{"id":61571,"date":"2020-09-07T03:58:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T00:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/its-now-looking-like-the-lockdowns-may-have-been-a-huge-mistake\/"},"modified":"2020-09-07T03:58:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T00:58:00","slug":"its-now-looking-like-the-lockdowns-may-have-been-a-huge-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/its-now-looking-like-the-lockdowns-may-have-been-a-huge-mistake\/","title":{"rendered":"#It\u2019s now looking like the lockdowns may have been a huge mistake"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#It\u2019s now looking like the lockdowns may have been a huge mistake<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

September 6, 2020 |<\/span> 8:58pm <\/p>\n

\n Were lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes.<\/p>\n

Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, \u201cWe\u2019ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.\u201d As I\u2019ve noted, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 70,000 and 116,000 Americans, between 0.04 percent and 0.07 percent of the nation\u2019s population. The 1968-70 Hong Kong flu about 100,000, 0.05 percent of the population.<\/p>\n

The US coronavirus death toll of 186,000 is 0.055 percent of the current population. It will go higher, but it\u2019s about the same magnitude as those two flus, and it has been less deadly to those under 65 than the flus were. Yet there were no statewide lockdowns; no massive school closings; no closings of office buildings and factories, restaurants and museums. No one considered shutting down Woodstock.<\/p>\n

Why are attitudes so different today? Perhaps we have greater confidence in government\u2019s effectiveness. If public policy can affect climate change, it can stamp out a virus.<\/p>\n

Plus, we\u2019re much more risk-averse. Children aren\u2019t allowed to walk to school; jungle gyms have vanished from playgrounds; college students are shielded from microaggressions. We have a \u201csafetyism mindset,\u201d as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff write in \u201cThe Coddling of the American Mind,\u201d under which \u201cmany aspects of students\u2019 lives needed to be carefully regulated by adults.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the news<\/a> of the COVID-19 virus killing dozens and overloading hospitals in Bergamo, Italy, triggered a flight to safety and restriction. Many Americans stopped going to restaurants and shops even before the lockdowns were ordered in March and April. The exaggerated projections of some epidemiologists, with a professional interest in forecasting pandemics, triggered demands that governments act.<\/p>\n

The legitimate fears that hospitals would be overwhelmed app<\/a>arently explain the (in retrospect, deadly) orders of the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan requiring elderly care facilities to admit COVID-infected patients. And the original purpose to \u201cflatten the curve\u201d segued into \u201cstamp out the virus.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the apparent success of South Korea and island nations \u2014 Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand \u2014 in doing so could never be replicated in the continental, globalized United States.<\/p>\n

Governors imposing continued lockdowns claimed to be \u201cfollowing the science<\/a>.\u201d But only in one dimension: reducing the immedia<\/a>te number of COVID-19 cases. The lockdowns also prevented cancer screenings, heart-attack treatment and substance-abuse counseling, the absence of which resulted in a large but hard-to-estimate number of deaths. What Haidt and Lukianoff call \u201cvindictive protectiveness\u201d turned out to be not very protective.<\/p>\n

Examples include shaming beachgoers though outdoor virus spread is minimal; extending school closedowns though few children get or transmit the infection; closing down gardening aisles in superstores; and barring church services while blessing inevitably noisy and crowded demonstrations for politically favored causes.<\/p>\n

The new thinking on lockdowns, as Greg Ip reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, is that \u201cthey\u2019re overly blunt and costly.\u201d That supports President Trump\u2019s mid-April statement that, \u201cA prolonged lockdown combined with a forced economic depression would inflict an immense and wide-ranging toll on public health.\u201d<\/p>\n

For many, that economic damage has been of Great Depression proportions. Restaurants and small businesses have been closed forever, even before the last three months of \u201cmostly peaceful\u201d urban rioting. Losses have been concentrated on those with low income and little wealth, while lockdowns have added tens of billions to the net worth of Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos and Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n

The anti-lockdown blogger (and former New York Times reporter) Alex Berenson makes a powerful case that lockdowns delayed, rather than prevented, infections.<\/p>\n

There are old lessons here. Governments can sometimes channel but never entirely control nature. There is no way to entirely eliminate risk. Attempts to reduce one risk may increase others. Amid uncertainty, people make mistakes. Like, maybe, the lockdowns.\n <\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n

If you want to read more Opinion News articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

if you want to watch Movies<\/a> or Tv Shows go to Dizi.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a> <\/span> for forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#It\u2019s now looking like the lockdowns may have been a huge mistake” September 6, 2020 | 8:58pm Were lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes. Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, \u201cWe\u2019ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.\u201d As…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":61572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[65413],"class_list":["post-61571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-its-now-looking-like-the-lockdowns-may-have-been-a-huge-mistake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}