In our zeal for security, we forget that, while we can reduce risk, we can never eliminate it.
COVID policy has mutated into a psychosis — one that ignores the reality that risk can be mitigated, but not eliminated.
A year of the COVID pandemic has transformed some of the freest and most affluent societies in the history of the West beyond recognition and in ways perhaps never imagined. Not even amid the last century’s two world wars did we experience anything similar to the past twelve months, whereby the economies and lives of entire nations were stopped on a dime by executive fiat, when normal human interactions were forcibly halted to save us from a pathogen that, according to many a pundit — at least initially — would have otherwise killed millions. During this past year “lockdowns” gained widespread currency: a term eerily connoting the idea of incarceration, only this time it was to be effected by the citizens themselves, urged to accept a de facto self-imprisonment mandated by pro publico bono and based on the mantra of “trust the science” repeated by government officials and media outlets. As a result, Europe and North America of a year ago and today look like two different worlds.
A year into the collective pandemic psychosis, few seem to remember that “lockdowns” were to serve as a temporary expedient, to last but a few weeks so as to “flatten the curve” and ensure that our medical services would not become overburdened. But already at inception, instead of weighing opportunity cost and the relative economic and social impact, our public-policy decision-making was reduced to the unyielding Faucian binary of “either we lock down or people die,” reinforced via the contrived moral blackmail that no responsible political leader or decent human being could object, for if we save but one life, the economic and societal devastation visited upon us in the process will have been worth it regardless. Few politicians or media pundits bothered to ask the obvious question of why a life threatened by COVID deserved to be saved before all other lives threatened by, say, untreated cancers or untreated heart conditions, and why the rights of free citizens, such as the right to earn a living, to interact with one’s family and friends, to educate one’s children, or simply to live in freedom — a right that millions have died across history to preserve — should be sacrificed so that we could (as one politician recently asserted) “conquer this virus.”
There is no denying that the Wuhan pathogen causes a serious illness, especially among the elderly and people with underlying medical conditions. We should take precautions to limit its spread and to develop vaccines against it and, most of all, therapeutics to treat the infected. But its impact is nowhere near those of the epidemics that have plagued humanity throughout its existence. The Black Death that swept through Asia, Africa, and Europe in the 14th century killed an estimated 50 million people, which — depending on whom you believe — amounted to between 25 and 60 percent of Europe’s population at the time. Smallpox in America after 1520 and other diseases brought to the New World are believed to have killed 90 to 95 percent of the native population. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 20 million people, the Modern Plague of 1894–1903 killed 10 million, the Asian flu of 1957–58 killed 2 million — the list goes on. The HIV/AIDS epidemic that began in 1960 continues to the present day, with the greatest infection rates recorded in the 1980s; thus far it is estimated to have killed 39 million people, while about 37 million people are living with HIV thanks to therapeutic drugs, but it’s worth nothing that treatment for HIV/AIDS was not available until 1987.
And yet none of these public-health emergencies generated anything approximating the current government response to COVID-19. As of this writing, the total number of COVID-related deaths worldwide stands at 2.8 million, with 132.5 million cases reported and about 106 million infected people having fully recovered. This puts the current average case-fatality ratio at 2.1 percent of those infected (unevenly distributed across different countries and age groups), and when measured against the world population the 2.8 million COVID-related deaths represent 0.03 percent of the total. I mention these numbers not to make light of the tragic impact of each individual loss of life but to take a broader view of the scope of the pandemic versus the impact that the measures to combat it have had across our societies, especially the massive loss of GDP, the destruction of small businesses, and the unraveling of our educational system, with the impact falling predominantly on the young, social pathologies, including surging alcoholism, drug addiction, and domestic violence. Again, as with any public-policy decision, the course of action must be measured against the opportunity cost and the likelihood of success — and the now-regnant “culture of lockdowns” points decisively to excessive opportunity cost versus apparently only a marginal impact when it comes to reducing the infection rate, as the decline in the rate of infection last spring and summer could just as well rest on seasonal factors and the virus’s having not yet mutated as it could on lockdowns, social distancing, and masks.
What has arguably done most to erode public trust has been the arbitrary nature of the rapidly shifting public-health guidelines, with numbers of people who can/cannot congregate in one space literally pulled out of thin air. In a nutshell, the fundamental problem for every citizen since virtual self-incarceration was mandated by our governments’ executive fiats has been the cognitive dissonance between the scope of the threat and the measures taken to combat it: The severity of the measures adopted does not square with the nature of the risk. And while our political leaders might have been forgiven at the beginning of the pandemic, when few data were available, it is now obvious that, regardless of the mutated “variants of the virus,” this pandemic is nothing comparable to the plagues of yore.
Given the various strands that have been identified, this coronavirus will probably not be “conquered”; rather, it is likely to remain with us, much as a multitude of other airborne viruses have been with us for centuries. Unless each individual locks himself or herself in a hermetically sealed room, the pathogen will be “out there,” keeping all of us at some risk of infection, though over time vaccinations and increasing herd immunity will reduce that risk and, more importantly, new therapeutics will allow us to effectively treat those infected. The incessant testing, and making a clean test — and soon a proof of vaccination — the sine qua non for us to be allowed to do something as trivial as board an airplane, is evidence of a social psychosis unlike anything democratic societies have ever experienced, with the media breathlessly announcing the rising number of positive tests as a justification for yet another lockdown.
How did it happen that the West, which not long ago represented the most vibrant and geostrategically assertive civilization — traits that allowed it to conquer the world — has been reduced to millions cowering in fear from a version of the coronavirus? It may indeed prove lethal, but so do scores of other viruses, including the flu virus, as do diseases that humanity has lived with since time immemorial. The answer lies perhaps in political changes under way across Western societies in the past decades. As the West becomes increasingly secular, bereft of sources to give meaning to human existence beyond the here and now, we seem to have become a people no longer capable of accepting any level of risk, while we demand an absolute certainty that those we elect to office provide safety, even at great cost. The idea of the human condition that our ancestors accepted as a given, i.e., that life on this earth is mainly nasty, often brutish, and definitely short, is no longer even a proposition for homespun experts to contemplate.
Unless we accept that in the final analysis we are able only to mitigate risk but never eliminate it — and most of all that there are things worth more than safety alone, such as the quality of life and the ability to pursue the talents God has given us — we will continue to submit to these incessant bureaucratic contortions seeking to achieve the impossible, i.e., to ensure that our existence carries zero risk. Furthermore, if the West continues on its current path, it will be eclipsed and displaced by civilizations that accept the necessity of playing with the cards fate has dealt them and powering through the tough times so that they as well as their children can enjoy good times when they inevitably return.