Libertarian: How NY Botched Its Coronavirus Response
“Widely mocked” Mayor Bill de Blasio and “overly adulated” Gov. Andrew Cuomo turned the coronavirus challenge into a “health and public-policy catastrophe,” observes Reason’s Matt Welch. They combined “empty early boasts” about containing the virus with “false promises, bad epidemiological advice, and ideologically motivated decision-making.” De Blasio “consistently” denied the virus was “devilishly transmissible” weeks after health professionals said it was and chose “his own ideological commitments over the urgent advice of health scientists” when he opted to keep the city’s schools open. “It’s impossible to measure precisely” the damage they caused, but former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Thomas Frieden estimates better policy might have reduced the death toll by 50 to 80 percent.
Campaign watch: Bernie Sanders, Sellout
When Bernie Sanders, who’s finally admitted he won’t win the Democratic nomination, ran in 2016, National Review’s Jack Butler found his honesty and willingness to stray from “left-wing orthodoxy” a “breath of fresh air.” But in Sanders’ second run, Butler rues, “he proved himself to be just another politician.” In 2015, Sanders criticized “open borders” — but in 2020, he called for “breaking up” our border-control agencies. In 2016, he “didn’t run away from” his longtime support for gun rights — but his “2020 platform proposed a buyback program for guns and a ban on assault weapons.” By dropping “his politically inconvenient stances in pursuit of power,” Sanders showed himself as “just another guy all too happy to tell people what they wanted to hear.”
Foreign desk: Brits’ Too-Stiff Upper Lip
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “stay-at-home exhortations were issued with such vigor because it was assumed — wrongly — that Brits would not really listen,” reports Fraser Nelson at The Telegraph. Government modelers “expected workers to carry on and at least a million pupils to be left in school by their parents.” Instead, the lockdown’s economic consequences have been as shocking as the number of COVID-19 deaths. The message to keep working (but from home if necessary) has been lost — unemployment applications have soared beyond the Treasury’s expectations and only 2 percent of pupils are showing up. “Other options are, now, being discussed. Perhaps adverts, politely telling us that our country needs us to work.” With the economy forecasted to plummet by a quarter by summer, a decision “will be better made sooner rather than later.”
Crisis desk: Let’s Get Back To Work
Now that it’s “increasingly clear that the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak is not the doomsday event alarmists made it out to be,” it’s “time to get America back to work,” urges Christian Whiton at RealClearPolitics. Take out the hotspot of New York and “one is left with 6,000 premature deaths of mostly elderly individuals with underlying health conditions in a country of 327 million.” Each death is a “personal tragedy,” but those losses are “being surmounted by an even heavier economic impact that itself will harm and shorten lives dramatically.” Suicides “will be the most obvious cost” of “our self-inflicted economic catastrophe,” but “those made poorer will also defer important health care, delay retirement, take fewer vacations, refuse to invest, drive older cars with fewer safety features, have worse nutrition [and] limit heat and air conditioning.” Taiwan and South Korea controlled their outbreaks without an “extreme economic shutdown.” We can, too.
Culture critic: Isolating with the Saints
Under lockdown in London, Laura Freeman writes in The Spectator of the solace found in art depicting self-isolating saints. Now too “our way is the way of the ascetic and the anchorite.” Yet our isolation, imposed rather than sought, isn’t as glorious as theirs. “Many of us, even those used to the solitude of the study, the man cave, the shed, are lonely and spooked.” St. Anthony the Great is perhaps our most-needed saint, the “founding father of church monasticism and a figure of saintly healing.” Or how about a “Working From Home hero”? Her desktop background is an image of St. Jerome, “the scholar who translated the Old and New Testaments into Latin,” “serenely retired” in his study. “Pin up postcards round your makeshift desk,” Freeman advises. “Think of the monks in San Marco in Florence, each cell with its own Fra Angelico fresco.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
