Conservative (note well!) pundit Rich Lowry: “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 growing chorus on the right—from conservative talk radio hosts to Republican lawmakers like Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Ken Buck of Colorado—is slamming the shutdowns as a panicked overreaction and agitating to end them, hoping to drive a wedge between President Donald Trump and his more cautious advisers. […]A good example of the genre is an op-ed co-authored by former Education Secretary William Bennett and talk radio host and author Seth Leibsohn . It is titled, tendentiously and not very accurately, “Coronavirus Lessons: Fact and Reason vs. Paranoia and Fear.” Bennett and Leibsohn are intelligent and public-spirited men whom I’ve known for years, but they’ve got this wrong, and in rather elementary ways. They cite the latest estimate of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state that the current outbreak will kill 68,000 Americans. Then, they note that about 60,000 people died of the flu in 2017-18. This is such an obviously flawed way of looking at the question, it’s hard to believe that Bennett and Leibsohn don’t realize it. [note from Godfreydaniel: Could they be IDIOTS? Well, yes………] 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 (or whatever the ultimate toll is) from what would have been a number multiples larger. […] As for the flu comparison, it isn’t as telling as Bennett and Leibsohn believe. In the 2011-12 season, 12,000 people died of the flu in the entire country.”
Conservative (note well!) pundit Rich Lowry: “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 growing chorus on the right—from conservative talk radio hosts to Republican lawmakers like Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Ken Buck of Colorado—is slamming the shutdowns as a panicked overreaction and agitating to end them, hoping to drive a wedge between President Donald Trump and his more cautious advisers. […]A good example of the genre is an op-ed co-authored by former Education Secretary William Bennett and talk radio host and author Seth Leibsohn . It is titled, tendentiously and not very accurately, “Coronavirus Lessons: Fact and Reason vs. Paranoia and Fear.” Bennett and Leibsohn are intelligent and public-spirited men whom I’ve known for years, but they’ve got this wrong, and in rather elementary ways. They cite the latest estimate of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state that the current outbreak will kill 68,000 Americans. Then, they note that about 60,000 people died of the flu in 2017-18. This is such an obviously flawed way of looking at the question, it’s hard to believe that Bennett and Leibsohn don’t realize it. [note from Godfreydaniel: Could they be IDIOTS? Well, yes………] 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 (or whatever the ultimate toll is) from what would have been a number multiples larger. […] As for the flu comparison, it isn’t as telling as Bennett and Leibsohn believe. In the 2011-12 season, 12,000 people died of the flu in the entire country.”