Morning kids! It’s Hump Day, week 297 of the Wu Flu Panic of 2020.
Today’s Morning Links feature looks a little different. As I wrote in my post about leaving and rejoining Facebook a couple of weeks ago, “I’m tinkering with features and experimenting with new ways of designing and sharing content.” You can expect that things will change and morph around here for a while.
Instead of collecting links and presenting them through a series of pages, I’m going to try and integrate them with a morning vox mihi, a brief commentary about one or two subjects I’m currently preoccupied with. Let’s try one today and see how it goes.
Yesterday I wrote that I’m personally getting a bit restless about the continuing lock down as evidence mounts that the elites to whom we turn our lonely, socially-distanced eyes have no idea what the deuce they’re doing when it comes to the Chinese Lung Pox.
Also yesterday, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States passed 1 million with more than 58,000 deaths. That’s significant.
When this thing became serious and there was a general consensus among our national leaders that we all needed to work together to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread” of the virus, we were willing to do what was thought to be good for the country and for our fellow man.
We were willing to put up with what we were told was a major but temporary disruption to our lives—and to the booming economy we were enjoying—if it meant that we could avoid 2.2 million American deaths.
It’s now clear that we didn’t know enough about the virus to make a truly informed decision commensurate with the actual impact the virus would have. And while that’s okay—we don’t expect that anyone can be an instant expert on a novel virus—it’s time to acknowledge that no matter how we got here, the curve is flattened and it’s time to get back to work with common sense precautions.
We’ve learned that the virus was in the US earlier than thought. We’ve learned that it’s older adults and people whose health is already compromised who are at highest risk. We’ve learned that the disease may not be as deadly as we thought (or maybe it’s worse). We’ve learned that a vaccine may be available sooner than expected.
We never saw the massive overcrowding at hospitals we were told to expect (projections in New York at the end of March were 140,000 beds and 40,000 ventilators needed). In New York City, the 1,000-bed hospital ship, USNS Comfort, is returning from Manhattan to its base in Norfolk, Virginia, having treated just 182 patients.
Two California doctors have tested more than 5,000 patients and have found that the flu and the Coronavirus have similar death rates. In other words, while there have been a significant number of deaths involving COVID-19, the hyper-panic of millions of deaths haven’t materialized.
And yet we have governors in Illinois and California and Michigan planning to extend the lock down. Why? For what purpose? At some point these measures are no longer about “safety” but about extending their top-down control that encroaches on our freedoms.
In Michigan, they reached that point a few weeks ago when Gov. Whitmer (D) declared that “residents cannot leave their homes except for essential services such as food or medical supplies, or engage in outdoor physical activity” and banned travel to second homes and vacation properties. She’s being sued for depriving citizens of their constitutional rights to associate with others under the First Amendment and to due process.
It was Benjamin Franklin who said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” In a free society that can feel the ropes being tightened about its wrists, you can expect a reaction. So far, ours has been feeble.
As Heather MacDonald observed, “Every day the lockdown continues, its implicit message that we are all going to die if we engage in normal life is reinforced.”
It’s time to open the country and get back to work.
