The good, the bad, and the ugly
With Covid-19, many of the cures have proven to be worse than the disease.
Parts of this piece appeared earlier in the Idaho State Journal.
We are now more than two years into one of the most disturbing social/medical/economic experiments ever conducted – with all of us as test subjects. The Covid-19 pandemic, and our response to it, will shape the world for decades (if not centuries). Ever the eternal optimist, even I'm not so sure that what's gotten dinged here will just buff out.
When this whole mess first got spun up, I, among others, were mistaken in predicting how serious (in medical terms) Covid-19 would turn out to be. I stated in a column two years ago I doubted that anyone you or I knew would perish of Covid-19. Now three friends of mine are gone - along with many more that you, I and many others have lost.
All that I can say in my own defense is that the early data wasn't great - and not for no reason. That lack of data was mostly due to the government in China, where the pandemic indisputably arose, being less than forthcoming with information. Had the Chinese government been more transparent we could have, perhaps, avoided a lot of pain.
I had Covid-19 very early on (at least I think so). It was, for me, like having the swine flu once again. I had most of the spectrum of symptoms people were having at that time (including great difficulty in breathing). It was misery incarnate.
The reason that I'm not completely sure that it was Covid-19 was because testing at that time was controlled by the government – and hard to get. I found that it would cost about $3k, that insurance would not pay, to have myself and my wife tested.
This, as it turned out, was a good early indicator of how our response to the Covid pandemic would play out.
I was never completely onboard with masking, lockdowns, social distancing, school closures or many of the other solutions that were imposed to control the spread of the coronavirus back in 2020. The reason that I went along with any of it was because it was mostly out of our hands and the best way to get back to normal was to make what was on the table work.
It's something you'd have a much more difficult time convincing me to do again.