WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR THE CORONA TYRANNY?

A lot of discontent, and not much by way of results.

There is no doubt that tens or hundreds of thousands of people died prematurely from untreated ailments, avoidance of healthcare out of fear of getting COVID-19, and to a lesser degree things like overdoses and suicides. Because of all the looseness in reporting, the highest integrity data point measuring the pandemic and lockdown impacts is looking at how many people in total died against expectations. If three million people died annually from 2015-2019 and then 3.5 million people died in 2020 and 2021, the increase is obvious. This is how we measure the pandemic and interventions holistically.

If California had fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than South Dakota, but 3% more total excess deaths during the pandemic from all causes amidst the strictest lockdowns, was it worth it?

It's not that we didn't notice.

That's a yard sign Walworth County Republicans were selling to call attention to the ineptitude of their governor, Tony "Pencil Neck" Evers (D - Public Instruction).  His corona response was a failure.

Governors John Carney (DE), David Ige (HI), Janet Mills (ME), Tim Waltz (MN), Steve Sisolak (NV), Michelle Lujan (NM), Roy Cooper (NC), Kate Brown (OR), Ralph Northam (VA), Jay Inslee (WA), Tony Evers (WI), Larry Hogan (MD), Charlie Baker (MA), Chris Sununu (NH) and and Phil Scott (VT). Millions of their students were locked out of schools for over a year, thousands of businesses closed and they were defiant in opening up when it was clear where the science stood. The only salvage for Ige, Mills, Brown, Scott, Sununu and Inslee is that while they kept kids out of class and closed thousands of businesses, they did achieve low relative COVID-19 deaths and all-cause excess deaths. They likely would have anyway had they let kids get educated and let businesses function.

That's despite the state legislature and a divided state supreme court holding that emergency powers must be limited in scope and duration.

That report, though, took the view that there were degrees of failure, which makes sense, there are abject failures, listed above, and there are the truly spectacular failures.

Governors Andrew Cuomo (NY), Phil Murphy (NJ), Gavin Newsom (CA), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), J.B. Pritzker (IL), and Tom Wolf (PA). There’s a special place for governors that locked kids out of classrooms for a year and a half, ordered sick COVID-19 patients back into nursing homes, did not practice their own orders, shut down tens of thousands of businesses and still couldn’t beat the U.S average in COVID-19 deaths or excess all-cause deaths.

There is still time, later this year, to turf the Michigan and Illinois governors out.  Whether the opposition parties will come up with credible replacements remains to be seen.