“COVID-19 Has Killed Thousands of Young Americans”
Although 2020 wasn’t that long ago, it sure feels that way. However, it’s important to flashback and try to remember our mindset at the time, specifically how we felt about contracting COVID ourselves. Most of us didn’t want it.
By October 2020, when the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) was written, we’d all been deluged with horrors of suffering and dying COVID patients from all over the world. We knew COVID could overwhelm hospitals and morgues, and the first installment of the COVID Amnesia Project discussed the efforts to erase that history.
Everyone knew that while older people had the highest risk, younger people were not invulnerable. Frontline doctors reported our experiences in 2020. In my only article that year, I wrote about seeing “patients as young as 23 die alone, with no one by their side”, though as early as April 2020, the Washington Post had published articles titled Hundreds Of Young Americans Have Now Been Killed By The Coronavirus, Data Shows and Young And Middle-Aged People, Barely Sick With Covid-19, Are Dying Of Strokes. By January 2021 the headlines would read COVID-19 Has Killed Thousands of Young Americans. This Is Not Just a Tragedy for The Elderly. COVID became the #1 disease killer for young adults and middle-aged people in 2021.
Source: CDC
We knew that children were not entirely spared by the virus. An article from May 2020 was titled Everything You Need To Know About A Mysterious Illness That Could Be Linked To Coronavirus In Children. It said:
Doctors are referring to the condition that has hospitalized dozens of children as “pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome,” and health officials believe it could be linked to coronavirus. Three children have died because of it in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Saturday.
COVID would go on to kill over 2,000 children, and at its worst, during the Omicron wave in January 2022, nearly 1,000 children were being hospitalized daily, some in the ICU.
All of this would have been much worse had people under age 60-70 abandoned all efforts to avoid the virus in 2020.
It was clear early on that COVID did not magically spare educators. A headline from NYC in May 2020 declared Coronavirus News: 30 Teachers Among 74 DOE Employees to Die of COVID-19. A teacher at my son’s school died. At least 451 active teachers had died by the end of 2022, a number that would have been much higher had they all contracted COVID in 2020.
Everyone also knew that death was not the only bad outcome from COVID. A lot of people got really sick, even though they didn’t die. A younger colleague of mine spent weeks unable to make it from her bed to the bathroom without gasping for air during her infection in April 2020. Her awful experience didn’t show up in any statistics or medical journal, but it wasn’t exceptional. It was no secret that COVID could be horrific even if it didn’t kill you, and most people reasonably wanted to avoid this suffering.
Even if they didn’t fear the virus themselves, normal people cared about their community and didn’t want to participate in a chain of transmission that might end up killing a stranger 10 infections later. There was immense social pressure to avoid spreading the virus in 2020, which made sense considering the worst wave of the pandemic was January 2021, when 3,000 Americans would die daily.
There was some good news. Everyone knew that vaccines were potentially on the way, and in December 2020, they arrived.
The bottom line is this- an honest remembrance of 2020 reveals that we all had every incentive to avoid COVID, and most of us wouldn’t have lived normally even if everything had been officially “open”. However, a goal of the COVID Amnesia Project is to make people forget this by implying that we would have been eager to fill up restaurants and classrooms if only wise politicians and public health leaders had directed us to do so. Everything could have been normal.
“The authors of the Declaration argued that for the low-risk majority, normal life should otherwise resume.”
A typical example comes from the revisionist history book In COVID’s Wake, written by two Princeton political scientists, architects of the COVID Amnesia Project who experienced the pandemic from their laptops. In my previous review of it, I criticized its authors for “treating proposals as accomplishments.” They wrote:
The authors of the Declaration argued that for the low-risk majority, normal life should otherwise resume. Schools and restaurants should reopen, and teaching should be in person (with special provision made for older or immunocompromised teachers and students).
It may not seem that way, but there’s a lot to unpack there. It’s true that the authors of the GBD “argued for” things to be normal on Twitter, podcasts, and Fox News. However, SBM readers know that’s no great accomplishment and what people “argued for” matters infinitely less than what actually happened.
What actually happened is that when SARS-CoV-2 was allowed to spread unchecked, children and teachers got sick, and schools couldn’t stay open. The virus forced people’s hands and gave them no choice. Nowhere escaped the pandemic untouched with life as normal, not even Sweden, and COVID continued to disrupt normal life in the U.S. well after leaders said, “everything’s open.” The headlines 15 Miami-Dade Educators Die From COVID-19 in 10 Days and School Closures Reported in Five Fl Counties; Districts ‘Drowning’ In COVID came during Florida’s Delta wave when authors of the GBD helped run the show. The virus didn’t care that the GBD’s authors “argued for” for this not to happen, and neither should anyone else.
However, in addition to absolving SARS-CoV-2 of all blame, the illusion that normal life was possible in 2020 is entirely based on an absurd assumption- that the vast majority of people avoided COVID that year only because politicians and public health leaders instructed them to do so.
In the fantasy of an alternate pandemic, the sage authors of the GBD were in charge, and millions of Americans, who had devoted most of 2020 to avoiding COVID, would have suddenly been willing to contract it en masse once they received their marching orders in October. Parents would have sent their kids to school, and customers would have flocked to packed restaurants. Teachers would have seen the video below, and hearing they faced a “very modest risk,” would have been convinced to return to crowded classrooms. That’s how persuasive the authors of the GBD would have been. School bus drivers, chefs, waitresses and everyone else required to keep schools and restaurants functioning would have similarly abandoned their efforts to avoid COVID. Since they were “low risk”, life would have been blissfully normal. Of course, “special provisions for older or immunocompromised teachers and students” would have been miraculously created at a moment’s notice as the virus swirled around them. What could possibly go wrong?
This depiction of the pandemic as optional, an entirely avoidable catastrophe caused not by a deadly virus but by stupid people who made stupid choices is appealing at a child’s level. The imagined alternative- where competent leaders snapped their fingers, normal life resumed, and everybody lived happily ever after- is certainly much better than what we all actually lived through, as long as you were not elderly or immunocompromised. Such people did not get a voice in GBD’s vision.
However, not only does this fantasy erase SARS-CoV-2 from the equation, it erases how people felt regarding COVID in 2020 and their agency about it. It portrays people who tried to avoid COVID as easily manipulable lemmings who blindly followed orders, rather than rational individuals who made rational decisions with their own free will.
To be clear, the GBD and broader We Want Them Infected movement were very influential in convincing some people to live normally. The GBD told people under 60-70 they had essentially no risk from the virus, and that for the sake of herd immunity, they deserved gratitude for contracting it. Once vaccines arrived, they claimed that natural immunity was preferable to vaccine immunity. Many people were tricked by this, some of them paid dearly for it, and they are no longer around to tell us about the wisdom of their decision to live normally. Erasing their existence to maintain the fantasy of the optional pandemic is a core aim of the COVID Amnesia Project.
However, the obvious truth is that countless millions of Americans prioritized their health and protecting their neighbors over a fantasized return to normal in 2020. We made enormous sacrifices, and our collective efforts deserve recognition and gratitude, not amnesia and revisionist history. Instead of appreciating that people came together to limit a deadly virus, the COVID Amnesia Project blames their unwillingness to contract it for a lack of normalcy that year.
Resisting the COVID Amnesia Project requires honestly remembering what actually happened in 2020. Every country needed mandatory mitigations because even though a new virus killed a lot of people and overwhelmed cities, some people still didn’t care about it. They had other priorities and didn’t want the virus to be slowed down.
However, the vasty majority of people worked together to avoid a contagious virus entirely of their own volition in 2020. They didn’t need to be told what to do. This cooperation not only saved lives, but it also precluded a return to normal. We don’t have to pretend the authors of the GBD could have uttered some magical incantation that would have destroyed our respect for the virus, our autonomy, or our solidarity 6 years ago.