"We suspect that more deadly than what the coronavirus might do to us is what we might be doing to ourselves."

Roger Kimball writes in part in the New Criterion,

In January, some of our most reputable experts were urging caution about excessive caution: the coronavirus represents a “very, very low” threat to the American people, they said. Get on with your life. Yes, pay attention, wash your hands, but don’t worry. As late as March 9, we were told on the highest authority that “If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, [not to] go on a cruise ship.”

By mid-April, on the new advice of such experts, much of the country was locked down, and large swathes of the economy were shuttered. Restaurants, bars, and clubs: closed. Schools and colleges: closed for a few weeks, then for a couple of months, then for the entire semester, maybe until 2021. The ordinary business of life petrified. Everything deemed “non-essential” by the lucky people whose own positions exempt them from being declared “non-essential” was twisted shut, like a faucet.

In many places, one is not allowed to appear in public unsheathed with mask and gloves. Sales of hand sanitizer have soared. One governor banned gatherings of any size in any place and forbade people to travel between their own residences. Elsewhere, a young man who dared to board a bus without a mask found himself beset by no fewer than seven policemen who dragged him from the conveyance. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a group of citizens gathered to protest an executive order issued by the governor. Local police ordered the protestors to disperse, claiming that “Protesting is a non-essential activity.” The First Amendment was unavailable for comment.

A whole new jargon has sprung up, suitably inflected by Orwellian grace notes. Start with the term “coronavirus,” or its scarier variant covid-19 (capitalized acronyms, especially if they boast a number, seem more menacing than words printed lowercase). No one except specialists had heard of it until this winter, even though such viruses are responsible for many common colds. You can’t go anywhere now (indeed, you may not), even virtually, without running into “coronavirus” a thousand times a day. At the same time, everyone is “sheltering in place,” practicing “social” (or is it “anti-social”?) distancing in order to “flatten the curve” (and what about developing “herd immunity”?).

...Less debatable are the economic consequences of the epidemic. We don’t know anyone who believes that they are other than catastrophic. The question is, however, whether the draconian measures imposed to slow the spread of the virus are justified. Whether or not this nasty respiratory disease presents an “unprecedented” challenge is open to interpretation. What does seem unprecedented is the experiment of suddenly shutting down almost all economic activity in a complex market-oriented country like the United States. It is one thing to switch off the mighty engines of prosperity and wealth creation. We are about to discover whether they can be restarted so expeditiously.

...More noteworthy, and more worrisome, are three other features of our cultural-political situation—of “the way we live now”—that this crisis has revealed. First, there is the issue of fragility. The Western world, and the United States in particular, comprises the richest and most powerful societies in history. The fact that they can be brought to a quivering standstill by a bug that sickens and kills a minuscule part of their populations should give us pause. Is that fragility real and unavoidable, or is it chosen?

We suspect that more deadly than what the coronavirus might do to us is what we might be doing to ourselves.

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