I REALLY hate the phrase ‘post-COVID’. I get that it’s meant to be almost hopeful – but to me it misses the point. All the really nasty effects like higher levels of suicide and death from other causes as well as loss of freedom (yes, being confined to your home is really confinement), autonomy (mandates by definition strip the individual of choice) and trust (I’ll spare you the litany of broken promises and lies coming directly from our government) – all those things stem directly from the gross mismanagement of the response to Covid, not from the virus.

Mind you, the economy is only one of the things that ‘world leaders’ have damaged and damaged badly. Full disclosure, I’m not an economist and it was my fault, not the professor’s, that I got that D in Economics 101. I blame the 8 am time slot but that’s just because it’s true and I didn’t have enough sense to drop the course when I should have. If you’re looking for an in depth analysis of the economic impacts I’m definitely not your girl.

Policy, on the other hand, I can analyze. Passed all those courses including work toward a Ph.D. in Political Science. Yay, me!

I know, your eyes are already glazing over. We teach policy and government as badly as we teach history. It’s not that facts and figures – and dates – aren’t important. It’s that the ‘people factor’ is far more important. Who wants the policy and who opposes it and why on both counts will tell you far more about the impact a policy is likely to have. But we bury that in overly wordy white papers and rapidly spun news reports so that most folks are left with the false impression that policy is like science – boring and objective. That impression is wrong on both counts.

So let’s look at these policies from the beginning. Who started this lockdown nonsense? China. Why? Politically, to create the impression they were responding and controlling the crisis. Remember that Wuhan went from Ground Zero to C19 free in under six months – at least according to the CCP. In reality, it diverted attention away from China’s culpability. China was in PR mode from the very start. Lockdowns in the draconian, weld people into their homes, Chinese style look effective – especially if you control the statistics being released. Nice for the CCP – bad for everyone else.

China’s geographic neighbors are used to the posturing. They are also more keenly aware of how untrustworthy China is – so almost universally, their politicians opted for policies that didn’t look like China’s. This isn’t altogether because of their great wisdom – it’s also because they didn’t want to face their constituents having done anything that resembled the CCP. That would be a very quick way out of power. By and large they rejected lockdowns and mandates and went for public awareness / education and medical response instead.

As C19 spread westward, things changed. India, Iraq and Italy all have high elderly populations and were all hit very hard. Unlike China that has its elderly largely separated into the rural areas, these nations were much more integrated and therefore started reporting very high death tolls. Italy was especially hard hit. And politicians in Europe and the US took immediate alarm.

But most European nations don’t have Italy’s demographics – or culture. Italy’s strong extended family culture worked against it where most European nations are more like the US with small immediate families being the norm, not large extended ones.

Being fair, no one knew – except the CCP – exactly how C19 spread. We still don’t really. We assume it’s airborne but all we actually know is that it’s respiratory and contagious. But in the early days when a novel disease hits its hardest and fastest, it is very hard to know what to do to control the spread. Politicians have to do something and they want something that works. It’s not surprising they looked to Wuhan as the model, despite the fact that Taiwan and Japan were doing perfectly well.

Telling the panicky folks at home that you’re not going to do anything because that worked for Japan while Italy is piling up body bags is a non-starter. Being fair, folks would not have accepted doing nothing and the media was hyping the daylights out of every death – that’s a lot of pressure on a politician to wave his arms in the air just to look like he’s doing something. Arm waving probably wouldn’t have satisfied anyone – but those lockdown things China used suddenly started looking good.

Same thing happened in states across the US – governors wanted to look ‘proactive’ and public health officers who hadn’t practiced medicine in decades were their advisors. The results were pretty consistent in Europe and the US – those who panicked did massive damage and those that didn’t had equal or milder virus impacts without the massive damage.

And this is where policy starts really going off the rails. It’s never easy to own a mistake – when that’s a political mistake that cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs NO ONE wants to admit to that. Ever. The media provided the hype to cover the lack of good research and the absolute trash of public health response; politicians doubled down on failed policies in order to look like they were getting something done.

And they’d have made it, too, except for that meddling Internet. The Internet let truth catch up quickly once it got its proverbial boots on. The sudden censorious bent of social media only made matters worse – people start wondering why all this misinformation is being fought and just exactly which information is the good stuff. What was Big Tech hiding, anyway?

And we get to where we are now. The instant C19 isn’t the biggest crisis in the world there are going to be a LOT of very pointed questions to be answered – and we can’t have that, can we? Science and statistics be danged – full speed ahead on vaccine passports, boys! We’ll vaccinate the whole world!

Anything to keep people from noticing that their lives have been upturned and destroyed over the last two years not because of a pandemic but because of their government’s panicked mismanagement.