Resolving the Argument Between Lockdown and Liberty
We must protect the vulnerable, restore the lives and livelihoods of those whose vulnerability is economic and not medical, and assert the human spirit of survival and progress over a demeaning and unfeasible culture of intimidation lest we live like furtive, fearful, moles.
By Conrad Black • May 18, 2020
As the debate between those who want an unlimited lockdown and those who want to reopen America as quickly as possible becomes more clangorous every day, months of intensive study and sad experience with the coronavirus enable us to determine the best course and resolve the argument.
The shutdown must end in all but severely afflicted areas. Its original purpose was to “flatten the curve.†In the early stages, the number of coronavirus reported cases and deaths in the United States was doubling every few days. Horrifying projections based on the scanty evidence available and hyped by the anti-Trump media to put as much pressure and blame on the president as possible for his initially somewhat casual treatment of the subject, stirred fears of millions of deaths and of a universal vulnerability to an almost untreatable fatal illness.
As viruses do not die and only become dormant, there was no possibility of stamping the coronavirus out completely in any country that it had entered. Flattening the curve was always a method for slowing the progress of the coronavirus, but never had any possibility of eliminating it. Everyone knew that the economic cost would be completely unsustainable beyond a couple of months. It was correctly estimated that unemployment would swiftly rise to 25 percent or more, a number not seen since the depth of the Great Depression in 1933.
The shutdown achieved its initial purpose; the incidence of coronavirus has declined from its height of several thousand to approximately 1,400 fatalities per day last week. We now know that approximately 80 percent of fatalities occur among the approximately 20 percent of people above the age of 60, especially those with supplementary problems that reduce their immunity.
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