How I Was Wrong About Covid; When even libertarians trust the government too much.

Glenn Reynolds:

I was right about all that, though it was worse than I anticipated.  And yet Covid was, it turned out, not as bad as I anticipated.  In the early days, I was a Covid hawk, but I was wrong to be.  It seemed right at the time.  The Chinese called it a “grave” threat, and their tendency had always been to downplay bad things in China.  There were reports of death rates ranging from 4% to 10%.

Sure, Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi and Bill DeBlasio were telling us not to worry and go visit Chinatown, but I lacked confidence in them.  (Hey, I was right about that.)  They reversed course like a week later.

It turned out, of course, that Covid’s mortality rate was significantly less than 1/10 of those early reports, and those deaths were mostly concentrated among the obese, the elderly, and those with heart failure and diabetes.  (Even in those early days, just about exactly three years ago now, my yoga teacher told me that her son-in-law, an ER doc in New Orleans, said that all his Covid ICU patients were morbidly obese).  Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, really, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience, and colossal economic destruction.

In retrospect, I should have been more skeptical.  It’s hard to believe that I, of all people, trusted the government too much, but there you are.  Well, lesson learned.

In mitigation, I should note that co-bloggers Sarah Hoyt and Charlie Martin were as skeptical as I should have been. There were people who wanted me to shut them down, but that’s not how we work at InstaPundit, and even then I was open to – and hopeful for – the prospect that they might be right, as of course they were, and I might be wrong, as of course I was.