How I Was Wrong About Covid

When even libertarians trust the government too much.

So it’s been a rough week around here and I didn’t really have the time or energy to sit down and write a long essay.  But some of the stuff I was busy with did give me some thoughts.

Among many other things, my mom got Covid.  She’s currently fine.  She had a bit of a fever at first, but that’s gone.  She’s on paxlovid and her main symptoms now are sneezing and red eyes.  If she hadn’t tested for it, and run a fever for a bit, she might have thought it was allergies. 

She was super-careful about avoiding infection for three years, living as a near-hermit for the first couple of years after Covid broke.  When she started getting out and around people more, she looked and felt a lot better.  Being isolated in your home, even with animals and the Internet for company, isn’t good for you, as millions of Americans have learned. 

I’m not surprised that she’s doing okay, as she was a school librarian for over three decades, giving her an immune system that I always figured could laugh at the Wuhan coronavirus.  As she said to me when I dropped by some food and supplies, she’s been much sicker in the past and still went in to work.  She might still take a turn for the worse – she’s 83 after all – but it seems unlikely at this point.  (My sister, who is of course much younger and in robust health, has been in bed with fever and chills from Covid; they both came down with it about the same time.)

My experience was similarly mild.  I tested positive, felt a little tired and achy – but as a late-middle-aged guy who lifts weights, I’m usually tired and achy – and if I hadn’t lost my sense of smell for a few days would have seriously doubted the test.  (Weirdly, over the following months my sense of smell, which had been muted since a nasty flu in the 7^th grade, actually got better than before, and I found myself able to smell things I hadn’t noticed in many years.  Which, to be fair, is a mixed blessing.)  Helen’s case was even milder than mine, though she got it again a couple of months ago and felt somewhat worse, perhaps because it was sandwiched between a case of the flu and a nasty cold, which didn’t help.

This weekend was also host to “Mardi Growl,” a Knoxville parade in which dog owners and their pets parade in costume through downtown.  Three years ago, Helen and I had rented a condo downtown for the weekend for a getaway and Mardi Growl was underway, and I remember thinking at the time that this coronavirus thing was likely to shut down events like that for a couple of months.  And, in fact, a week or two later the city was locked down and the University went suddenly online over Spring Break.  (I took my seminar out to a bar for their last meeting before the break because I had a suspicion that they might not be seeing themselves, or me, in person for a while.)

I was right about all that, though it was worse than I anticipated.  And yet Covid was, it turned out, not as bad as I anticipated.  In the early days, I was a Covid hawk, but I was wrong to be.  It seemed right at the time.  The Chinese called it a “grave” threat, and their tendency had always been to downplay bad things in China.  There were reports of death rates ranging from 4% to 10%.

Sure, Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi and Bill DeBlasio were telling us not to worry and go visit Chinatown, but I lacked confidence in them.  (Hey, I was right about that.)  They reversed course like a week later.

It turned out, of course, that Covid’s mortality rate was significantly less than 1/10 of those early reports, and those deaths were mostly concentrated among the obese, the elderly, and those with heart failure and diabetes.  (Even in those early days, just about exactly three years ago now, my yoga teacher told me that her son-in-law, an ER doc in New Orleans, said that all his Covid ICU patients were morbidly obese).  Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, really, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience, and colossal economic destruction.

In retrospect, I should have been more skeptical.  It’s hard to believe that I, of all people, trusted the government too much, but there you are.  Well, lesson learned.

In mitigation, I should note that co-bloggers Sarah Hoyt and Charlie Martin were as skeptical as I should have been.  There were people who wanted me to shut them down, but that’s not how we work at InstaPundit, and even then I was open to – and hopeful for – the prospect that they might be right, as of course they were, and I might be wrong, as of course I was. 

Covid’s worse than a cold, usually, and not as bad as the 1918 flu, generally, but definitely didn’t justify the crazed response, which probably had as much to do, at least domestically, with trying to get rid of Donald Trump as with public health.  As I say, lesson learned.

And it’s not just me.  When Helen tested positive for Covid a couple of months ago, she was at the ER for an odd rash.  I didn’t suspect Covid, but the rash was spreading fast for no obvious reason.  It was in fact, a side-effect (more like an after-effect really) of Covid infection, but the most striking thing was that when the doc and nurse came in to tell her she had Covid, they just stood around chatting with us without even wearing a mask.  “A year ago, y’all would have been wearing hazmat suits,” I commented.  “Yeah, but it really isn’t that bad usually, and we just assume we’re exposed 50 times a day anyway without knowing it, so what’s the point?” was the gist of the reply.

So that’s where we are now.  And the lesson is that the “expert” class failed us again.  How much was failure, and how much was deliberate malfeasance, remains to be seen, though the evidence keeps piling up in favor of the latter.

And in fact, that’s the biggest lesson of the past few years.  Again and again, claims to expertise turn out to have been cloaks for politicized misbehavior.  “Professionalism” has turned out to be no protection against partisanship.  And America’s cold class war between the Gentry Class and the normal-American community has escalated.

Covid is basically over, but there will be something else.  You can, alas, bet on that.