Lockdowns were, in fact, beneficial.

Back in the early days of the pandemic, I started a public interest website called TestAndTrace.com. Our goal was to encourage and to help state governments implement contact tracing programs to contain the virus. After a few months it became apparent that we had failed in our mission, for two main reasons. First, U.S. testing mostly relied on companies that sent their tests to centralized distribution centers, which took several days to turn tests around — far too long to catch people before they spread the virus (this has improved hugely in recent months). Second, and even more importantly, unlike many countries in Europe and Asia, the U.S. never managed to suppress the spread of the virus to low enough levels.

Before we had vaccines, the main tool we had for suppressing the virus was government-mandated social distancing restrictions — also known as “lockdowns”. In practice our restrictions weren’t anything like the draconian lockdowns China implemented, where people were literally sealed inside their houses. But many European did manage to use government-mandated distancing to suppress the virus…at least until the variants arrived at the end of 2020.

Had we managed to do the same, we might have saved a lot of lives, even if fast-spreading variants and distancing fatigue eventually defeated us in the fall. The reason is that in the early days of the pandemic, we didn’t know how to treat COVID, and death rates were pretty high — maybe about 1% of those who got infected, and around 1 out of 5 people who were hospitalized. By the end of the pandemic, as we learned how to use things like steroids and oxygen to keep people alive, death rates fell to less than half of that level. If “lockdowns” had been able to suppress the virus in the U.S. like they did in Germany, a lot of Americans would still be alive today.

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