Columnists on pandemic implications

Conrad Black, writing in American Greatness:

"Every informed person has always known that there was no way of wiping the virus out until a vaccine is developed. There are about 600 coronavirus-related unemployed for every fatality to the disease. The economic consequences of the shutdown are unsustainable and already completely excessive in over 20 states. A partial return to work was bound to be necessary long before there was a vaccine and testing everyone is no answer—it isn’t possible in less than about six months and, in any event, a person could pass the test one day and be infected the next."

Another commentator worth hearing is Dennis Prager, (after noting that the New York metropolitan area currently has 52 percent of all the Wuhan coronavirus deaths in the U.S., and that 41 states put together have only 21% of the deaths):

"Now let us imagine that the reverse were true. Imagine that Georgia and North Carolina—two contiguous states that, like the New York metro area, have a combined total of 21 million people—had 18,690 COVID-19 deaths, while metro New York had 858 deaths (the number of deaths in North Carolina and Georgia combined).

Do you think the New York metro area would close its schools, stores, restaurants and small businesses? Would every citizen of the New York area, with the few exceptions of those engaged in absolutely necessary work, be locked in their homes for months? Would New Yorkers accept the decimation of their economic and social lives because North Carolina and Georgia (or, even more absurdly, Colorado, Montana or the rest of what most New Yorkers regard as “flyover” country) had 18,960 deaths, while they had a mere 858?"

Henry Grabar has related thoughts about the misplaced fatalism of New York City bureaucrats and their subsequent mismanagement of the municipal response to the Wuhan coronavirus.

(I wonder if Henry is husband to Mary Grabar? I've read more of her work than his, but they'd make a power couple).

Much depends on the news sources you trust, and what you choose to accept from those sources (Chinese journalists have it much tougher than their American counterparts).

Post-pandemic, there should be a national conversation about bogus models and statistics (although if you can't say anything about them in a climate change context, the Wuhan coronavirus "rules" probably won't be any different).

Let's not forget that Sweden is playing its coronavirus hand differently, either, or that conversations in the United States and any other freedom-loving enclaves ought to explore more than just the economic impacts of an interminable shutdown.

And -- last but not least -- PJ Media has a solid list of people who actually help the most in times like these, when Dairy Queen employees are wearing face shields and more than 400 commercial aircraft sit grounded on the tarmac of a decommissioned Air Force base in California. The only group missing from that list that should not be, I think, is clergymen.