© MediaPunch/Associated Press
Spring-break crowds on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale last Sunday.
Spring-break crowds on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale last Sunday.
The Covid-19 pandemic represented a test of elites in the U.S., from public-health experts to the corporate media. The results have been disappointing. Policy makers who bucked the elites and challenged the narrative have been proven right to do so.
To begin with, highly publicized epidemiological models were as consequential as they were wrong. The model produced by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London — which erroneously forecast millions of non-nursing home Covid deaths in the U.S. — sparked panic among public-health elites and served as the pretext for lockdowns throughout the U.S. and Great Britain. The lockdowns failed to stop the virus but did a great deal of societal damage along the way — damage that a more targeted approach, seeking to reduce total harms, would have been able to avoid (and did, in places like Sweden and Florida).
Similarly, models predicting massive shortages of hospital beds helped to precipitate the disastrous policy — enacted by states like New York, New Jersey and Michigan — to send contagious, Covid-positive hospital patients back to nursing homes. States like Florida that rejected the models and adopted policies to protect nursing-home residents had comparatively lower nursing-home mortality rates as a result.
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