The harms of COVID-19 are distinct from the harms of our response to it

COVID-19 should not be underestimated. More than 5.6 million have died worldwide from it, including 900,000 in the United States. People have endured agonizing hospitalizations, and some have come out permanently disabled. All of this has devastated families and disrupted communities.

But the responses by governments, employers, businesses, churches, and other institutions have also inflicted great harm. Some of those harms have been “worth it,” as they were lesser than the COVID-19 harms they prevented. But often, our interventions did little good and far more harm than they prevented.

Government officials and the news media have avoided any cost-benefit analysis. They try to discourage it, in part by portraying the harms of official responses as harms caused by COVID-19.

After my county’s health czar closed public schools for a year, banned many activities for even longer, and generally made ours one of the most locked-down counties in America, he cashed out to a for-profit telehealth company to battle an “alarming rate in pediatric mental health crises,” which the company vaguely attributed to the “pandemic.” But who caused the crises?

It is startling that one can impose policies that exacerbate pediatric mental health crises but not acknowledge it when you get hired to address those very crises. Instead, the media and officials here pretend that children’s anxiety and depression are caused by a virus rather than by the isolation the government imposed upon them.

The very county council members who once led the push to lock down schools have been vague about the crises of mental health.

The media have perpetuated this pandemic conflation between COVID’s harms and the government’s harms.

The New York Times wrote about the surgeon general’s warning that “young people are facing ‘devastating’ mental health effects as a result of the challenges experienced by their generation, including the coronavirus pandemic.” Their story never once mentioned school closures, mask mandates, social distancing rules, the cancellation of sports teams, the outlawing of hanging out with friends, or the other policies that obviously drove the spike in depression and anxiety.

Here’s an ABC story about parents with children under 5 who say having a child “too young to get vaccinated” means “you’re still stuck in March 2020.” Like the dozen other pieces on the same topic, this ABC story blames all the problems “a global pandemic that does not want to end.” ABC never explores whether quarantine rules that punish 4-year-olds and their parents make any sense. (They don’t.)

Matt Yglesias put it well: “Some of the problems that people experienced in January were the problems of disease … But COVID-19 mitigation measures are causing burdens over and above the burden of disease per se.”

Yglesias proposes a way to tell how much of our disruptions today are from the pandemic and how much are from the responses:

The harm of the interventions is greatest when it comes to children. It’s clear our COVID responses harmed schools more than the disease itself ever did. We can only imagine how much better things would be if we had responded more level-headedly and less fearfully.

Who was more stressed about their job: those facing the virus or those dealing with the policy response? The answer is obviously the latter.

RAND did a study after the 2020-2021 school year and found teachers teaching remotely were far more stressed than teachers working in person, while those teaching hybrid were twice as stressed out as those teaching strictly in person.

So yes, the pandemic has done horrible things to our lives. But let’s not blame a virus for what our mayors, governors, and other leaders have done to us at the same time.