What coronavirus 'truthers' get dead wrong

An irony of the coronavirus debate is that the more successful lockdowns are in squelching the disease, the more vulnerable they will be to attack as unnecessary in the first place.

A rising chorus on the right is slamming the shutdowns as a panicked overreaction and agitating to end them, hoping to drive a wedge between President Trump and his more cautious advisers.

While there's no doubt there have been absurd lockdown excesses, and we should want to return to normal as soon as plausible, the case against the initial shutdowns is weak, contradictory and based on denying the seriousness of COVID-19.

A good example of the genre was an op-ed coauthored by former Education Secretary William Bennett and talk-radio host Seth Leibsohn, headlined "Coronavirus Lessons: Fact and Reason vs. Paranoia and Fear." Bennett and Leibsohn are public-spirited, intelligent men, but they have got this wrong and in rather elementary ways.

They cite the latest University of Washington estimate that the current outbreak will kill 68,000 people. Then, they note that about 60,000 people died of the flu in 2017-18. For this, they thunder, we've scared Americans and imposed huge economic and social costs on the country. Their reasoning is obviously flawed.

If we are going to have 60,000 deaths with people not leaving their homes for more than a month, the number of deaths obviously would have been higher — much higher — if everyone had gone about business as usual. We didn't lock down the country to try to prevent 60,000 deaths; we locked down the country to limit deaths to 60,000 from what would have been a number multiples larger.

By Bennett and Leibsohn's logic, we could just as easily ask: Why did we adopt tough-on-crime policies when crime rates are at historic lows? Why did we work so hard to find a treatment for HIV when so many of the people with the disease now have normal life expectancies?

Of course, it was precisely the actions we took that caused those welcome outcomes.

If we had shut down the country a month sooner and there had been, say, only 2,000 deaths, then on their terms they'd have even a stronger argument, that is: "We did all this, and there were only a couple of thousand fatalities?"

In other words, the more effective a lockdown would have been, the more opposed Bennett and Leibsohn would be to it.

As for the flu comparison: The flu season stretches as long as from October to April, although it usually peaks between December and February. The 2017-18 season, with 60,000 flu-related deaths, was particularly bad. But the coronavirus might kill a similar number of people — with the country on lockdown.

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In the 2011-12 season, 12,000 people died of the flu nationwide. New York alone has eclipsed that in a little more than a month and recorded roughly 9,000 coronavirus deaths the first 15 days of April (again, while on lockdown). In 2018-19, there were 34,000 flu-related deaths nationwide. We are going to surpass that number nationally sometime soon (yet again, while on lockdown).

Why have people reacted so dramatically to this virus, despite the fact that it is supposedly comparable to the run-of-the-mill flu? Bennett and Leibsohn have a theory: "New York City is where the epidemic has struck the hardest. The media is centered in New York City."

There's no doubt that New York is always going to get disproportionate attention. But Gotham is the biggest city in the country, and the Empire State accounts for 8 percent of the US economy. If New York were an independent state, it would rank as the 11th-biggest economy in the world. What happens there matters. It's part of America, as we all agreed after 9/11.

If the disease struck smaller heartland cities like Omaha, Kansas City and Wichita, would Bennett and Leibsohn hope that the story got ignored and no one took any precautions based on major media companies not being headquartered in those places?

Plus, the authors ignore the key fact that the economy began to shut down before there were widespread shutdown orders. People voted with their feet, because they were fearful of a virulent disease. And they acted rationally. If everything had gone on as normal, the outbreak would have been much worse, and we would have shutdowns anyway, just with even worse health outcomes.

By all means, let's open up the economy as soon as we can, but it will require more careful thought than the most fervent critics of the shutdowns have demonstrated.

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