By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 10, 2020
There’s an intense, often ugly debate over the response
to the COVID-19 pandemic. In broad brushstrokes, some contend that the
lower-than-predicted death toll proves the models forecasting massive
fatalities were needlessly sensational. Some even suggest they were
deliberately so, to scare politicians, including President Trump, into taking
drastic and unnecessary action.
A few conspiracy theorists — so-called “coronavirus
truthers” — see more sinister motives at play. But, as is always the case,
these cranks and grifters are best ignored, so I won’t shine a light on them
here.
The serious debate centers on whether the initial models
were always exaggerated, or whether the response to them is driving down
fatalities more effectively than epidemiologists predicted. For what it’s
worth, my opinion is “both.”
What makes the debate uglier than it needs to be is that
many of the people denouncing the initial projections want to make the case
that our response was deliberately misguided from the beginning — so much media
hype, partisan point scoring, and ideologically motivated crisis exploitation —
and that we never should have shuttered the economy.
I think these people are mostly on the wrong side of the
argument, but I don’t begrudge anyone who’s desperate to get the country
working again. The economic toll of this pandemic is staggering and will be
felt for a generation or more, even if we get the much-craved “V”-shaped
recovery when the all-clear is sounded.
The first error is assuming that the scientists at the
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Imperial College London, National
Institutes of Health, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were acting
in bad faith. Just because a cashier makes a math error when giving you change
doesn’t mean he’s trying to steal from you. And just because these models
weren’t perfectly oracular doesn’t mean anyone was lying.
Of course, predicting the spread of a new virus across
the globe isn’t remotely like calculating the correct change for a bag of
potato chips. We’re talking about the interdependent behavior of hundreds of
millions of Americans, and billions globally, across institutions, communities,
and borders.
It’s almost surely the case that the models were wrong to
one degree or another for the simple reason that any model is only as good as
the data fed into it. With imperfect information — partly thanks to the outrageous
dishonesty of the Chinese government and the grave missteps of the World Health
Organization — it was inevitable that the models would never be more than best
guesses. We’re far from out of the woods, but the fact that “only” some 60,000
Americans may die instead of 240,000 seems like something to celebrate, not an
excuse to scapegoat officials who scrambled to save lives.
Still, there’s an interesting assumption common to both
sides of the debate: that the government is responsible for all of this. Both
defenders and the critics start from the premise that government diktats are
the only variable here.
My American Enterprise Institute colleague Lyman Stone,
an economist based in Hong Kong, makes the case that the essential variable in
“flattening the curve” isn’t central planning but behavior change. Many
businesses closed down well before they were ordered to. Millions of people
practiced social distancing and refused to get on planes not because they were
commanded to, but because they were convinced this was a wise course of action
for themselves and their loved ones.
People change their behavior when they are given clear
information about risks. Various countries have flattened the curve of COVID-19
cases in different ways, Stone explained on my podcast, The Remnant. Some relied heavily on contact tracing, others on
quarantining the sick, others through lockdowns — or all of the above. “But
what we’ve seen in every country is that what really does it is information,”
Stone said.
Information doesn’t just come from governments. The death
tolls in Italy and New York probably did more to change behavior on the ground
than all of Trump’s press conferences or Dr. Anthony Fauci’s TV appearances.
And this raises another complication for those who think the
government can just “re-open” the economy with the flick of a switch. Trump and
all of the governors could lift the stay-at-home orders and federal advisories
tomorrow. That wouldn’t necessarily fill the restaurants, airplanes, or
stadiums. People would still need to be convinced it’s safe. Such persuasion
comes via clear, believable information, not orders from on high.
And that’s how it should be in a free society.
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