Heather Mac Donald at American Greatness asks all the right
questions:
More than a dozen governors
extended their economic shutdown orders recently into May and beyond. Those
officials should have publicly addressed the following questions first:
- How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?
- What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?
- How many workers will have lost their jobs?
- How many businesses will have closed for good?
- How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?
Instead, the announcements of the
prolonged shutdown were representative of government decision-making during the
coronavirus crisis: opaque, lacking in criteria for measuring success and
failure, and bereft of any attempt to measure the benefits of mitigating one
particular health problem against the costs—including other health problems. . . .
She concludes:
The focus on saving “just one life”
from the coronavirus, as Cuomo put it in March, to the exclusion of all other
considerations likely will prove a catastrophic failure of policymaking. The
devastation to individuals’ ability to flourish or even survive may
soon become irreversible. Every scientific model used to justify these economic
death sentences has been discredited. But even if those models were proven
reliable, government decision-making must turn toward opening up. Officials
must be made to justify, through a transparent analysis of costs and benefits,
all further mandates to prevent people from working. Otherwise, there may be
nothing recognizable as our economy to return to, with a resulting cost in
human life and well-being that will match anything the coronavirus could
inflict.
Ms. Mac Donald’s full article (“The Deadly Costs of Extended
Shutdown Orders”) is here. All good
reasons to Open Ohio Now.
Details of the Open Ohio Now rally in Columbus
on Saturday,
April 25, are here.
# # #
