The Deadly Costs of Shutdowns

Heather Mac Donald has an excellent piece at American Greatness titled “The Deadly Costs of Extended Shutdown Orders.”

More than a dozen governors extended their economic shutdown orders recently into May and beyond. Those officials should have publicly addressed the following questions first:

* How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?

* What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?

* How many workers will have lost their jobs?

* How many businesses will have closed for good?

* How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?

Instead, the announcements of the prolonged shutdown were representative of government decision-making during the coronavirus crisis: opaque, lacking in criteria for measuring success and failure, and bereft of any attempt to measure the benefits of mitigating one particular health problem against the costs—including other health problems.

Heather focuses mostly on New York State and its feckless governor, Andy Cuomo:

Cuomo’s operating principle, he said, was to “do no harm.” Had harm to people’s livelihoods been factored into the extension decision? Viewers and voters were only left to guess. Cuomo’s press secretary has not responded to a query asking whether the governor had consulted with small business owners about their capacity to survive another month without customers.

Cuomo did reveal that his future decision-making would be guided by “data and science.” But all previous “scientific” estimates of the coronavirus toll—from the number of hospitalizations to the extent of equipment shortages and deaths—by Cuomo’s own admission, had proven wildly overinflated, sometimes by an order of magnitude of 10 times or more.

Like other governors, Cuomo has divided businesses into “essential” and “non-essential” categories:

It is not the role of a state bureaucrat to decide how essential an enterprise is. That is a judgment for consumers to make. To its employees, every business is essential. Perhaps the governor should let voters decide how essential the vast state bureaucracy is, how many staffers and diversity managers should be furloughed or fired during the current shut-down, and how many politicians should continue receiving their salaries.

That won’t happen, of course, but we can dream.

Andy Cuomo will never live down his “If it saves just one life” mantra. His shutdown is destroying many thousands of lives, a fact to which he, like a number of other governors, seems completely indifferent.

The focus on saving “just one life” from the coronavirus, as Cuomo put it in March, to the exclusion of all other considerations likely will prove a catastrophic failure of policymaking. The devastation to individuals’ ability to flourish or even survive may soon become irreversible. Every scientific model used to justify these economic death sentences has been discredited. But even if those models were proven reliable, government decision-making must turn toward opening up. Officials must be made to justify, through a transparent analysis of costs and benefits, all further mandates to prevent people from working. Otherwise, there may be nothing recognizable as our economy to return to, with a resulting cost in human life and well-being that will match anything the coronavirus could inflict.