Thread by @CACoreyU

Here's one for you. The government, the media, and the medical establishment didn't panic and abandon all their principles at the start of the COVID pandemic and everything they did was "by the book" and totally necessary.

Oh, sorry, #AprilFools 🧵

On February 28, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIAID, Dr. Clifford Lane of NIH & Dr. Robert Redfield of the CDC published "COVID-19- Navigating the Uncharted" saying the consequences of Covid-19 "may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe influenza."

nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…

They further suggest "mitigation techniques" may include isolating ill persons, school closures, and telecommuting where possible. #commonsense

That comports with pre-COVID-19 pandemic literature, especially "Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza" by infectious disease experts including Dr. Donald Henderson of Johns Hopkins University.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17238820/

Dr. Henderson's "overriding principle" was that communities facing an epidemic "respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted."

Why didn't the White House's Coronavirus Task Force adopt the same overriding principle? It appears the panic was driven by epidemiological modeling. We all became familiar with the Imperial College London's projection that more than 2.2 million non-nursing home deaths awaited.

This projection covered about a six-month period "in the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in human behavior." More alarmingly, the model showed hospitalizations for Covid-19 would overwhelm every state's health care system many times over.

Thus, the Task Force recommended a total economic shutdown, "15 days to slow the spread," in order to "flatten" the curve and give hospitals more time to prepare and care for patients.

There was, no doubt, reason for extra caution. The virus was new and had wreaked havoc on Italy. It was beginning to strain the State of New York's health care system, and any number of excess deaths is going to be painful, tragic, and frightening. Panic was understandable.

I joined many others writing that putting our livelihoods on hold to save lives was a noble trade-off and I personally knew people flying into New York to help care for the sick and relieve an overworked and frightened health care workforce. They ARE heroes, and they earned it.

But this was never sustainable. Congress quickly passed the largest single spending bill in history, $2.2 trillion with only a voice vote, not even a recorded vote, to keep vulnerable senior members from having to come to the Capitol and risk getting infected.

"15 days to slow the spread" became 30 days and slowing the spread was now a herculean effort to get the curve down to "no new cases, no new deaths" to quote Dr. Fauci, now a household name.

This was again a major deviation from previous recommendations. In 2007, the CDC published "Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation in the U.S." noting the effectiveness of mitigation will "erode rapidly" as the case rate rises above 1%.

samhsa.gov/resource/dbhis…

According to the 2007 recommendations, the purpose of these strategies was not to slow the spread but to allow time for hospitals to "expand surge capacity as much as possible" and reduce the strain by limiting disease transmission.

By all accounts, the 2007 paper's pronouncements won out. While models showed that New York would need as many as 140,000 hospital beds, the actual peak of hospitalizations was 18,000. To be sure, a significant surge but not the doomsday scenario predicted.

Between the #TwitterFiles that show how governments and social media platforms suppressed accurate information and hours of footage of new media "journalists" reporting sensationalized predictions as fact...

There is ample evidence that several institutions we rely on not to panic and stick to principle clearly didn't. In a country that presumes liberty first, how do we balance public health and freedom? How do we save lives AND livelihoods?

We have to ask, "what is reasonable?"

Dr. Fauci, Redfield, and Lane are experts, but one would be wise to consult Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address: "we must be alert...that "public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." It is the "task of statesmanship" to find balance.

I write this not to relitigate the past and it is by no means a comprehensive review. I'm no expert and I'm sure that further research might show the above to be less than the full explanation for any one of the discrepancies. And, yes, my source is @GovRonDeSantis of Florida.

It's the most detailed part of his book and worth reading in full to get a clearer picture of the power of principled leadership over panic. Gov. DeSantis recognized that the early data showed the elderly were most vulnerable to infection and death and set policy based on that.

There were lockdowns at first. In fact, three years to the day, Florida instituted limits on so-called "non-essential business" and travel restrictions, but while other states remained locked down well into the year, Florida lifted nearly all lockdowns within 4 weeks.

In the meantime, Florida focused on protecting its sizeable population of elderly people while letting life otherwise return to normal. The results speak for themselves: from April 2020 to mid-July 2022, NY saw an increase of excess deaths of 20 percent; CA, 17.7; Florida, 15.6.

Florida typically ranked between 15th and 25th in per-capita COVID-19 deaths, despite a sizeable elderly population. On an age-adjusted basis, 30 states had higher Covid-19 mortality than Florida, and nearly 40 had higher per-capita mortality among senior citizens.

Despite pressure from the media, Congress, and even the Trump administration, Gov. DeSantis insisted on actually following the data and the people of Florida fared better because of his leadership. Nobody else could have run this ad in 2022.

https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1567194182745194497

The point of all this is not to lionize Gov. Ron DeSantis, though I believe he is owed a debt of gratitude for saving so many lives and livelihoods but to point to the power of principled leadership over panic. That will be the greatest lesson I learn from the Covid-19 pandemic.