Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About The Lockdown

If you prefer to resume living a normal life, or not see everything you’ve spent decades building destroyed in a matter of months, or want your children not to waste away in a world of computer screens and “virtual playdates,” you must want to kill people’s grandmothers. This is how discourse is actually being carried on in the United States right now. Don’t believe me? Take a glance social media. Fact-free hysteria, and accusations of murder, are everywhere.

I myself was initially very concerned about COVID-19, and my Twitter feed bears this out. I am still concerned, and I think vulnerable people should take sensible steps to protect themselves. But when I observed how people I now call the Doomers conducted themselves, I began to wonder: if this is such a home-run case, why are they acting like this?

Wild, exaggerated predictions carried the day. In Florida, my state, we were told we’d have 465,000 hospitalizations by the end of April. We had about 5500. Our governor closed down the state two weeks later than the Doomers wanted, so the Doomers predicted piles of corpses. These never materialized.

Some people tried to say: why, the reason we’ve done so much better than the predictions is that we’ve done such a good job living like vegetables – er, “social distancing.” But the models generally assumed perfect compliance with social distancing, so they can’t be saved that easily.