. In a bad season we will use up all the ECMO machines in an area. These are not uncommonly shared amongst institutions and will run out. Where do you get these ideas?
Steve
MikeP
Nov 24 2021 at 3:50pm
You are apparently not from California.
The hospital ship in Los Angeles or Long Beach and the Santa Clara County Convention Center near me were not brought to bear to treat COVID patients, but to treat others so the ICUs and hospitals could be freed up for COVID patients.
It is interesting that you find so much wrong with that strategy, so maybe I give public health authorities too much credit in trying to expand capacity early on.
As for whether ICUs get over 100% capacity most winters, I appear to be as guilty as the current media in inflating anecdotes into crises. I am surprised not to find the sort of ICU tracking we have today for past seasons, so I cannot support my claim with numbers. My impression comes mostly from reading about ICUs in Europe, where ICU capacity has in recent years been dropped in half in the UK and the Netherlands and by more than half in Sweden. These motions are made to not waste spare beds and resources and in light of plans to expand ICU capacity when it does get over the new 100%. This new measure of “full” of course fuels panicked headlines and overreactions of state control to keep capacity below 85% of the newly lower 100%.
Yes, I was talking about regional ICU capacity. California created regional lockdowns based on regional ICU capacity on the theory that those regions’ respective hospitals would be sharing their capacity with each other when some hospitals overflowed. California is probably unique in its stupidity.
Michael Stack
Nov 24 2021 at 10:51am
Bryan, if you can share more about your 5-minute weight-lifting regimen, I’d love to read it.
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