Lockdown theater

Roger Kimball writes in part in the Epoch Times,

An acquaintance of mine made what I think is an astute observation when he wrote that “Politicians and bureaucracies tend to respond to crises with theater. After 9/11 it was airport security theater. Following Corona it was lockdown theater. There’s some utility to it, but only some, there is much more hoopla.”

I agree, except for the “there’s some utility to it” bit. In my view, the TSA is 100 percent “airport security theater.” If we really wanted to be secure airline travel, we’d allow passengers to carry concealed weapons. A baddie pops up with a box cutter, pow, Mr. Smith in 11D puts his Beretta M9 to good use. No more baddie and the nice lady next to him gets to keep the box cutter as a souvenir.

How about lockdown theater? What good has it done? The main current of opinion favors the process if not necessarily the theater. In a particularly nauseating piece, even for The New York Times, our former paper of record notes today that the situation on the ground seems to be improving, but asserts that “The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country.”

Playing Epidemiologist
I know that many people think that is the case, but there are some dissenting voices. The biostatistician Knut Wittkowski is one, and I recommend this interview (https://archive.is/0jB0M) as a primer on his thoughts about the subject.

Wittkowski has been the object of much abuse by those acting in, or producing, the Lockdown Theater, but it is worth noting that more and more bits of data are emerging to support his main contentions: 1. that the medical problems caused by the CCP virus, often known as the novel coronavirus, are respiratory illnesses; 2. that like all respiratory epidemics, this one follows a predicable course; 3. that one should respond by protecting the “elderly and fragile”; but 4. that massive self-isolation impedes the development of herd immunity and makes a “second wave” more likely.

Read more here.