A bit of very early Monday-morning quarterbacking, with the understanding that nearly every bit of info about the coronavirus is hotly disputed: the original idea for a 15-day lockdown followed by social distancing was probably right for most parts of the country.
The coronavirus is dangerous and insidious. It was not a bad call to think we needed a little time to put precautionary measures in place. 15 days would have been fantastically expensive but not ruinous to the economy. It would have been enough time to "flatten the curve."
The simplest explanation for why all the models were dramatically wrong, and all of the doomsday predictions were off, is that social distancing works better than anticipated. Every individual element of social distancing is subject to skepticism, but together they seem to work.
Some individual areas needed to be treated differently, and we should have done far more to isolate the most at-risk people, but for most of the country 15 days of lockdown was plenty - arguably more than enough, but given the mood of the public in March, probably inevitable.
Trump's much-derided call to reopen by Easter was pretty reasonable in retrospect, provided other measures were put in place quickly enough. Everything after that was needlessly destructive, and now Lockdown Forever has become a religion, a political platform, not science.
It will take a great deal of data-crunching to prove it, but to lay the hypothesis out now: sometime around Easter was the point at which total nationwide lockdown became counterproductive for public health in the long term, lives lost and horribly damaged exceeding lives saved.
We'll be counting the cost for a long time to come, because the lockdown and its aftershocks will be killing people, damaging their health, and ruining their lives for months to come, probably years to come. Efforts will be made to obscure that human cost for political reasons.
But when the proverbial final analysis is made, April will be when the lockdown became an error, and May is when it became a psychosis. The coronavirus was dangerous, but we went overboard with symbolic and politicized actions, and now we've entered the realm of madness. /end
