What Lessons Will We Learn from the Xi Jinping Flu Coronavirus?

I really am starting to suspect that we--as in worldwide--went overboard on shutting down our economies so much in response to the Xi Jinping Flu.

Given the high proportion of the elderly and already ill in the death count, perhaps focusing resources on those populations and isolating them from exposure would have been superior. We could have social distanced and had lockdowns in specific places--like New York City or the Detroit area, in particular. Then personal protection equipment could have been focused on those who really need it to work with the sick and elderly, and those in lockdown areas.

Of course, this is with hindsight that isn't reliably or remotely clear even now. I don't blame leaders for shutting down based on the information and projections we had at the time. Public health-wise a shutdown wasn't counterproductive for a short time. Even an adequate plan that you carry out resolutely is better than rapidly switching policies looking for the perfect one.

And realistically speaking, it is always safer for officials to do what other officials are doing even if it proves to be wrong. That's one herd immunity that always works.

Admit it, if leaders had decided not to shut down our economies and institute lockdowns and we had exactly the same casualties as we have now, there would be people--with lots of experts among them--who would say that the casualties would be far lower had we only shut down our economies and locked down our people. Don't deny it. That's how people roll.

But if we can get our economies moving again to pre-pandemic levels quickly, perhaps this won't seem like such an overboard reaction.

In regard to an adequate policy, remember that the plan was to flatten the curve to keep from overwhelming medical systems--not to eradicate the virus. So changing the plan to do that with the price of continuing to shut economies down is madness.

Yet I don't want to fall into the trap of concluding that having deaths much lower than early predictions means we overreacted when it could just mean our actions worked. That's also how people roll. Again, all this is outside of my lane. I have great trouble judging.

We have a lot to learn yet before we know for sure more than what we do know: the Chinese Communist Party has a lot of explaining to do in its role in creating the epidemic in Wuhan and turning it into a pandemic; and their outrageous propaganda that has tried to shift blame to America.

This is out of my usual lanes, as I've said. And I suspect it is still hazy for those who are in their exact lane working on this. And that's not even considering how WHO made it worse by covering for China. Which to be fair, is exactly their lane.

Can we even know if another course of action would have been better given that the only way to compare is using models? Which are highly flawed as we've seen? I think all we can do is judge whether we did a good enough job to endure this.

I hope that we can learn lessons without politics slanting every damned thing about this pandemic.

UPDATE: Interesting thoughts on the next time.

UPDATE: More on moving the goal posts on when lockdowns can be lifted.  And divisions in America widen under assault. But to be fair, part of the division is that blue areas hit hard have set the standard for how red areas hardly hit at all must live. Wouldn't America be able to help the hardest hit areas more effectively if as much of the country was working as possible?