Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

a soft lockdown that shut most schools and businesses—would actually increase infections inside households by 25 percent. The harsher alternative of “whole household isolation” could cause those infections to double.

But the theory was discounted within months, because Chinese researchers could not find Sars-Cov-2 in tissue samples of animals taken from the Wuhan wet market.

But the models were wrong in another way about New York, as well. According to their predictions, new hospitalizations and deaths should have fallen as quickly as they rose. Instead they lingered on into May. Why?

Fauci could have encouraged the National Institutes of Health to focus on examining older off-patent medicines such as HCQ—or even more basic interventions, such as encouraging people to take vitamin D. Instead, he focused on finding shiny new drugs such as remdesivir.

In reality, lockdowns likely worsen intrafamilial transmission in the short run. They force younger people who may have been infected to stay home with parents and grandparents, who are at greater risk.

While men were more likely to become severely ill from the coronavirus than women, and older people were far more likely than the young, long Covid had exactly the reverse profile. Its sufferers were disproportionately young to middle-aged women, often with pre-existing diagnoses of depression or anxiety.

A week later, the publication of an anti-lockdown manifesto called the Great Barrington Declaration grabbed attention.13 Co-authored by epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, it declared, “Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing

Unverified second- and third-hand horror stories were regularly retweeted tens of thousands of times, especially if they included information about young people becoming ill and dying. Many of those stories would later be proven false, but far fewer people saw the retractions or corrections.

But the peak in new admissions in New York at the beginning of April signaled that deaths would fall later in the month. Sure enough, deaths peaked on April 13, when the state’s seven-day moving average of deaths reached 957 a day.4 (Again, I use the seven-day average to smooth out weekend reporting fluctuations.) The rising deaths led to a new wav

Because infections remained stubbornly high well into April, instead of crashing after the lockdowns were imposed.