Coming to terms: The COVID lockdowns were all for naught

Source: (https://bit.ly/3ByBPRT)
How different it feels this time around. Broadcasters are lustily
cheering anti-lockdown protesters in China. Members of Congress
offer unqualified support. President Joe Biden, although more
guarded, is sympathetic.
No Western politician, as far as I can see, is insulting the
protesters. They are not dismissed as selfish or sociopathic, nor
as dupes of conspiracy theories. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK)
captured the mood: "To the people of China - we hear you and
we stand with you as you fight for your freedom."
Broadcasters and columnists who spent 2020 calling anti-lockdowners
kooks and criminals are now uncomplicatedly applauding their
Chinese counterparts. They see ordinary people standing up against
an authoritarian government the anti-COVID policies of which were
crushing liberty.
So, what changed? Perhaps pundits tell themselves that the disease
is less virulent now, or that vaccination has altered the balance
of risk, or that, in some other way, Beijing's crackdown is less
proportionate than those of 2020. But none of these explanations
stacks up.
Yes, the coronavirus became less lethal. All viruses that spread
through human contact eventually become less lethal because they
have an evolved tendency to want to keep their hosts up and active
and therefore more infectious. For this to happen, they require
a critical mass. Enough people need to be incapacitated or killed by
the original version to give milder strains an advantage. And, yes,
the vaccines helped, too.
But the trade-offs are essentially the same in China today as they
were three years ago - coronavirus deaths versus other deaths. The
current unrest was sparked by a fire in Xinjiang, which was allowed
to become needlessly deadly because the authorities were following
COVID protocols. In other words, they were elevating COVID
above other forms of harm.
Most countries did the same in 2020 with, as we now see, disastrous
results. The lockdowns did not just cause an economic meltdown
from which we will take years to recover. They also failed on their
own terms. They killed more people than they saved.
Guess which developed country had the lowest excess mortality
between 2020 and 2022. Go on, have a guess. That's right. Sweden,
which refused to close shops or schools or to impose a mask mandate,
saw cumulative excess deaths rise by 6.8%, the lowest figure in the
OECD. By way of comparison, the equivalent figures were 18% in
Australia, 24.5% in the U.K., and 54.1% in the U.S.
At this stage, various authoritarians, hypochondriacs and mask
fetishists trot out bizarre arguments about Sweden having a low
population density, as if Swedes were evenly spaced across their
birch forests rather than living mainly in cities comparable to ours.
What is striking about this argument is not so much its dishonesty
(in March 2020, lockdowners claimed that Sweden faced total
catastrophe, not that it might end up with a slightly higher
mortality rate than Finland ) as its desperation. Across the world,
we are
in denial. We simply can't bring ourselves to admit that everything
we went through - the disrupted education, the spike in mental
health problems, the ruined careers, the debts - was for nothing.
Like the countries that emerged maimed from World War One,
we tell ourselves that the sacrifice must have had some purpose.
Perhaps, now as then, decades will pass before we can bring
ourselves to face the hideous truth.
And yet, deep down, we know it already. That is why we respond
as we do to the images of the brave protesters in China. We wish
we had responded the same way, even if we cannot yet acknowledge
that wish to ourselves.
"Suppose the pandemic had started not in China but in Canada
or the Netherlands, a country, in other words, where locking up the
entire population had previously been unthinkable," I wrote back
in May 2020 . Had that happened, I suggested, the authorities
might not have been panicked, or pushed by irresponsible media,
into pursuing the most draconian of measures for fear of having
worse mortality rates than their neighbors on just one metric.
In retrospect, I underestimated our servility, cowardice, and
authoritarianism. We demanded, and got, two more lockdowns - three
for some countries - despite all the evidence being in. It turned out
that we were no less keen on the smack of firm government than
anyone else.
At the start of 2020, looking at what was happening in Chinese
cities, I thanked my lucky stars that I lived in a culture that
elevated personal freedom over collectivism. In the event, it took
only the tiniest tap to shatter that culture. Will we ever piece
it back together?