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Coronavirus Lockdowns: What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen
Reopening America after a month of lockdowns is not like flipping a light switch. A better analogy is a dimmer switch. Governors will methodically reopen sectors of the economy and daily life while closely monitoring COVID-19 cases. With good numbers, they’ll keep dialing the rheostat to the right; with bad, to the left. They should start this process now.
Too many people view the virus in isolation. The goal is not fewer Coronavirus deaths vs. a healthy economy, it’s both/and. From my latest piece for the Arizona Republic.
Forcing Americans to abandon their workplaces and lock themselves in their homes creates a wide variety of ill effects. Sure, they might be safe from the virus but they will suffer in many other ways.
Domestic violence is surging worldwide as people are sheltering in place alongside abusers. Calls to a national suicide hotline last month increased by 900% over the same time last year. Necessary doctor appointments are being postponed by weeks, despite undiagnosed cancer being at least as fatal as COVID-19.
Add to that the mass layoffs, furloughs and shuttered small businesses. Economic decline is always associated with increases in substance abuse, crime and declines in physical and mental health. As if severe recessions weren’t awful enough on their own.
Governors across the country must balance what is seen with what is not seen.
Few newspaper readers but plenty of Ricochetti will know I stole the phrase “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” from Frédéric Bastiat’s influential economic pamphlet. From his intro:
In the sphere of economics an action, a habit, an institution or a law engenders not just one effect but a series of effects. Of these effects only the first is immediate; it is revealed simultaneously with its cause, it is seen. The others merely occur successively, they are not seen; we are lucky if we foresee them.
Bastiat later offers his most famous lesson, the parable of the broken window. A kid hurls a brick through the window of a bakery. The baker pays a glazier $400 to replace it. The bad economist (rhymes with Scrawl Smugman) recommends the boy toss bricks through all the windows on Main Street. Economic stimulus!
Smugman is dumb because he’s focusing only on what is seen.
What is not seen is that the baker was planning to spend that $400 on a new suit. The clothing store down the street is out that amount, so economic stimulus was a net-zero. And if the kid breaks everyone’s windows, the window shop is up $400,000 and all the other businesses combined are down $400K.
Those of us who want to reopen the country aren’t out to kill old people. (Shocking statement, I know.) Instead, we want to mitigate viral spread while we mitigate the endless negative effects of a mass, one-size-fits-all lockdown.
The COVID-19 death toll is only what is seen. Just as important is what is not seen.
Published in Economics, Healthcare
That analysis is much to logical and straightforward to ever make it to the MSM.
That is, there are known, lethal public health side effects to Dr. Fauci’s prescription for America, side effects of which he had a duty to be aware and for which he had a duty to bring in consulting medical experts, really team members, to fully inform President Trump and the American people and to give full consideration to all the known serious or fatal side effects.
As I mentioned in another thread, on Wednesday a regional politician relayed information from the chief of police of a nearby city: since the “lockdown” began, child abuse calls are up 23% and spousal abuse calls are up 21%. Suicides are also up, but getting a firm number is apparently difficult.
A child (12 years old) in an adjacent town tried to commit suicide on Sunday. A friend of mine who is friends with the family said that the child was already depressed, and the lockdown may have pushed him over the line.
Unfortunately, the increase in domestic violence, suicide, and plain old “giving up” are not likely to make media headlines, and thus will probably remain “unseen.” Also, to follow up on comments made by @andrewklavan on his podcast, a bunch of dead bodies on Broadway in New York City will impact the country as a whole, and so policies must be implemented to prevent that. Those bodies would be in a concentrated area of importance to the media, and thus would be seen by the entire country. But I would respond that we might make the wrong policy choices if we ignore or don’t see the bodies (suicide, drug and alcohol overdose, domestic violence, and even the technically living but spiritually dead who have just given up) that are spread out across the vast expanse of the rest of the country. Unfortunately we are unlikely to see those distributed bodies.
Jon,
Regards,
Jim
Jon, what makes you think that it is feasible to prevent COVID-19 deaths? Is there evidence that the lockdown has actually prevented any deaths, as opposed to merely delaying them?
Eventually, this thing is going to spread until the point of herd immunity. The IFR is going to be the IFR, whatever it is — 0.2%, 0.5%, maybe higher, unlikely lower.
My conclusion, at the moment, is that we’ve created an economic depression in order to buy a little time, apparently in the vain hope that someone will come up with a vaccine in a miraculously short period of time, or that some other miracle will occur.
Hey. Speak for yourself, Arizona Lad. I want…..death!
Pretty good summary of the numbers, and the rationale for a ratcheted recovery re…plan.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation
The government has lost a lot of credibility. People can’t help thinking, “If they were so smart, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place.” So the government’s telling everyone, “Get back to normal now because the danger is past” may not be very reassuring for a while.
I quite agree. The problem is that this debate has become weaponized by people who want to destroy their opponents, and it barely matters what their opponents believe so long as they can justify their opposition. At this point I’m just automatically ignoring nearly all the posts that talk about this topic, even here on Ricochet where we’re supposed to be offering thoughtful discourse.
The far left wants to see chaos, the moderate left just wants power and that means weaken Trump. Trump is trying to avoid these two groups. The middle, who aren’t run by politics, are being herded reluctantly by everybody in different directions, but mostly are willing to follow Trump and are paying the biggest price. The right, as usual, is all over the place, they know the left is crazy and crooked, but are skeptical about everybody else. It’s all normal, but in a new very costly direction that must be corrected as soon as possible.
Exactly so. “We” have chosen to unperson those who died of despair over the past decade(s), slinging dismissive insults about disfunctional subcultures and telling the victims to “learn to code.” Apparently these lives were worth trading off for the latest iPhone and some avocado toast. The Cuomos of our world can strike their lives over dollars pose because the lives on the other side of the ledger just do not register.