My Sunday column: Why the Coronavirus Is Winning:
nytimes.com/2020/06/06/opi…
nytimes.com/2020/06/06/opi…
Part of my column is a response to the Q of whether conservatives who supported stay-at-home orders should feel like "suckers" now that blue-state politicians are blessing mass protest, or apologize (per @herandrews) for supporting public health restrictions. My answer is no: 
The public health response succeeded in its primary objective - slower spread, no hospital meltdown, get to warmer months and closer to vaccine. It failed in its secondary objective - buy time for a suppression strategy -because America can't execute.
The ideological hypocrisy of public-health liberals, no less than the ideologically-motivated virus skepticism of conservatives, is part of that failure of execution. And taken together they mean that the strategy has run its course.
But lots of ppl are alive because we tried it, the economy isn't as dead as was feared, and the alternative case studies - populist in Brazil, technocratic in Sweden - don't look like great advertisements for their approaches.
The fact that America couldn't get its act together to get to suppression is unfortunate, and yes, given decadence, predictable. But for us there is only the trying, the rest is not our business.
And trying to limit deaths from the initial wave, instead of saying "we're too decadent to imitate SK or Germany so let's just tough out the extra deaths among vulnerable populations, the old dying alone and unshriven, etc.", still absolutely seems like the right thing to do.
All of this allows for lots of specific hindsight critiques of how the shutdown was implemented, whether there should have been more geographical variation (though in practice there was), whether liberal/NYC bias was unfair to FL and too kind to Cuomo/De Blasio (yes and yes).
But it's worth remembering that leading anti-lockdown contrarians made fatality predictions that were about a third of what we've seen, and seroprevalence predictions that were likewise way too optimistic. While the Fauci/Birx casualty predictions have been, sadly, right on.
So even if you assume the hope of suppression was doomed from the start and we'd always end up shrugging off lockdowns, I'd rather shrug them off in summer with tens of thousands (at least) still alive, than run the De Blasio experiment on lots of cities in the cool of March.
Lots more to say, we'll be arguing about this for a decade, but I'll leave it there for @herandrews to demolish.
