What if the lockdown is working too well?

The beclowning of America

Earlier this week Boston’s mayor, citing tests showing that only 10% of its residents have developed Kung Flu antibodies, vowed to continue his lockdown orders. Assuming that those tests are accurate, and the 10% figure is surprisingly lower than other tests in the rest of the world, what’s to be done? Continue the city’s lockdown until a virus is invented, tested for safety ramped up for mass production and then successfully injected into 7 billion people? (By the way, judging from comments by various public health officials warning that “some people” won’t voluntarily submit to vaccination, look for increaing calls for governments to impose mandatory innoculatio programs that will round up citizens and shoot them up with what’s good for them). That could, will, take years.

The flu is certainly a danger, but, though severe cases can be agonizing — my own daughter went through three weeks of hell before her body beat it — it rarely kills. 99% of the deaths associated with COVID-1984 occur in people with pre-existing, life-threatening illnesses, and because old people have far more of such illnesses, the death rate among sick elderly in nursing homes is particularly high.

Those people should stay home, if they choose — no one I know is proposing that anyone, of any age or any condition, who wants to avoid the risk should be forced from their shelters; in fact, we should divert some of the trillions of dollars currently devoted to poor-relief to create special isolation rooms in now-vacant hotels for all who wish them, but those who choose to go out and resume their normal lives should be applauded, not arrested; they’re the ones who are going to raise the percentage of the population with antibody protection to a level acceptable to government officials like Boston’s mayor and enable the vulnerable to come outside again.

If we all stay indoors, the infection rate will stay so low that we’ll never get permission to leave. The original idea of this economic carnage was to slow the spread of the disease to avoid swamping hospitals. Mission accomplished; hospitals are empty and in more danger of closing because of lost revenue than because of too many patients. Now let my people go.