If it cannot be done already, it won't be long before a serious case with ample documentation can be made that deaths directly caused by the lockdown rival deaths from the worst "adjusted" coronavirus models. Some of the same high-risk people are dying from different causes.
That doesn't automatically mean the lockdowns were completely unnecessary or entirely counterproductive, but it's a possibility that should have been considered more carefully at every step of the way. This was never a binary choice between Jobs and Lives.
The most urgent matter before us is to consider lives lost due to the lockdowns when we decide how much longer to wait before lifting them. We are approaching, or may have passed, the point where the lockdowns are a net loss for both the economy AND health.
But that's the thing about public policy: decisions tend to be made according to the simplest, shortest-term political narrative. Death and injury from the lockdowns will be piling up for months and years to come, in many different ways. Blame will be spread slow and thin.
Politicians are not much concerned with slow and thin spreads of blame. They rarely think in the long term at all. They aren't worried about documentaries and special reports 10 years from now that suggest maybe the current crisis was handled badly in retrospect.
I watched the Wuhan virus coming for long enough to know that SOMETHING had to be done, but I've also seen enough of our political culture to know that frantically doing ANYTHING would probably lead to disaster in the long term.
Really, our politics are engineered to get decisions like this wrong: overselling benefits and hiding costs, robbing Peter to pay Paul and then savaging Peter if he dares to complain, "socializing" costs until they become an impenetrable fog from which benefits appear by magic.
It's a system that tries to keep us in a constant state of panic by manufacturing crises and convicting us all of social "crimes" without a trial. Of COURSE it reacted badly when a real crisis struck, beginning with a bureaucracy that mostly produces paperwork, not useful goods.
Lockdown deaths were not hard to predict, and arguably easier to model than the coronavirus itself was, given how often those models have been revised. It's not shocking that hospitals and clinics are collapsing because they're EMPTY. But none of the Modeling Gurus saw it coming?
We have oceans of data about rising mortality rates from various sources due to severe economic hardship, rising unemployment, and widespread panic. But nobody plugged THAT data into their vaunted models to predict the downside of the lockdowns? Not one single model?
The news should not be filled with "shocking" fallout that was entirely predictable. Maybe we needed to take drastic action, even to the point of lockdown paralysis, but we should have been given a more complete analysis of the cost, especially marginal cost of extreme measures.
But that's the last thing our politicians ever want to talk about, isn't it? The doctrine of "If It Saves Just One Life" is an explicit repudiation of marginal costs. If X is good, 3X is better and 10X is better still. We're paying a steep price for that kind of thinking. /end
