Four years ago, our world ground to a halt as COVID-19 swept the globe from Wuhan to Milan to Westchester County, New York where it took my mother-in-law. Millions in America and around the globe succumbed to this rapidly mutating respiratory virus for which science had no treatment. Health care workers, governments and businesses were forced to learn on the fly.
Mistakes were made. Power was yielded and co-opted. Some overreacted. Just as many under-reacted, or worse, muddied the already muddy mishmash of often contradictory mandates and warnings by deliberately misleading the public about what was needed so they could exploit the crisis for their own gain.
There were consequences for every action and inaction.
Businesses folded. Traffic evaporated. Gas prices plunged as offices shuttered and the supply chain slowed to a crawl. Pilates were out, Purell was in. The travel spigot was turned off. Airplanes flew nearly empty. Without jobs waiting for them, immigrants stopped crossing our borders. Ball games were played in deserted stadiums. Theaters went dark. Restaurants moved to the sidewalks to survive. And ballots were mailed to everyone in California, opening the floodgates of paranoia culminating in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
March 19, 2020 is the day California Gov. Gavin Newsom asked us to stay home for “two weeks” to get ahead of the virus. Those two weeks turned into two years; two years unlike anything the modern world has experienced. The reverberations continue to this day and will echo far into the future. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the arc of history. Will any lessons be learned?
When the next crisis hits do we repeat the shutdowns of schools and businesses, travel and trade or do we let nature take its course? Do we mandate vaccines (assuming we can create one) or do we let each man decide for himself? Given the fallout, it’s hard to imagine any politician shutting down Thanksgiving and Christmas a second time.
Twenty million met their end during the First World War. The eleventh hour of the eleventh month, 1918, marked the close of battle, but opened the door to an even deadlier disaster, the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed 100 million. Carried home by soldiers and sailors fortunate enough to have survived the trenches and torpedoes of war, the mass migrations of people spread a deadly pathogen far beyond government or medicine’s capacity to contain. Today we are infinitely more mobile and far more numerous. A sneeze in China gets a “Gesundheit” in San Francisco. Public health in the modern world is a scientific and political problem.
Was Dr. Fauci a hero or villain? Was President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” a scientific marvel or a gross government overreach, pushing untested vaccines into our arms? If the governor of California can shut down the 6th largest economy in the world, is there any limit to his power? Leaders are accountable for the actions they take, as well as the actions they don’t take. History will be the judge.
So, how did we do?
The answer may not be satisfying.
What was right for the West Side of Manhattan or Los Angeles may not have been right for Wyoming. Partisanship made these decisions more difficult. While viruses don’t care who you vote for, the people deciding what to do about viruses do.
There’s an old adage among military historians: “The generals always fight the last war.” This is also true of politicians tasked with responding to a new disease. We look to the past for help when deciding the right course of action in a crisis. The ideological agendas grafted onto the COVID-19 fight will make it that much harder for future epidemiologists and political leaders to convince a skeptical public to trust them.
Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sundays. Reach him at: Doug@DougMcIntyre.com. His novel, “Frank’s Shadow” is available at Amazon.com.
