Late-stage pandemic response is hindered by how much the earlier stages were governed by panic, politics, and authoritarian urges. We'd be in better shape now if Americans had always been treated like rational adults capable of balancing cost and benefit, risk and reward.
Now, all of a sudden - solely and entirely because blue states where political and media elites live are experiencing huge Covid surges, and the incompetent Biden admin fell down on ordering test kits - we're talking about measuring the cost of restrictions against benefits.
Now that panic measures and authoritarian diktats have failed, and places where "sophisticated" people who "did everything right" are boiling over with new cases, suddenly it's time to ask if those protocols too harsh, if we should be counting hospitalizations instead of cases.
Suddenly we're ordered to forget everything the elite ever said about vaccines offering absolute protection against infection, making everyone who refused to take the shots into a super-spreading criminal who should be hounded out of society and barred from employment.
The sudden chatter about paying more attention to hospitalizations instead of infections is an example of shifting to rational risk/reward calculations instead of politicized hysteria. Remember, this all started with "15 days to flatten the curve," the curve meaning hospitals.
Reducing hospitalization and death was always a more rational and achievable goal than "zero Covid." It was never necessary to whip a population full of neurotics, hysterics, and aspiring petty tyrants into a frenzy over theatrical nonsense like masking.
The problem facing the elite today is that Omicron is the microscopic avatar of risk/reward calculations. It spreads quickly and nothing seems to stop it, but its effects are mild and vaccination reduces those effects to pretty much "bad cold" levels for most people.
If the longstanding regime of politicized panic, hysteria, and authoritarian OBEY OR BE PUNISHED psychosis is applied to the Omicron variant, it will destroy the country. We'll collapse in economic ruin and dissolve into civil war, blaming each other for the inexorable spread.
But if we treat Omicron as a situation to be managed with intelligent decisions about risk vs. reward, and approach sovereign American citizens as intelligent, sovereign people who can process good information and make those decisions for themselves, we can restore normal life.
There are signs the political elite are beginning to understand this, perhaps as the grim prognosis (from their point of view) from the next couple of elections settles on them, or because they realize the public is no longer willing to indulge a Laptop Class elite lifestyle.
We have to get better at remembering every action has a cost, and it must be measured against benefits, in both short and long terms. We must remember politicians always underestimate costs and exaggerate benefits, because they rarely pay a serious price for doing so. /end
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