What is the COVID response endgame in your state? Does anybody know? Ricochetti have discussed at length the issue of the moving goalposts since the implementation of a two-week curve-flattening. But where are we now?

The politics of the matter are increasingly detached from the relative effectiveness of past and present official actions and policies and especially detached from the actual state of the pandemic. So now, under what circumstances can officials foster an impression of success, take credit for it and stop saving us?

The trick will be (a) to prevent voters from asking why we could not have re-opened a lot sooner; (b) not merely deflecting blame for the economic carnage but to secure additional authority and power to “solve” that crisis as well, and (c) to make sure the timing yields the most partisan electoral advantages.

The single largest political obstacle appears to be a vested political interest in lockdown policies. We have known at least since April that this disease carries little risk to non-elderly persons with no existing co-morbidities. In my home state of Maryland, for example, the Governor issued an order on April 29^th authorizing state health authorities to fashion detailed (mandatory) guidance for nursing homes. (The CDC did not fully spell out its current recommendations regarding nursing homes until May 18^th. ) The Governor Hogan’s order was seven weeks after the initial lockdown order thus by then too late politically to concede that (a) lockdowns had had little effect with respect to protecting the vulnerable (b) the focus needed to be on the vulnerable and (c) a return to normal with prudent awareness of risks and best practices was possible without significant additional risk to the vulnerable once prudent precautions were in place to protect the vulnerable. If you told everybody we could all die without these restrictions and you then lift them before there is a cure, will everybody think you were lying?

Gov. Whitmer in Michigan just successfully pressured the school system into canceling high school football. (Whitmer reminds me of that one hyper-religious relative who wishes it could be Lent all year long—she seems to revel in punitive actions against normal life.) The risk of additional COVID deaths from playing in or attending a high school football game is probably more than offset by the risks of adverse risky behavior by teens done in lieu of football, by downstream personal losses such as the loss of scholarship opportunities and by not saving the lives that would have been saved by hastening the onset of herd immunity. The average age of a Michigan COVID fatality is 75.4. There have been 600 deaths so far this year among the two million school and college-age persons in Michigan. Eight of those are COVID-related. Lockdowns directed at the young are utterly asinine. But politically useful perceptions much be served. To the bitter end.

Taking credit for success. The execrable Gov. Cuomo is taking victory laps because the COVID crisis is about over in NY. Cuomo is responsible for this decline in the same way it could be said that effective air defenses at Pearl Harbor eventually caused Japanese warplanes to return to their carriers thus resulting in an American victory. The truth in NY is that the disease just ran out of targets.

Cuomo can be forgiven for the initial error of focusing so completely on hospital capacity that the order to return infected persons to nursing homes was issued. He was relying on the same experts that prompted President Trump to dispatch a US Navy hospital ship to NYC. However, it is an open question as to whether Cuomo’s error was corrected in a timely manner. It is also undeniable that his administration fudged reporting to hide nursing home deaths and his subsequent partisan handling of the issue is a disgrace.

But Cuomo’s absurd self-congratulations will be the norm as the disease recedes. My seat-of-the-pants estimate is that by mid-September, there will be no US state in which the daily number of cases is increasing, the national running fatality rate will approach that of usual flu and thus continuing the lockdowns will be harder to justify. But there is probably enough political momentum behind innumerate politician- and media-driven fear, mask-enforcement mania, and incentives to depress Trump’s re-election to keep the pain in place in blue states well into November.

The Swedes dropped a turd in the political punchbowl. I would argue that nothing done by any government had any significant positive effect on the incidence and lethality of COVID-19. There are indications that improper use of ventilators and the political barriers to the use of some medications had an adverse effect but overall, the bug spread and killed everywhere in a very similar fashion no matter what anybody tried to do to forestall or prevent it.

QUIZ: (a) Match each graph to the COVID death data to the right jurisdiction. Choices are Italy, Michigan, New York, and Sweden. (b) Explain how any the varied approaches of these jurisdictions could have made possibly any difference given the remarkable similarity in outcomes.

So when is it over?