Were the lockdowns a mistake? To that nagging question, the answer increasingly seems to be yes.

Certainly, they were a novelty. As novelist Lionel Shriver writes, “We’ve never before responded to a contagion by closing down whole countries.” As I noted in May, the 1957-58 Asian flu killed between 75,000 and 116,000 people in the United States, between 0.04% and 0.07% of the nation’s population then. The 1968-69 Hong Kong flu killed about 100,000, 0.05% of the population.