Museums Fail Public in Coronavirus Lockdown Year

The toll of a year’s COVID hysteria will unfold quickly and clearly, like 100,000 small businesses killed and our city centers empty. Or slowly and painfully, like tens of millions of children tossed from school, lagging in math and reading, depressed and neurotic. Or stealthily like $5 trillion in new debt. That’s more than the $4.1 trillion in current dollars the Congressional Research Office says the United States spent to beat the Nazis and the Japanese. Or daftly, like museums that no longer know how to function as museums. After a year, every theater, symphony, and opera and dance company are still closed. All to fight a virus that targets almost exclusively the very old, the critically ill, and the obese.

We jumped into the quicksand of lockdowns, masks, six-foot rules, and no-touch zones with little scientific evidence of their value and no thought to their cost and consequences. Still, after a year, debate of cost and consequences is verboten.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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The toll of a year’s COVID hysteria will unfold quickly and clearly, like 100,000 small businesses killed and our city centers empty. Or slowly and painfully, like tens of millions of children tossed from school, lagging in math and reading, depressed and neurotic. Or stealthily like $5 trillion in new debt. That’s more than the $4.1 trillion in current dollars the Congressional Research Office says the United States spent to beat the Nazis and the Japanese. Or daftly, like museums that no longer know how to function as museums. After a year, every theater, symphony, and opera and dance company are still closed. All to fight a virus that targets almost exclusively the very old, the critically ill, and the obese.

We jumped into the quicksand of lockdowns, masks, six-foot rules, and no-touch zones with little scientific evidence of their value and no thought to their cost and consequences. Still, after a year, debate of cost and consequences is verboten.