"We'll just have to see what happens!"

Christopher Roach writes in part in American Greatness,

These shutdowns have been economically devastating. They’re psychologically taxing, hard on relationships, and damaging to our communities. And they’re encouraging the worst instincts among the ruling class and its servants.

Public policy, medicine, and life all involve risk assessments and changing course based on new evidence. After two months of shutdowns, it looks like we’ve killed our economy to forestall a phantom threat.

If this were actually a situation where millions of deaths were the alternative, continuing the lockdowns would be defensible. They’re even forgivable considering the state of our knowledge a couple of months ago. But with the benefit of the last two months of experience, it is clear that the toll of coronavirus has been and will be much closer to a bad flu season than millions of deaths.

One can expect the media, no matter what happens in Georgia, to report on every public gathering as ominous, to exaggerate the spread of the disease, and to shame the people of Georgia for their foolhardiness. As with hydroxychloroquine, the factual question of whether or not this is an acceptable risk will be subordinated to the social identity of rejecting every word out of Trump’s mouth, no matter how reasonable.

Reopening may, of course, prove to be a deadly and costly mistake. This is a new virus, after all, and its impact is not entirely known, treatment protocols are haphazard, and Georgia’s decision to “reopen” is being made under conditions of uncertainty, though not as much uncertainty as the original decision to close. Real science looks to evidence, not ghost stories about what could happen.

As both the scientific method and President Trump like to say, “we’ll just have to see what happens.”

Read more here.