Did It Work?

On May 1, 2020, four months a3er the "rst public reports out of China, there were just over 1,000,000 con"rmed cases in the United States, and around 58,000 deaths. At the same time, the lockdowns caused over 33 million Americans to lose their fulltime jobs and another estimated 10 million to lose part time jobs. With a family dependence ratio of 2:1 in the United States (for every working person there is approximately one other who depends on them "nancially), 86 million Americans lost their primary income. So, while 0.018 percent of Americans were killed by COVID-19, over 26 percent lost their livelihood.

Did It Work?

Time, evaluation, and retrospect will answer this question completely, but it appears now that the short answer is no. !e primary objective was to “5atten the curve.” Did that mean fewer people would get the disease? No. Why do it? To ensure that hospital facilities were available to treat those who got it. !e concern was that if the disease spread too fast, then too many people would need to go to the hospital at one time. However, as of May 1, 2020, the total number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 in the United States stood at 164,000 1 or an average monthly rate of around 70,000. !is compares to a total of 924,107 total hospital beds in the country. 2 Plus, the federal government spent nearly one billion dollars setting up temporary hospitals with over 13,000 beds that, combined, treated just over a thousand people. 3

By mid-June, governments were faced with the reality that their economies may never recover. Fear of coronavirus

1 “Laboratory Con"rmed COVID-19 Associated Hospitalizations,” COVIDNET (CDC.gov), June 27, 2020. https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/COVID19_3. html. 2 “Fast Facts on U. S. Hospitals,” aha.org, American Hospital Association, https:// www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals. 3 “U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients,” npr.org, National Public Radio, https://www.npr. org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-withouttreating-any-covid-19-patients.

was being superseded by fear of losing one’s house, inability to a$ord healthcare, or not being able to buy groceries. !e fact was, ironclad lockdown worked to slow the spread, but was completely unsustainable. Hence, a3er three months, there were no options le3. People had to get moving. As reasonably expected, when people began going from shelter in place to back to life, the virus began to spread again. By mid-July, headlines were once again focused on the number of new cases and overwhelming hospitals. In other words, three months of lockdown and trillions of dollars simply delayed the situation by three months. !ere were initial promises/hopes of 5attening the curve, of allowing or hoping for enough time for a vaccine to be created, tested, and implemented across the country. While this is possible, according to the Mayo Clinic, “Realistically, a vaccine will take twelve to eighteen months or longer to develop and test in human clinical trials,” and then many more weeks to produce, distribute, and apply. 4 We are likely looking at two years before any serious national immunization is rolled out. So, unless we are willing to stay in lockdown for another eighteen months, very few lives will be extended due to vaccines.

Some still say that we saved lives, that without the lockdown we would have overwhelmed hospitals or exposed people who were unexposed during the lockdown. While these statements seem less and less valid, and more and more defensive in nature, here are the numbers: based on data from the "rst months of the disease, dozens of universities and other institutions are running models that provide projections on mortality rates, and they are combined and published by the CDC. 5 If we go back and extrapolate the realistic highs and lows of these models, one could estimate that as many as 250,000 people have been “saved” (did

4 “COVID-19 Vaccine: Get the Facts,” mayo.org, Mayo Clinic, https://www. mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-vaccine/ art-20484859. 5 “Forecast of Total Deaths,” cdc.gov, Center for Disease Control, https://www. cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/forecasting-us.html.