Renewed COVID-19 lockdowns again show leftists’ blinkered vision

With their renewed lockdowns, leftists once again fail to see that they’re destroying far more lives than their lunatic policy saves.

One of the points I’ve made repeatedly over the years is that, when it comes to guns, leftists see only those who died because of guns and are never able to understand that many more lived because of guns. Here’s just one example of my writing on the subject:

When it comes to guns, the gun grabbers suffer from a very bizarre limitation: Their mental horizons allow them to see only those who died because of guns, not to recognize those who did not die thanks to guns. This myopia creates the giant intellectual chasm that separates those who oppose the Second Amendment from those who support it. The former see only the people who died in the past while the latter also see the ones who will live on into the future.

As just one example of what I mean, imagine how the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if Jews across Europe had been armed. Or, coming at it from the opposite point of view, imagine how many more than two people would have died in a Texas church if good people hadn’t been armed.

I’m seeing exactly the same mental blindness play out with the lockdown. When I speak to leftists, all that they can talk about is the number of people who have already died from the Wuhan virus and how many more would have died but for the lockdown. Before I get into the “how many more would have died” point, let me say a couple of things about how many have allegedly died from the Wuhan virus. Frankly, I don’t believe the numbers. Neither do Timothy Craig Allen and John Lott:

“The case definition is very simplistic,” Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois Department of Public Health, explains. “It means, at the time of death, it was a COVID positive diagnosis. That means, that if you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means, technically even if you died of [a] clear alternative cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death.”

[snip]

Medical examiners from Colorado to Michigan use the same definition Ezike described. In Macomb and Oakland Counties in Michigan, where most of the deaths in that state occurred, medical examiners classify any death as a coronavirus death when the postmortem test is positive. Even people who died in suicides and automobile accidents meet that definition.

Such expansive definitions are not the fault of rogue public health officials. The rules direct them to do this. “If someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death,” White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx noted multiple times.

This does not inspire confidence.

Yes, there have been excess deaths but for a new virus in a vulnerable population, the death rate is actually exceptionally low. So far, the disease seems to have a survivability rate of over 99%. While the elderly are fiercely hit, young people walk away. Most of the super vulnerable died in the disease’s first wave. Moreover, we’ve learned a lot since the first dismal months: Take Vitamin D to buff your immune system and baby aspirin to beat the virus’s coagulation problem, make sure your doctor knows the knew ventilator protocols for COVID-19 patients, and see if you can get some hydroxychloroquine when you first fall ill. For people who know about history’s great plagues, a disease with a 99% survival rate is not the apocalypse.

What is proving to be an apocalypse — and this is what the leftists who fear the disease don’t see — is the damage done because of the lockdowns. In Illinois, 11,200 shops went out of business. Meanwhile, in New York and New Jersey, over a quarter of small businesses have are currently closed and it’s not clear how many, if any, will re-open.

The San Francisco Chronicle runs a regular feature listing all the restaurants in the Bay Area that closed permanently. Already in July, ABC News was reporting that nearly 16,000 restaurants across America had permanently closed.

For the leftists, many of whom have office jobs that they were able to turn into telecommuting jobs, those closed businesses are just abstract notions. For more Americans than I can imagine, those closed businesses are disasters. Their finances are shot, their dreams are shattered, and they’re trapped in their homes with equally depressed, unhappy people, all of whom are looking at a Venezuelan, not an American, future.

The American Institute for Economic Research has put together a preliminary list of the cost of lockdowns. It’s a deeply depressing read. In every category — mental health, hunger & poverty, the economy, unemployment, education, healthcare, crime — Americans are suffering. There are more school dropouts, more drug and alcohol addicts, more suicides, more family violence, more hunger, more diseases, and more crime.

To the leftists, though, these are the broken eggs you need to make that lovely, COVID-19 free omelet. They see themselves as crusaders saving America from a disease with a 99% survival rate, while they are destroying everything around them. They’re not even rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They’re blasting holes in the ship’s hull and proudly boasting about how that will somehow equalize the water flow in order to stabilize the engine in order to keep the ship warm as it sinks to the bottom.

Despite their constant cries for reimagining things and their endless pride in their empathy and compassion, leftists utterly lack imagination, empathy, or compassion for the lives they are destroying. Indeed, my sense is that, while the useful idiots to whom I speak think they’re doing something grand, the politicos making the decisions know exactly what they’re doing: Destroying America from top to bottom so that they can rebuild it in a Marxist-fascist mode, one that is a pure conglomerate of corporations and politicians enriching each other.

Of course, they’re all too stupid and greedy to realize that the wealth to buy corporate goods and pay government taxes so that these greedy socialists can enjoy glamour and luxury isn’t generated by either corporations or government. It’s generated by the rest of us, working, innovating, saving, and keep the country afloat. Once we’re gone, America sinks every bit as quickly as Zimbabwe, Venezuela, or any other Marxist-fascist state has since the misbegotten French came up with the socialist idea in the first place back in the late 18th century.

The only thing that generates lasting wealth is freedom. Everything else is a chimera that those greedy for power will destroy.