COMING TO TERMS WITH GOVERNMENT FAILURE.

I really should clean out my bookmarks, as some of the articles I linked almost a year ago probably have counterparts making the same arguments right now, which ought tell you something.  Let's start with Reason's Shikha Dalmia, "Public Health Authorities Have Failed America at Every Level."  Some of those early failures might have been pardonable (if we speak of a "novel" coronavirus, doesn't that mean the boffins aren't going to have it well scouted?) but some of the news hasn't aged well.In early March, when private testing had yet to come up to speed and public labs were the only game in town, the [Food and Drug Administration]issued a directive requiring the [Centers for Disease Control] to retest every positive coronavirus result by these labs before certifying it. This meant that for several crucial weeks, America's coronavirus tally was lagging and everyone was underestimating how bad things were. Worse, it meant that lab resources and chemical agents, which have been in acutely short supply, couldn't be used for new tests. The FDA was apparently afraid that false positives would make the spread look worse than it was.

It wasn't just global and national authorities who screwed up. Many state and local authorities performed poorly too. Just look at New York, the worst hit state in the country.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is trying to turn himself into the hero of the republic with his straight talk at press briefings about just how dire things are in New York. But in early March, like Trump, Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio publicly and repeatedly underestimated the seriousness of the outbreak and overestimated their ability to cope with it. De Blasio even urged city residents to go about their daily business without changing their behavior. Meanwhile, in a rare joint press conference the two held, Cuomo bragged: "Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers—I speak for the mayor also on this one—we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York."

The two were blasé not just in their words but in their actions. They both promised that health investigators would track every person who had come in contact with the first two confirmed victims—a woman who had returned from Doha and a New Rochelle lawyer—but they failed to fully follow through, The New York Times reports. Both lagged as well in seeing the need for social distancing. San Francisco and Ohio closed their schools on March 12 when the former had only 18 confirmed cases and latter a mere five. De Blasio waited another few days, until his city's case count touched 329.

Just as [World Health Organization head] Tedros and Trump will admit no misgivings about their initial handling of the situation, neither will the New York duo. Cuomo insists that he took action that everyone at the time regarded as "premature." And de Blasio pooh-poohs critics with the usual bromides about "hindsight" being perfect.

There's plenty of blame to go around, but will anyone take any responsibility?Notice how false positives went from something to be downplayed to something to be played up, particularly the way the dictatorial governors relied on positivity rates to tweak their ukases. Notice also that nobody in authority is going to take responsibility. It is on the voters to turf the dictatorial officials out, and, as many of those officials are Democrats, it would be desirable for Republicans to offer a pragmatic, libertarian-populist choice, which is to say, a vision of a new birth of freedom. "Not Cuomo" or "Not Pritzker" or "Not Evers" isn't going to be enough.

The same day, Reason's Jacob Sullum weighed in on the failure of the public health boffins to make tradeoffs.  When Mr Sullum and Princeton's bioethicist Peter Singer are in agreement, we are in unusual times.

Singer forthrightly questions "the assumption…that we have to do everything to reduce the number of deaths." That assumption is manifestly wrong, as reflected in the decisions that government agencies make when they assess the cost-effectiveness of health and safety regulations—decisions that routinely take into account not just the deaths that might be prevented but the resources expended to do so. Those assessments assign a large value to preventable deaths, but the value is not and cannot be infinite.

"At some point," Singer says, "we are willing to trade off loss of life against loss of quality of life. No government puts every dollar it spends into saving lives. And we can't really keep everything locked down until there won't be any more deaths. So I think that's something that needs to come into this discussion. How do we assess the overall cost to everybody in terms of loss of quality of life [and] loss of well-being as well as the fact that lives are being lost?"

But if you're an expert on infectious diseases, you might get a pass.  "I suspect, as well, that as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and addiction are not infectious diseases in the sense of Fauci, the good doctor is less than competent to trade off those costs against the benefits of mask up, shut up, have no fun, and no holiday gatherings."

Brit Hume is having none of it.  "Remember: his job is to fight the Covid outbreak. He has no responsibility for children’s mental health or education. The economy is someone else’s problem. So are missed cancer screenings, suicides and other collateral damage from lockdowns etc."

Exactly.  It's on the people, though, to say "enough" to the boffins and the dictatorial governors.

The weather is improving: look for widespread outbreaks of people having fun.