What (I think) I've learned about Covid

May 2021. I compiled a curated list of articles and links that provided me with my basic understanding of the myths and misunderstandings of Covid, errors that led to ill-conceived policies that devastated small business, the global economy, mental health and social integration for more than two years, while increasing inequality and burdening the poor with millstones that they will carry with them for years.

What I believe to be true.docx

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Sadly, the expensive silliness continues. Here is one speculative piece on "long Covid."

The Economy Could Have a Long Case of Long Covid - WSJ.pdf

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Per usual, the comments seem too "get it right" much better than the columnist.

Yet without any irony, on the same day we get this critique of Covid policy, namely the unforced errors of Fauci and Biden in destroying the economy and public confidence in the government and the CDC, while all the time these two cloak themselves in "the science," to the point where Fauci even claimed, "I am the science." The hubris knows no limits.

Biden and Fauci Botched the Covid Pandemic Response - WSJ.pdf

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Here are three key paragraphs:

From the outset of the pandemic, the mainstream medical establishment and government bureaucracy were aligned behind a lockdown-at-all-costs strategy. The Trump White House tapped Scott Atlas, a Hoover Institution fellow and radiologist, for a contrarian perspective. Dr. Atlas endorsed the elements of the Great Barrington strategy. The House report criticizes him for a memo in which he argued that “stopping all cases is not necessary, nor is it possible. It instills irrational fear into the public. Non-prioritized testing is jeopardizing critical resources for truly critical testing and is creating problematic delays in test results for the most important populations.”

He was right on every point. Indiscriminate use of a scarce resource reduces public welfare. When tests were in short supply, Dr. Atlas’s recommendation to save them for high-risk groups such as nursing-home residents made eminent sense. His prescriptions and those of the Great Barrington Declaration aimed to maximize public welfare.

Democrats claim in their report that 130,000 lives could have been saved with more “mitigation,” but this is doubtful. California and New York, which adopted mask mandates and lockdowns during the 2020-21 winter, fared no better than Florida and Texas, which didn’t. What’s more, employment continues to lag significantly in liberal lockdown states. Had all 50 states stayed shut down until vaccines were available, with the federal government paying tens of millions of people not to work—as Democrats ostensibly would have done—we might now be experiencing high unemployment and even higher inflation.