Happy COVID Anniversary, We’ve Learned Almost Nothing

It was one year ago today that President Donald Trump imposed that travel ban on most of Europe over the Wuhan Coronavirus, the official kickoff of the dominoes falling that bring us to the point we are at now. There were a few actions that happened before the European travel ban – the China travel ban, the formation of the Coronavirus Task Force, travel warnings, etc., but today is the anniversary of when those dominoes started to fall in quick succession. In the week that followed, the world was basically shut down. Emergencies were declared, borders were closed, economies halted, lives put on hold. Ultimately, it culminated in “15 days to flatten the curve.” Through all of it, over the past year, we’ve learned next to nothing.

How many things have the “experts” gotten wrong? It’d be easier to ask what they’d gotten right – a new virus started infecting humans. That’s about it. Everything else has been contradicted at some point by the very people who made the original declarative statements.

No one has been more “all over the map” in the last year than Dr. Anthony Fauci. “To mask or not to mask” is a question the highest paid person in our federal government hasn’t bothered to ask himself, he's declared both this past year. No person has done more to damage the concept of experts than a doctor who likely hasn’t treated an actual patient since finishing his residency in the late 1960s. He’s a paper-pusher, a bureaucrat who reads about the work of others and decides if it’s something others should do. And all of us are his lab rats.

Under his leadership, or lack thereof, we’ve collected a pile of data during this pandemic that future generations will…find almost useless.

The collection of data is wildly important in matters like a pandemic because they do happen with some regularity. Few feature viruses as transmissible as COVID-19, but they do pop up all the time. Collecting accurate information about the size and scope of a pandemic like this, as well as who was impacted, how and how severely, and what worked and didn’t is invaluable information for future generations. We don’t have that, at least in any reliable form.