But then of course it was only a few weeks later that the rational playbook was thrown out the window and pseudoscience and magical thinking were widely adopted to justify shutting down society and quarantining even the healthy.
“This is just mind-boggling: This is the mother of all quarantines,” University of Michigan medical historian Howard Markel was quoted as saying in the Washington Post. “I could never have imagined it.”
“The first and golden rule of public health is you have to gain the trust of the population, and this is likely to drive the epidemic underground,” saidLawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. “The truth is [these] kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”