“You horrible scolds killed people. You should be forever ashamed.”
That was the reaction of a friend on Facebook to a new University of Virginia Health study showing suicide attempts by overdose among children rose sharply during the pandemic. And, of course, he’s right.
It was about three years ago that we were told we should lock things down for “two weeks to slow the spread.”
The initial argument seemed plausible — shutter for a bit to slow transmission of the Chinese coronavirus now known as COVID-19 just enough that hospitals and other health-care facilities could handle the surge.
Would a two-week lockdown have helped? We don’t know because we got something closer to two years.
Or longer: Though evidence that mandatory masking worked was somewhere between skimpy and nonexistent, we only this year saw experts finally calling for an end to mask requirements in health-care facilities, among other measures.
Meanwhile, studies keep coming out indicating all sorts of harm from these so-called “non-pharmaceutical interventions” during COVID.
The damage ranges from the “shocking” increase in LGBTQ intimate partner violence that a Rutgers study found, to a rise in sex attacks on teen girls, to a major decline in cancer screenings, to an “unprecedented” drop in teen mental health, to a dramatic loss in kids’ school learning, which remedial attempts have been unsuccessful in reversing. Even bar exam scores suffered.
Though these interventions didn’t do much to reduce COVID death rates — Sweden, which avoided lockdowns, did better than the nations that pursued them — there’s considerable evidence they caused increased numbers of deaths from heart attacks, obesity, mental-health problems, drug overdoses and the like.
People who because of their age were at very low risk from COVID died at much higher-than-normal rates from these other causes as a result of the disruption of normal life, the cutoff of normal social-support networks and, of course, the endless miasma of fear government and media spread.
And children were hurt the most, suffering developmental delays and other losses.
For a 6-year-old, two years of masking and lockdowns is nearly half a lifetime, and you can’t get those years back.
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted lockdowns fueled strep, flu and respiratory-syncytial-virus outbreaks.
Many lockdown measures were nonsensical or downright discriminatory.
As lefty blogger Nate Silver observed, “It’s kind of crazy (and tells you a lot about who was writing the restrictions) that churches in some jurisdictions were subject to more restrictions than museums! Not even attempting to follow any sort of epidemiological principles.”
We saw outdoor skate parks filled with sand, ocean kayakers cited for not wearing masks while paddling alone on the ocean and, as the post Silver retweeted noted, a Santa Clara church and its congregation made the “targets of an unprecedented surveillance operation” over defiance of lockdown rules.
It was a golden age for scolds, busybodies and petty tyrants, and they made the most of it.
The result was a drastic loss of trust in the honesty and competence of public authorities, scientists and the media at every level, a loss of trust that was 100% justified.
I myself wasn’t skeptical enough, which is rare. I knew the history of the 1918 flu, where there were short-term mask rules and business closures, and foolishly assumed the coronavirus rules would be something like that. Short term and comparatively modest.
Boy, was I wrong. In my defense, we live in a different — and in many respects worse — America than 1918’s.
Our authorities are more venal and less competent (no small feat, as they were no great shakes back then, really), our press more one-sided and, lamentably, our public less willing to resist the abuse of power.
Though in the event of some new pandemic, I expect much less cooperation. People may have been too trusting before, but now they know better.
The scolds were happy. Once America made fun of them, mocking characters like nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz from “Bewitched” as they stared between the curtains at the goings-on next door.
During the pandemic era, though, we empowered them. They got to mind other people’s business while pretending to serve the public interest.
But those horrible scolds killed people, by enabling — and demanding and continuing to demand — intrusive government policies that demonstrably didn’t work and in fact made things worse.
Will they be forever ashamed? Nope. But they should be.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
