How lockdowns could work

Imagine a group of people who want to play tag. They know they risk tripping or being bumped into by someone else. Once they're tagged, they sit out for awhile and join the game later. The game requires physical exertion and risk of injury, therefore the sick and feeble will stay home to protect themselves from the game's perils.

Now imagine games of tag have to be played indoors. You can run into someone else's house, run around, but then you have to move to another house. Playing tag in the street is now outlawed, because it's just too dangerous to play tag that way. 

The game will take much longer. It might go on for months or years. But this new restriction aimed at protecting people now puts the sick and feeble in the same path as those playing the game. The vulnerable population hasn't been protected.

This is why lockdowns don't work. They put everyone inside. When healthy people get "tagged" they recover; their immune system protects them from getting hurt and hurting others. But if they're forced to play indoors, the game drags on so long that the vulnerable have to expose themselves to the game one way or another.

Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist from Harvard Medical School, supports an age-based approach to COVID-19. Since the young and healthy are orders of magnitude safer from the virus, it makes sense to develop herd immunity in this population.

Anti-lockdown advocates discredit themselves by saying "look at the numbers, there's nothing you can do to stop this." It's true, many of the patterns look very similar to past flu seasons. Perhaps in the modern world, our lives are so intertwined that it's impossible to slow the spread of a virus. On the other hand, you can imagine someone living on a self-sustained plot of land miles from anyone else where the virus can't reach. This scenario is exceedingly rare in the modern day, and maybe that's why the lockdowns have been so unsuccessful.

If there were a chance lockdowns help, it'd be to make them as short as possible. The only way to do that is through herd immunity. Let the vulnerable lock themselves away for a month. Let life go on as normal so the human immune systems can do the work of ending the pandemic. 

This is not what happened. New York and Sweden were hit hard and 40-60% of deaths came from their inability to protect nursing homes. This population is small and isolated and could have been protected. They weren't. So the mortality numbers are higher than they should have been. And due to the lockdowns, deaths caused by untreated illnesses, suicide, and abuse have increased as well. The exact wrong lesson was learned. To limit the movement of healthy individuals to reduce deaths in the vulnerable only prolongs the exposure of the population we needed to protect.

It's shocking to see the devastating rule of unintended consequences find its way into a pandemic. It underscores, once again, outcomes are much better when individuals are allowed to choose their own risks. Government works with a set of uncertainties when assessing the data. Individuals do as well, but the range of choices that are allowed naturally reduces that uncertainty quickly whereas government mandates puts us in a world of pure theorizing. The range of possible choices and actions allowed are forbidden, and the opportunity to use scientific analysis is lost.

A Masked Perspective

Rosa Parks was inconvenienced. She was told to sit in the back of the bus. Why did she have to make such a fuss over a minor inconvenience. She probably just wanted to be first off the bus for her haircut. Wasn't she thinking about all the white people who felt better about themselves knowing blacks were in the back? What a whiny, entitled, disrespectful person.

No, I am not equating wearing masks to systemic racism. No, I am not equating the plight of 1950's blacks to the plight of middle class white people who have to wear masks. What I am doing, is pointing to how civil disobedience is the only viable response for many who are otherwise powerless.

Rosa Parks didn't own a business. She couldn't stand up to the government by letting whites and blacks sit at the same counter or use the same drinking fountain. Business owners who did would be in violation of the government's Jim Crow laws and risked their livelihoods being destroyed. She couldn't make a statement like Elon Musk did when he defied state lockdowns. She probably sat at the blacks-only counter so she wouldn't put businesses at risk of fines or shutdown. What she did do is defy government orders on a government owned bus.

Today, governments have shutdown businesses ruining the lives of millions. Some of that ruination is temporary. But suicides have increased and those lives have ended permanently. Domestic abuse has risen leading to life long trauma. 55,000 excess deaths are attributed to the lockdowns because people delayed care.

The average person has been helpless to do anything. Most are not business owners, and those who are cannot risk fines when revenue has been cut off already.

What the individual has been mandated to do is wear a mask. And so the individual has been given an opportunity to resist. Critics of mask-haters have a case to make that masks can prevent droplets from spreading to others. But these critics miss the point. Regardless of the effectiveness of masks, it's a chance for individuals to symbolically stand up for those hurt by the lockdown and to declare enough is enough

Risk and benefit

COVID is dangerous, but sometimes the medicine is worse than the disease. Defending that statement will have to wait for a different blog post. What can be said is that some people have looked at the data and have decided normal life is worth the risk. This decision making has been taken out of our hands.

"But your decision is irrational." Bungee jumping to me is not worth the risk. I wouldn't tell people who want to participate in bungee jumping they can't; that's their risk/benefit assessment to make. They are not irrational. As Mises put it

'If a man drinks wine and not water I cannot say he is acting irrationally. At most I can say that in his place I would not do so. But his pursuit of happiness is his own business, not mine.' - Ludwig von Mises

That last sentence should be taken literally. Allow businesses to set safety policies. Those with higher restrictions will attract the risk adverse. Those with fewer restriction will attract those less fearful. But we're not given a choice and this is what's causing the overreaction to mask mandates.

Rosa Parks didn't sit in the front of the bus because she liked the view; she did it because of government edicts that restricted freedom. Mask protests aren't motivated by the discomfort; they exist because government edicts have stolen the lives and livelihoods of millions by suspending liberty.