JAMES BOVARD: Hacksawing the Economy: How Lockdowns Are in the Tradition of Civil War Surgeons. 

Surgeons justified fetching out their hacksaws, because otherwise many soldiers would die from their gangrened wounds. It didn’t matter how many soldiers died from unnecessary or botched amputations as long as surgeons didn’t get blamed for deaths from gangrene.

Politicians in many states are justifying their COVID-19 shutdowns with rationales that resemble those surgeons’. It doesn’t matter how many individuals lose their jobs, businesses, or robust health due to the shutdowns. As long as politicians claim that things would be worse if they had not amputated much of the economy, they can pirouette as saviors.

Actually, there is a closer analogy between the Civil War surgeons and contemporary politicians. Politicians have razed much of the economy purportedly to prevent anyone from getting infected at some unknown point in the future. This is like a Civil War surgeon sending his assistants to roam the countryside to seize hapless young men and saw off their arms in order to prevent them from being casualties in future battles.

Here’s how New York governor Andrew Cuomo justified shutting down his state’s economy and confining almost 20 million people to their homes two months ago: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” At the time of Cuomo’s decree, five or fewer people had tested positive for coronavirus in most counties in New York State. Cuomo’s formula exemplifies how politicians reap media applause for dramatic actions that have little or nothing to do with public safety.

The 1860s media no doubt published glowing profiles of the surgeons, too.

WHAT, ME HELP? AOC Discovers America. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s suggests Americans choose a “different path” and try something unprecedented during a disaster: voluntarily helping their neighbors. As usual, her ignorance is appalling, but to be fair,  helping someone else is probably unprecedented for her and her comrades.

HOW TO FILL THE SEATS AGAIN: Ticket to Cancel. To lure their customers back, airlines and theaters and arenas need to offer fully refundable tickets.

THE GEEZER FALLACY: What do the Covid9-19 Antibody Studies Mean? They yield vastly different fatality rates ranging from 0.05 percent in Iceland to 1.3 percent in northern Italy. Jacob Sullum analyzes the differences and says that some of the lower estimates look plausible. He also offers encouragement for the elderly from Alan Reynolds of Cato Institute, who notes that at least 99 percent of the people who died in New York City had underlying medical conditions.

“The absolutely critical and widely misunderstood point here is that ‘underlying conditions’ are THE only risk that virtually all fatal cases of COVID-19 had in common—not age,” Reynolds writes. “That misunderstanding arose because old people are far more likely to have one or more of these conditions (and because more old people die of this and almost every other fatal risk). But it’s about time to stop echoing the fallacy that this virus kills old people, rather than sick people.”

Good, because there are plenty of healthy old people.

NO, IT’S NOT: “The Moral Equivalent of War.” The war rhetoric surfaces once again in peacetime — and will lead to no good, as usual. “If we allow Covid-19 to kill our economy, then the virus will have won.”

THIS TIME IT REALLY IS DIFFERENT: Un-furloughing the Economy. Instead of forcing companies large or small to rehire workers they can’t use, we should focus on helping them survive. “The ‘Main Street-vs.-Wall Street-vs.-households’ narrative is a false characterization—everyone is in this together.”

THEY SHOULD MAKE MORE NOISE: Youth in Quarantine. Young people ride out the pandemic obediently, without the generational war that the boomers might have started. But they’ll pay the biggest price economically.

IDEALLY ONE YOU CAN DO DURING A LOCKDOWN: Make Your Own Job. The promise of entrepreneurship education.

NOW AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC IS OVER: The smart way for cash-strapped cities to save money and protect workers: Stop recycling. Howard Husock calculates that New York City could save nearly $200 million annually by scrapping its recycling program and sending stuff straight to the landfill. And it would spare trash collectors and other workers from the risk of handling recyclables with Covid-19 and other pathogens. If Bill di Blasio and other mayors want their pleas for federal aid to be taken seriously, they need to show they’re serious about eliminating waste.

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT: The Unexamined Model Is Not Worth Trusting. An epidemiologist’s critique of the Imperial College model, whose doomsday projections for the pandemic frightened leaders into imposing lockdowns. “Blind trust in an untested, shoddily written model is not scientific.”

ONE MAN CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE: Richard Gilder’s American Legacy. Remembering the New York philanthropist who rescued Central Park (by essentially privatizing it) and fought to restore the instruction of American history in secondary schools, among many achievements.

A FEDERAL PROGRAM THAT ACTUALLY WORKED? In Defense of the PPP. Criticisms notwithstanding, the federal aid program for small businesses is largely meeting its stated objectives.

APOCALYPSE POSTPONED (LIBERAL PUNDITS HARDEST HIT): An Orgy of Plague Death, Deferred.  Caseloads have declined in Florida and Georgia since the lockdowns were eased by Republican governors who were denounced for ignoring “the science.”

In the Atlantic, Amanda Mull’s dispatch anticipating Georgia’s apocalyptic future was entitled simply, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice: The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.” According to her reporting, though Georgians chafed under lockdown, there was no serious insurrectionary sentiment among the people when Kemp announced his intention to relax restrictions on service industries. “Georgians are now the largely unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine,” she wrote, “sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague.”

“Public health experts fear coronavirus will burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman,” read a florid analogy from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. His tongue-in-cheek piece, “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination,” toyed with the notion that Peach State residents were dying to work out at their local gyms including “CrossImmunity” and “Superspreader” boot camp. Cosmetologists could perform a “deep lung-tissue massage.” Restaurant-goers could enjoy “wet-market-to-table restaurants to experience a growing sampling of zoonotic dishes.” This columnist clearly enjoyed the time he spent crafting witty prose around the prospect of plague.

Those who did not strike either an authoritative or flippant tone struck a more somber note. “Mark this day,” Ron Fournier wrote on April 20. “Because two and three weeks from now, the Georgia death toll is blood on his hands. And as Georgians move around the country, they’ll spread more death and economic destruction.”

Florida’s DeSantis was, according to state Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, “reckless, premature, and irresponsible” to allow municipalities to reopen their coasts in mid-April. When stores began reopening, the Miami Herald editorial board accused the governor of serving up his state’s citizens as a sacrifice in return for some imagined “political favor” from the president. As recently as this week, the Washington Post’s Ben Terris and Josh Dawsey described DeSantis as the prototypical “Florida Man”—a “devil-may-care and slightly oafish, beloved but not admired” cliché of a human being.

Actually, Florida Man is more admired than the mainstream media. And apparently has a better grasp of “the science.”

NO, AS THE CDC DIRECTOR KNOWS FROM EXPERIENCE: Is There a Penalty for Those Who Fan Flames of Pandemic Hysteria? Before you take doomsday warnings from the CDC’s Robert Redfield too seriously, remember that he was a leading promoter of the myth of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic in America during the 1980s.

PUTTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO SHAME AGAIN: Getting Distance Learning Right. While public schools eliminate grades and let most students languish during the pandemic, the Success Academy charter schools in New York have transformed themselves into fully functional digital schools serving the poorest neighborhoods in the city. They’ve provided every student with a Chromebook and maintained full days of instruction and the usual rigorous monitoring of students’ progress.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Therapeutic Campus. Why are college students seeking mental-health services in record numbers? The therapeutic bureaucracy is flourishing as “safe spaces” expand into woke spas for the most privileged neurotics in history.

Underneath the essential oils and yoga mats, the woke spa mental-wellness crusade is accomplishing an even more profound transformation of university life.The assumption that emotional threat and danger lie just beyond the spa is the product of an increasingly female-dominated student body, faculty, and administration. That assumption is undermining traditional academic values of rational discourse, argumentation, and free speech.

Read the whole thing.

“ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”: Keystone Rebellion. Six counties in Pennsylvania rebel against the governor’s lockdown policies.

RED TAPE AND LAWYERS: Covid-19: Regulatory Obstacles to U.S. Recovery. How the FDA prevented Covid victims from making vital  health measurements on their smartphones, and how to stop legal vultures from feasting off the pandemic.

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING: “Social Distancing” Is Snake Oil, Not Science. There was never good evidence to support its efficacy.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): One of the things I find most annoying about Dr. Fauci is his scientific version of Jon Stewart’s clown-nose-on-clown-nose-off routine. Sometimes he demands double-blind studies, other times — as with lockdowns and social distancing — he goes with his gut. It’s not that that’s necessarily wrong, but he’s very shifty in not explaining why he’s changing his standards.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Earlier: Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic.

(Updated and bumped.)

WHY WE FOOLISHLY BELIEVED THE COVID MODELERS: A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for Our Destiny in Data. In the Middle Ages, the physicians of Paris “forecast” the ebb and flow of the Black Death using the conjunctions of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. The way we’re seduced by complex mathematical models today isn’t all that different from how we were seduced by astrology for millennia, as the physicist and data scientist Alexander Boxer explains in his entertaining history of this obsession.

Astrology was the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained for centuries by some of history’s most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler. Just consider that for much of the last two thousand years, the word “mathematician” (mathematicus) simply meant an astrologer; there was no distinction. . . . Astrologers were the quants and data scientists of their day, and those of us who are enthusiastic about the promise of numerical data to unlock the secrets of ourselves and our world would do well simply to acknowledge that others have come this way before.

And learn from their mistakes as we look for an escape from lockdown.

THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN: Economic Well-Being Matters, Too. The poorest counties are suffering the most from lockdowns.

DECAY ON THE BAY: I Left My Home in San Francisco. The exodus from a beautiful city going to seed.

MATT RIDLEY: We know everything–and nothing–about Covid. The lockdowns were imposed in a state of ignorance. It now looks as if many of the early cases were caught in hospitals and doctors’ offices and nursing homes.

If Covid-19 is at least partly a ‘nosocomial’ (hospital-acquired) disease, then the pandemic might burn itself out quicker than expected. The death rate here [in the U.K.] peaked on 8 April, just two weeks after lockdown began, which is surprisingly early given that it is usually at least four weeks after infection that people die if they die. But it makes sense if this was the fading of the initial, hospital–acquired wave. If you look at the per capita numbers for different countries in Europe, they all show a dampening of the rate of growth earlier than you would expect from the lockdowns.

So if it wasn’t the lockdowns that slowed infection . . . .

It is possible that washing your hands, not shaking hands with others, not gathering in large crowds, and wearing a face mask in public, but no more than this, might have been enough, as Sweden seems to suggest. Forcibly shutting schools and shops and aggressively policing sunbathers in parks may have added little in terms of reducing the rate of spread.

But it did give politicians a chance to order everyone around, so there’s that.

LOCAL MILITIAS ARE BETTER THAN A D-DAY STRATEGY: Herd Immunity Is Misleading. We should aim for augmented immunity instead — and fight a guerilla war against Covid-19 instead of a centrally commanded confrontation.

THIS WOULD BE VERY GOOD NEWS: Have Stockholm and Other Places Already Reached Herd Immunity? Nicholas Lewis argues that the Covid modelers’ doomsday predictions were off because they wrongly assumed that the “herd immunity threshold” is 50 to 60 percent of the population, whereas there is reason to believe that it’s actually much lower and has already been reached in Stockholm and probably in some other places. This paper and other encouraging developments — like the downward trend for infections in Germany despite the easing of the lockdown — are discussed in Toby Young’s daily roundup at Lockdown Skeptics.