Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-premonition-review-a-pandemic-of-experts-11620078624
Excerpt:
The article, in any case, doesn’t claim that 180,000 people could have been saved by more robust public-health interventions in early 2020 but that those deaths are mostly the result of Americans’ poor health. That the U.S. death rate, even so, is lower than that of the U.K. and Italy and nearly equal to that of France — all G7 nations — rather complicates Mr. Lewis’s breezy thesis.
It is amazing to me that intelligent people in 2021 can survey the past year and conclude that some alternative set of non-pharmaceutical interventions would have made an appreciable difference in the spread of this magnificently resilient virus. But many such people do believe that, including the author of this book and its ostensible heroes. One of those heroes, an accomplished hospital administrator named Carter Mecher, drew up a national pandemic response plan for the George W. Bush administration. The key to stopping dangerous pathogens, he came to believe as he studied pandemic modeling, was closing schools.
….
Here is a point that Mr. Lewis’s heroes show no awareness of grasping: that the United States is a big unruly country in which people are accustomed to going where they please and don’t care for government authorities telling them what to do based on poorly understood “data.” One of the Wolverines, a public-health official in Santa Barbara County named Charity Dean, appears to believe that any sign of a dangerous contagion permits health authorities to assume dictatorial powers. She tells Mr. Lewis that in early 2020 California should have closed its borders “until it figured out exactly how much virus was circulating, and where” and that the U.S. should follow Thailand’s example and require “anyone entering the country to wear a GPS wristband” and so enable the authorities to know who’s disobeying quarantine rules.
Author(s): Barton Swaim
Publication Date: 3 May 2021
Publication Site: Wall Street Journal
Book Link: https://amzn.to/3xLQZzS