The incalculable damage wrought by COVID-19 is everywhere

Dr. Cory Franklin, Tribune News Service

The ledger on COVID-19 has been closed for 2023. But the contagion is not, as some have proclaimed, “over,” with the Upper Midwest dealing with a mini-surge that will probably continue through January. Because reporting and interest in general have tailed off, no one has a good idea how many cases are actually occurring, but there are enough that hospitalisations have doubled since autumn. However, for most, COVID-19 is no longer the serious infection it was in the four previous years. After more than 1 million deaths in those four years — in terms of overall American casualties, think 20 Vietnam Wars, three World War IIs or two Civil Wars — the projection was that the US would experience 100,000 or more deaths in 2023. Yet according to Worldometer, the actual number was just over 70,000 in 2023 and slowing in the second half of the year, as the effects of immunity and vaccination now protect the population.

For Americans today, the mortality of COVID-19 — that is, the share of people who contract the virus and die — is less than 1%, and for healthy individuals, it is significantly less than that.

When we review the effects of COVID-19 to date, we should harbor no illusions — the havoc is not merely measured in deaths and long-term disabilities. The incalculable damage wrought is everywhere: undereducated children, increases in suicides and drug overdoses, a general coarsening of society and intensified political division. This political dissonance was aggravated by the physicians and scientists who abandoned their independence during the pandemic. They let politicians exploit them to justify public policy choices. Some lessons are being learned, albeit too late.

Testifying before Congress in May 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who became President Donald Trump’s public health spokesperson for the pandemic, acknowledged his lack of expertise in the economic implications of societal lockdowns. Fauci devoted little attention to the unintended consequences of closing down large segments of society, a strategy advocated by most of the public health community.

Now, Francis Collins, former National Institutes of Health chief and Fauci’s onetime boss at the NIH, has admitted that the public health mindset of the response to COVID-19 was a mistake.

In an interview that recently resurfaced online, Collins said, “if you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is. And that is something that will save a life … so you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”

This admission is a positive step forward by an influential scientist. Putting the science into perspective, Collins, a nonconformist in the scientific community, has described himself as a “serious Christian” who has attempted to bridge the gap between science and faith. That’s why it was somewhat uncharacteristic that until now, he marched in lockstep with the initial zealous public health approach to limit spread of the virus through lockdowns.

Will he also admit to another serious misstep that he and Fauci committed — the attempt to silence the scientists who authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated an alternative approach to confronting the pandemic? Their notion was to focus protection on the elderly and vulnerable groups, while allowing the rest of us to lead normal lives.

In retrospect, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration probably oversold their plan — the pandemic would likely have proceeded apace even with their approach, but there may have been less collateral damage. What Fauci and Collins did, however, amounted to scientific censorship and constituted a serious breach in scientific ethics: Scientists must maintain their objectivity in the search for the truth. Many want to forget all this and move on, but no one should ignore the incalculable damage caused to our country and the rent it has put in the social fabric and our institutions. There is much to be gleaned from this, but there is a sense that rather than learn from the experience, many of the actors will attempt to rewrite their role in history to portray their actions in a more favorable light.

As the COVID-19 pandemic moves into its fifth year, it is not the beast that raged through the world in 2020 and 2021. The contagion is by no means done with us — there will likely be seasonal and sporadic outbreaks for years, and things could always change if a more lethal variant mutation pops up. For now, though, it poses little more than an inconvenience to most people and a serious threat only to an unfortunate minority. It is the whimper, not the bang, we hoped it would become.

It has been said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Of course, the unfortunate corollary is that even if you do learn from history, you may well be condemned to repeat it. It is only a question of time.