Commentary

I have to dash off a quick note this morning in response to the media’s usual alarmist reactions, this time to some resurgence of cases in places like China and South Korea.  This supposedly illustrates how dangerous it is to relax extreme lockdowns, but what it really reveals is how futile they are and how they are just going to delay the inevitable.  The harder you lockdown and suppress spread, the more likely you feel like you can’t ever let up.  And it should be clear from these examples that the virus isn’t really going anywhere.  These countries, or in the US, states or localities, are condemning themselves to more economic pain and more deaths than if they had a strategy of letting the virus run its course through the vast low and no-risk population, which would create immunity that protects the vulnerable.