Thomas Boswell, the veteran baseball writer for the Washington Post, wrote this:
Now my spirits are buoyed [by baseball] despite seeing the United States combat a plague with all the trust in science of medieval Europeans fighting the Black Death by rubbing chopped-up snakes on boils or drinking arsenic.
Based on our trust in scientists, the United States put its economy on lockdown for two months or so (there was variation from state to state). After four months, some economic activity remains on hold by order of governments, based on the say-so of scientists.
We locked down our economy knowing that doing so would cause millions of Americans to lose their jobs and would derail one of the most prosperous economies the U.S. has ever known. The lockdown had these effects. Unemployment reached depression-like levels.
One can believe the lockdowns should have lasted longer (or that they were too severe in the first place). One certainly can believe that, as time went on, compliance diminished and some people acted recklessly (or that it’s surprising there was so much compliance).
But no intelligent, fair-minded person can believe the U.S. did not combat the coronavirus with a considerable amount of trust in science. It was precisely trust in science that led governors, with the agreement of the Trump administration, to halt most economic and social activity.
It’s not easy consistently to write intelligently about the coronavirus. The virus is, after all, novel. When it reached our shores, we knew very little about it. Even today, there’s still too much we don’t know.
But a little bit of intellectual modesty, coupled with an aversion to hyperbole, should be sufficient to avoid serious error in writing about the virus. And only blind rage, probably partisan in origin, can explain the kind of idiotic writing Boswell indulged in.
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