At the time, it was largely understood that, without a vaccine, some deaths were inevitable. The idea was to force Americans to keep their distance to slow the spread of the virus. Instead of an immediate spike of infections that could overwhelm medical systems as millions of people got sick at the same time, the idea was to turn the spike into a rounded curve so that hospital visits would be spread over a longer period.
But the idea that millions of Americans would die from the virus was just a guess, and its author appeared to abandon his predictions soon after making them. Neil Ferguson is an Imperial College London scientist whose dire virus forecasts helped inspire aggressive measures by the White House and other authorities in both the United States and the United Kingdom. On March 16 of this year he coauthored a widely read report which described Covid-19 as “a virus with comparable lethality to H1N1 influenza in 1918.”10
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the 1918 virus is estimated to have killed 50 million people worldwide,11 more than 70 times the number killed by the coronavirus as of the end of July 2020. The 1918 flu was even more devastating in relative terms because the world’s population was a fraction of our current count.
But less than ten days after Dr. Ferguson’s highly disturbing report, which was being used to justify lockdowns all over the world, he told a committee of Parliament he was “reasonably confident” the country’s health service could cope with the peak of the epidemic and that the number of deaths in the United Kingdom might total less than 20,000.12 He also said that people who would have shortly died anyway “might be as much as half or two thirds of the deaths we see, because these are people at the end of their lives or who have underlying conditions.”13
We were turning the global economy upside down largely to prevent terminal patients from contracting the coronavirus along with whatever was already killing them? Ferguson’s stunning testimony was mostly ignored in the United States, where many governors and mayors proceeded to enforce lockdowns that could no longer be justified by any reasonable consideration of benefits and costs. But it seems that President Trump was paying attention because he insisted that the coronavirus cure must not be worse than the disease and soon turned against the lockdowns.
The staggering shutdown expense was just beginning to come into focus. Eric Morath, Jon Hilsenrath, and Sarah Chaney reported in the Wall Street Journal on March 26: “A record 3.28 million workers applied for unemployment benefits last week as the new coronavirus hit the U.S. economy, marking the end of a decade-long job growth.
“The number of Americans filing for claims was nearly five times the previous record high,” they continued. “Pennsylvania, Ohio and California were among 10 states reporting more than 100,000 claims, leaving unemployment systems overloaded.”14
Because not everyone suddenly out of work was able to file and because many independent workers didn’t qualify, the awful numbers were actually a gross understatement of the damage to American livelihoods. And the numbers would get much worse.
The Journal’s Marcus Walker would write a few days later: “The coronavirus has produced something new in economic history. Never before have governments tried to put swaths of national economies in an induced coma, artificially maintain their vital organs, and awaken them gradually.”15 And never before had they taken such costly action with so little evidence to support it.
Numerous politicians pretended that economy-crushing shutdown mandates were the only sensible response, rather than focusing on protecting the vulnerable elderly while relying on those at lower risk to exercise good judgment and employ frequent handwashing, social distancing, and other voluntary measures. States like Georgia, South Dakota, and Texas, which largely relied on voluntary measures to fight the spread of infection, would achieve results that were better than many shuttered jurisdictions. By contrast, the governors of New York and New Jersey, among the most aggressive in issuing shutdown orders, would preside over the highest per capita Covid death tolls in the United States—and in fact the highest in the world.
But even in the hardest-hit areas, the damage was not nearly as bad as one might assume from the hysterical media and political reaction. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough have been among those comparing Covid-19 to World War II.16 The virus will need to get vastly more destructive to approach the scale of 1940s carnage. The National World War II Museum in New Orleans counts a total worldwide death toll of 60 million for the entire conflict but acknowledges the total might be more like 90 million—more than 100 times the Covid total. More than 400,000 Americans died in World War II, almost all of them young people who lost many more years of life than the elderly who succumb to Covid.17
World War II was even more devastating in relative terms because in the 1940s the world had less than a third of its current population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.18 Also, many of the civilian deaths and almost all of the battle deaths were young people, denied many decades of life by the horrific conflict.
Even in Italy, where an aging population and a socialized medical system created a perfectly awful storm of suffering this year, total virus deaths to date don’t come close to the World War II carnage.
“The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco,” observed Dr. John Ioannidis, professor of medicine and biomedical data science at Stanford University, in March. “… Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.
“Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates—either on its own or because of these measures—short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable,” he noted. “How long, though, should measures like these be continued if
