The COVID Lockdown Rut

L ast week, Governor Andrew Cuomo promulgated a new public-health measure, limiting indoor and outdoor gatherings in private homes to ten or fewer people. Private homes.

And in the days after, Bill de Blasio started warning New York City schools that they should be prepared to shift to online-only instruction as early as this week. My own school district in the New York suburbs is debating a move to fully remote instruction at the start of Thanksgiving break and continuing throughout the New Year, to avoid Thanksgiving and other holiday gatherings, and the spread coming back from colleges — even though such gatherings have been supposedly banned.

I started the year as a COVID hawk. I pulled my child from school before my district closed down. I was in favor of taking dramatic and immediate action. But I preferred travel bans to lockdowns. If you can believe it, there was a time when the leaders of liberal and progressive opinion held that travel bans, as Vox put it in January, were “expensive, resource-intensive, and potentially harmful to the economies of cities and countries involved.” That was before they advocated the much more obviously and wildly expensive, resource-intensive, and certainly harmful lockdowns.

But we never moved on from a lockdown model. By April, I was already horrified by the way COVID lockdowns were changing our society. The evidence is clearly in. When the headlines mention authoritarianism, they mean Trump’s tweets. Cuomo’s ban on gathering in homes is taken breezily. We got used to this. In fact, it was worse than I thought. Lockdowns and the general constriction of social life under social distancing have forced Americans even deeper into social media. The result is even more distrust and resentment of our institutions, more conspiracy theories, and more people suffering from something new that is halfway between depression and paranoia.

I have not gone all the way to becoming a COVID skeptic, however. This is a real disease, and it is really dangerous for seniors. I’ve passed instead from COVID hawk to COVID fatalist. I thought we would be forced to adapt to COVID the way South Korea, Taiwan, and New Zealand have. Taiwan never went into lockdown. South Korea has come out of it, and New Zealand’s life has basically returned to normal, except for severe restrictions placed on travelers from abroad when they arrive. They’ve moved on from lockdown.

But lockdowns and other economically ruinous restrictions on life are now the only thing our leaders can think to do until there is a vaccine. In the West as a whole, we are unwilling or unable to do the things that would allow us to hold on to the gains of a lockdown: imposing strict travel bans and mandatory, centralized quarantine on overseas travelers to the United States; or launching a modern, digital tracking and tracing system through our smartphones. Instead, we have presumed to make the life of affluent hyper-mobile suburbanites compulsory: Do everything — work, school, and social life — through your iPads.

Throughout his campaign, Joe Biden promised to deal with the virus, unlike Trump. His plan seems to be to do exactly what Trump did but without mentioning ultraviolet light as a disinfectant. To that end, Biden has put forward another COVID-19 task force. Two of the members of that task force are pushing for another six-week-long national lockdown.

The virus is dangerous. But we seem to be blind to the dangers of excessive fear of the virus. We are going to leave a generation of small- and medium-business entrepreneurs scarred by their experience of operating through this insane and ever-changing set of restrictions. The people who have the most invested in the “shut-in” lifestyle are now the most reluctant to return to normal life again. They have practiced hiding from danger rather than navigating responsibly through it.

And we are about to discover how divided we really are. This is the year when the annual family political arguments start before Thanksgiving dinner, as each household discovers the risk tolerance of the others. One household expects no get-together, another may demand one, but with masks. One more refuses to let their kids see others in masks. Happy holidays!

There is no way forward. There is no different strategy coming from the incoming administration. There will be interventions, and cases will go down a little, and then the public will tire of them, and they will go back up again — until the vaccines are available. Winter is coming, and so is the intensifying social and cultural insanity that is the only result of trying to live our lives through screens.