Why DeSantis’s Covid Policy Remains Relevant

And any epidemiologist would have told you as much in the first weeks, before it became systematically necessary to pretend something else for political reasons. You can still see the results in certain journalistic accounts three years later, framed by a presumption that only the terrible incompetence and failure of our leaders allowed Covid to spread at all. In his latest book, the Washington Post’s

Bob Woodward

portrays himself demanding of then-President

Donald Trump,

our failing national daddy, “Do something!”

The story of Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is the story, in contrast, of a grown-up. After initially adopting stringent measures, he returned to first questions. Was the virus stoppable? Would trying materially pay off in terms of reduced mortality and suffering? No, he concluded. As a result, Florida experienced roughly the same Covid outcomes as other states while piling on fewer of the costly, impotent gestures that were adopted elsewhere mainly to show that politicians were very, very concerned.

His decision was brave because he would be blamed for any deaths that occurred, whereas he would not have been blamed for any death if he had aligned his response with the prevailing media mood and political incentive.

What’s more, by and large, his fellow governors who took a different path were proved correct at least in their political judgment: They have not been electorally punished. Many have been electorally rewarded for actions that left their citizens objectively worse off. As the Atlantic Monthly delicately put it long after the fact, “Do strict lockdowns simply fail the cost-benefit analysis?” The accumulating answer appears to be strongly: “Yes.” Our authoritarian heroics only left communities poorer, more crime-ridden, and with the next generation’s prospects damaged by interrupted schooling.

Which could make the 2024 presidential race quite interesting if it pits Mr. DeSantis against any of the Democratic governors, say California’s

Gavin Newsom

or Michigan’s

Gretchen Whitmer,

whose chief claim to fame has been their draconian pandemic actions.

Alas, the world is not done with these questions for a reason that should be getting renewed attention: China. All the same trade-offs apply, between what’s optimal for a society and what’s optimal for its politicians.

Last week a Beijing spokesman put a statistic front and center that I’ve been emphasizing since July 2020: China’s dearth of critical-care beds. Wuhan, with 11 million people, saw its hospital system collapse with a caseload less than 25% of the caseload that New York, with a population of eight million, would handle a few weeks later. China has 10 cities bigger than New York and yet there’s no sign the regime is ready to withstand the inevitable spread of a virus now endemic and casually tolerated in the rest of the world but also increasingly adapted to our vaccines.

Beijing only hurt itself with its refusal to accept superior Western vaccines when it had a chance to get ahead of this curve. It hurt itself with the reluctance of its older citizens to risk local vaccination, a phenomenon seen also for a time in other zero-Covid countries such as Australia and New Zealand. Weirdly, when Beijing might have been bracing up its hospitals, it devoted effort to promoting traditional Chinese medicine as a Covid solution not only to its own citizens but around the world, apparently in keeping with a hobby horse of

Xi Jinping.

The last Covid chapter could yet be a doozy. As China tiptoes toward an accommodation with the virus in the next year or so, it does so without any conspicuous confidence that its giant metropolises can manage the expected caseloads, especially given more contagious and vaccine-resistant variants.

I doubt our own 2024 race will turn on our Covid policy but maybe it should: inflation, our crime bump, the supply-chain meltdown,

Vladimir Putin’s

disastrous Ukraine miscalculations, China’s bouts of nationalist hysteria. Many of the key forces shaping our world have links to the disastrous consequences of Covid and our often disastrous responses to it.