On March 12, 1913, at about noon, the people of Columbus, Ohio, started running. No one could quite remember how it started. The writer James Thurber, then a senior at the local high school, recalled the moment some 20 years later:
No one paused to consider that, even if the dam across the Scioto River had been breached, Columbus would have been unaffected. Caught up in the panic, the entire town joined in, encouraged by the police and the Ohio National Guard. As Thurber recorded:
Now consider a related question. How did a policy of general quarantine, a policy that formed no part of the contingency planning of any Western government, suddenly go global? Could it be that, one after another, like the runners in Columbus, governments, driven by panicky media, ordered mass closures without stopping to assess the costs and benefits?
Let me put that question another way: Suppose the pandemic had started not in China but in Canada or the Netherlands, a country, in other words, where locking up the entire population had previously been unthinkable. Would the global response have followed the same trajectory?
We are herd creatures. The instinct that makes us click on YouTube videos with the most views also makes us fear being left out. So, it is worth recalling the sequence of events.
China imprisoned Wuhan because China thinks nothing of locking people up. A precedent was thus set. The first Western country to be hit was Italy. Confronted by a concentrated and localized outbreak, the socialist government there initially planned to quarantine the afflicted northern region. But its plan leaked, and Italians began to head south while they still could. So, the authorities extended the ban nationwide.
Almost overnight, lockdowns were The Thing To Do. Those leaders who feared that they were disproportionate, including President Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, came under huge pressure. Why were they not taking the same precautions as neighboring countries? Were they prepared to take responsibility for millions of deaths? Their medical advisers, being human, started to recommend responses that they must have known were likely to be excessive. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, who crafted the shutdown, put it: “I think we should really be overly aggressive and get criticized for overreacting.”
Not that I blame him. Back in March, when the key decisions were made, we knew little about the coronavirus. A rational case could be made for operating on the assumption of a worst-case scenario.
But we now have more evidence. We have learned, for example, that young people are at almost no risk and that outdoor transmission is extremely rare. Knowing what we now know, we would almost certainly not have imposed such draconian closures. But, like the citizens of Columbus, we don’t like to think about that.
Almost every day for the past two months, we have been reading, in various media, two alternative stories about Sweden. One says it has been vindicated in avoiding a lockdown. The other says that deaths in Sweden are far higher than in neighboring Denmark and Norway as a result.
This second line was always based on a mulish refusal to understand that, however much you “flatten the curve,” you still end up with the same number of deaths over time. But it has now been blown out of the water completely, as Denmark and Norway are, in effect, recognizing that Sweden handled it correctly.
Norway’s epidemiologists now say the infection rate had peaked before its lockdown was imposed. As Camilla Stoltenberg, the head of Norway’s Public Health Institute, put it: “We could have achieved the same effects and avoided some of the unfortunate impacts by not locking down.”
Hers is a hard and unpopular message, but we need to hear it. Otherwise, we risk destroying more livelihoods and more lives simply because we don’t like to admit that we were wrong.
