Did Covid response accomplish much of anything?

 I&I:

With COVID deaths now topping 910,000, the Biden administration and the rest of the Democratic left are deciding to ease up on their mandate regime. We need to learn to live with COVID, they say – repeating advice President Donald Trump issued back in October 2020.

We’re all for ditching the left’s COVID police state, even if Democrats’ reason is political, as we pointed out in this space yesterday.

But that leaves us with a question: Was any of it worth it? Did any of the guidelines, mandates, orders, shutdowns, cancelations, lockdowns do anything to alter the course of the disease, or change in any way the number of people who died from it?

Was it worth the massive disruption to our jobs and lives, the education losses suffered by our children, the trillions in debt piled up? Was it worth shutting down dissent by Tech Giants? Or the unleashing of mask scolds? Or vaccine passports? Or the divisiveness all of it fueled?

After all, even with all that in place, Centers for Disease Control data show that more than 77 million Americans have contracted COVID, and 910,373 deaths are linked to the disease.

What would have been different if we’d done nothing, other than encourage people to use common sense?

Here’s one clue. Washington University in St. Louis said in November 2020 that if we ditched all the COVID rules immediately, the number of cases would climb to 25 million by February 2021. We didn’t do that, of course.  But the actual number of COVID cases by that month was 26 million – higher than WU’s do-nothing scenario.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the evidence keeps piling up that the mask rules, lockdowns, school shutdowns, and social distancing dictates were ineffective.

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There should be a study of the effectiveness of measures taken to make sure we do not make the same mistakes in future pandemics.  Texas and Florida which rejected many of these attempts appear to have weathered the pandemic better,