Pandemic watch: Science vs. Lockdowns

Governors claim “science” justifies continued lockdowns, but, scoff Alexander Galetovic and Stephen Haber at The Hill, “the governors are wrong.” State chief executives assume they are trading “a short-term reduction in ­employment” for a long-term curb in “age-specific mortality,” but really they are trading a short-term dip in COVID-19 deaths for more fatalities among working people over the long term. Research shows layoffs boost “age-specific mortality”; for middle-aged males, death rates rise 50 to 100 percent. Layoffs also “push families toward poverty,” which itself has a “brutal” effect on mortality: In the United States, “the poor die 10 to 15 years earlier than the wealthy.” Governors who persist in lockdowns are making “a huge mistake.” They think they are “safeguarding” folks from the virus, but they’re actually exposing them to greater “mortality risk from unemployment.”

Libertarian: Apply Biden’s Standards to Biden

As vice president, Joe Biden was “a hype man for the Obama administration’s vast reinterpretation of Title IX,” Robby Soave recalls at The Washington Examiner. And that change “made it more likely that a student who was accused of sexual misconduct would be found responsible and punished.” Now Biden stands accused of sexual assault, and he must either “denounce his own impractical sexual-assault standard” or “be held to it.” Yes, we have “reasons to be cautious about believing” Biden accuser Tara Reade, but a Title IX adjudicator would “quite likely” find him guilty anyway. If Biden expects “some basic presumption of innocence,” he has to drop his previous standards and let that presumption apply to everyone. He “can’t have it both ways.”

City beat: NYC Housing Policies Hurt the Poor

City Comptroller Scott Stringer recently found a quarter of Asian and Hispanic households “live in units with more than one person per room,” City Journal’s Howard Husock notes. But Stringer didn’t acknowledge a ­related problem: “ ‘under-housing,’ or under-crowding in much of the city’s low-rent” units, which causes other apartments to be overcrowded. A quarter of public-housing households are “ ‘over-housed,’ meaning the apartments have empty bedrooms,” according to a recent ­Department of Housing and Urban Development ­probe, which “translates to some 45,000 under-crowded New York City Housing Authority units.” Blame “the absence of any time limit on how long residents can stay in public housing,” as well as rent stabilization in the private market, which hinders turnover. Reversing such “counterproductive” policies meant to help the poor can curb “the overcrowding that puts them at risk” from COVID-19.

Campaign watch: The Pivotal 2020 Question

If you worked at “a steel or other manufacturing plant in the late 1990s,” recalls Matt Mayer at the Spectator USA, you would’ve seen “your community and the Midwest bleed jobs,” as companies moved “whole manufacturing plants” to China, “where the labor is cheap.” Only recently would you have “managed to get back on your feet,” thanks to President Trump’s policies — just to see your gains evaporate because of the coronavirus, which originated in China. That’s why the 2020 election will depend on “which candidate” you think will hold Beiing “accountable for its acts and omissions” — and why the president, the only candidate with “the backbone to fight back against China,” stands “a very good chance of being reelected.”

Foreign desk: Why Elites Back China

“Beijing faces a wave of anti-China sentiment” from the West because of its disastrous handling of the coronavirus outbreak, reports Reuters — and rightfully so, snaps National Review’s Jim Geraghty. Yet many “powerful people in the West” don’t seem to think so. Ex-Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz “called China an American ally,” and Michael Bloomberg let “the news organization that bears his name” bury “reports that could embarrass Chinese leaders.” Even now, “American media institutions regularly repeat the implausible claims of Chinese state media with bizarre credulity.” Why? Because “corporate America built its long-term strategies on access” to Chinese markets. If we have any kind of future conflict with China, many of our elites “will be, at best, conscientious objectors” — or worse, sighs Geraghty, prefer “Beijing’s side.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board