The unprecedented lockdown of American society was executed with one primary goal in mind: preventing our hospitals and medical professionals from being overwhelmed by the new coronavirus.
Two months later, it remains doubtful whether it was truly necessary to force businesses to close their doors or to order citizens to stay in their homes for weeks on end.
Many of the models used to justify these measures have proved to be flat out wrong. Experts who put forward the worst doomsday projections have been wildly off the mark — most notably, the British epidemiologist and leading lockdown proponent Neil Ferguson, who claimed 2.2 million Americans would die unless the strictest measures were put in place.
Ferguson has since downplayed his model but remained a loud supporter of the restrictions until being busted violating his beloved shelter-in-place order to visit his mistress. Even the most prominent and often cited model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has been repeatedly and dramatically revised.
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