by Steve McCann, American Thinker:

The Wuhan Virus pandemic is not the most significant crisis in our nation’s history.  It isn’t even the greatest public health crisis in our history.  But with the imposition of a near total national lockdown it is undoubtedly the greatest marginalization of personal liberty in American history.

Over the centuries, in virtually all societies, people known to be infected by various deadly diseases were confined and isolated in order to mitigate the spread and protect the rest of society.  Never have we confined the entire population ostensibly for the same objective.

Over the past 50 years, an ever-increasing percentage of the citizenry has been conditioned to look to the government to cure all societal and health related ills.  The ruling classes have eagerly promoted this mindset as it abets their lust for permanent power.  However, this obligates those in power to cure all ills, even a global pandemic.  Thus, it follows that the State will inevitably claim that in order to do so it must take control of our lives against our will even if we are healthy, lest we fall ill and overwhelm the health care system.

Using exponentially flawed models and projections, not based on any actual evidence or experience with the virus, the government at all levels so terrified the populace that they eagerly embraced the concept of home confinement and the catastrophic collapse of the economy.  But one question that the powers-to-be never asked themselves at the time was: How do we get out of this?  Now they find themselves trapped by their own decisions.

Recently, both the federal government and states have proposed various goals that must be met before the lockdown is fully lifted.  What is egregiously wrong with all these steps is that they are solely about health and arbitrary health related statistics.

Rather than look at the devastated economy as well as the unbelievable and potential life-threatening distress of the vast bulk of the American people, these politicians are hiding behind government scientist/bureaucrats, believing that focus on just Wuhan Virus statistics will shield them from criticism.  The national leadership of the Democrat party are also hiding behind the scientists to not only avoid criticism but to prolong the lockdown in the hope that the economy and nation is still in shambles on November 3, election day.

The reality is the decision to reopen the nation is a political decision, not a scientific one.

It all boils down to one simple question.  Has the lockdown been worth it?  That depends only partly on science.  There are also three other factors that must go into that answer: 1) economic consequences, 2) constitutional values and 3) moral judgements.

First, the medical aspect.  The declared purpose of the lockdown was to mitigate what was projected to be a complete meltdown of available intensive care and hospital beds nationwide or in now common parlance “bend the curve.”  At the height of the virus outbreak, the nation utilized less than 15% of available hospital beds and less than 20% of available intensive care beds for coronavirus patients.  This curve has been bent for some time.

Deaths from nursing and senior care facilities homes now account for more than 50% of total recorded fatalities since the beginning of the epidemic.  In some states it is as high as 80%.  Over the past three weeks nursing home related deaths account for nearly 70% of reported fatalities.  As Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review recently wrote:

This revelation should change everything we know about the current state of affairs with coronavirus.  Governors are still justifying the continued lockdown by pointing to rising deaths in many states and counties.  But it now appears, using simple arithmetic, that in most states, the overwhelming majority of deaths are in nursing homes, and in some states and counties, nearly every new death is in a senior facility.

The implication is that there is no excuse whatsoever not to open up the country and throw all our resources at protecting nursing homes.

Numerous serology study results have been extrapolated to show when accounting for the true number of people who have gotten this virus, the infection fatality rate drops to 0.1% to 0.3% (about the same as the annual flu).  A recent study at Truesdale Prison in Tennessee recorded that of 2,444 tests 1,299 were positive (53%) and 96% of those were asymptomatic (showing no symptoms).  One inmate (67 years old) has died or a fatality rate of 0.07%.

Accounting for the fact that the deaths are lopsided among the elderly and chronically ill, the fatality rate among the younger population approaches 0.03%.

This virus will never disappear unless and until there is enough exposure to produce a collective immunity or an effective vaccine, available to everyone in the world, is produced.  There is no scientific basis, centered on actual findings either in the United States or around the world, for continuing for weeks or months any full or partial shutdown of the general population on either the national, state or local level.

Second, the economic consequences.  There has been the inevitable leftist decrying of any attempt to measure the mortality of the coronavirus against the economic and emotional cost of the chosen means of mitigating it.  But this is nothing but empty rhetoric as well as hypocritical.  All of us whether a tenured college professor and a grocery store clerk and a government bureaucrat and an over-the-road truck driver value and depend upon the economy to generate wealth.

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