Gigi Foster - The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next

The Great Covid Panic:

What Happened, Why, And What To Do Next

by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker

Copyright 2021 by the Brownstone Institute, Creative Common Attribution International 4.0.

ISBN: 9781630691585

The year 2020 was above all a year when billions of people were very afraid of something they could not see.

Will I die if I leave the house and catch the virus? Have I brought it inside? What if my children play outside? Will they catch it?

The neighbour is coughing he should not be allowed out of his house.

That woman is looking strange I wonder if she has it. Shed better keep her mask on.

Its windy today someone told me it floats for days on the breeze so Id better not go out.

Other people are scared too. I clear my throat in the supermarket line and everyone turns to look at me. A couple of them glare at me. I know what theyre thinking.

The fearful wanted desperately to hear there was a solution something to make the fear stop. They were drawn to anything that offered escape from the oppressive anxiety pounding in their heads. Spending vast sums from the government purse and withholding the joys of millions started to seem like sensible ideas when they came with the promise of alleviating the fear.

The elderly need to be locked away for their own good? Yep, no problem.

The neighbour committed suicide because she was lonely? Well, too bad, but at least she didnt infect us and lets hope no one else moves in soon.

Kids shouldnt go to school? Of course not, kids are vulnerable and need to be protected from germs.

We need to buy 100 million tests? Yes, definitely, and more if we need them, whatever the price.

The teenagers are partying? They should all go to prison for having fun when theres a deadly virus going around. Same with the crowds at the beaches. Arrest them all so the rest of us can be safe.

All those months of obsession crowded out attention, care, and concern for so much else. The fearful were the perfect victims for those with cooler heads who recognised that this was a unique opportunity to seize power and wealth for themselves. The paralysis of the fearful led in the end to heartless neglect, social disintegration, widespread theft, and totalitarian control.

The human costs were vast. Children depressed about their worth in life, told that their slightest expression of love and joy could kill their grandparents. Whole populations unhealthier, too afraid to exercise outside or actually prevented from doing so by government edict. Hospitals closed to normal caregiving and surgical procedures cancelled. Mass starvation in poor nations that cost the lives of millions and plunged millions more into misery, caused not by a virus but by active government policies. Hundreds of millions lost their jobs, life roles, freedom to travel and motivation to rise in the morning.

It could be said that in the first three months of 2020, billions of people on the planet turned their backs on life, living instead in a kind of twilight zone weakly illuminated by the vague hope of a vaccine. Many became zombie conformers, stuck in their homes and gradually losing their humanity.

In these pages we explain what happened, and carefully consider how to avoid a repeat next time because of course there will be a next time and a next time after that. Only a fool believes that the memory of his own experience will protect future generations. Alas, new generations will be just like ours, subject to their own new terrors. Fresh-faced viruses and other threats will emerge that ambitious leaders will be willing to exploit to amass more power. Humanity has to learn to weather these coming fears without falling victim to the opportunism of the powerful.

In this book, the personal dramas of the Great Panics individual protagonists are embedded in the narrative of a grand global story. The personal dramas tell stories of fear, hope, sacrifice, arrogance, greed and lust for power. The grand story considers the economy, the social system, science, politics and alternative scenarios for the end game and what comes next.

Little can be achieved by thinking about Covid as a public health problem created by bats and solved by vaccines. If we really want to understand it as an historical phenomenon, to understand how we humans reacted to it in the way we did and to learn something useful for the future, we need to fit together many pieces of a puzzle. Some of the pieces repose in the heart, while some are in the mind. Some are at a micro level, some are macro. Some are good and some are unspeakably evil. This book aims to make sense of it all, to make these disparate strands coherent so we see clearly what happened and deduce what must be done to avoid a similar tragedy in future.

The book is organised as follows. We begin with by introducing the three representative characters who are defined by their response to the virus: Jane the conformer, James the decider and Jasmine the doubter. Jane and Jasmine will reappear periodically throughout the book to voice their personal experiences in each of the three major phases of the pandemic the Great Fear, the Illusion of Control and the End Games. James, meanwhile, will be a constant presence throughout the book. In his many guises he was the one with the power to stop the madness but instead kept it going for his own interests.

In , we give the reader a quick primer on viruses, how the human body responds to them and how we test for them. We explore the problems rife during the pandemic with statistical measures of virus severity, and how they can be misused to hoodwink and scare the public.

Then, in , we fold the knowledge of the first two chapters into the storyline of the Great Fear itself, showing how the extreme social distancing measures and other interventions practiced during the pandemic were destined, except in rare instances, to fail, and fail at great cost to humanity.

shows how parts of the scientific establishment were complicit in the tragedy.

shows how modern political and economic structures made it possible for authoritarian governments and the barons of modern capitalism to ruthlessly exploit populations.

Then comes we draw out lessons, provide alternative scenarios about what comes next, and offer our ideas on how similar mistakes can be avoided next time.

So with warnings to the faint of heart, we start by inviting the reader to relive the overwhelming force of the Panic as it hit and tightened its grip on the world at the start of 2020.

Jane is a normal human being who scares easily and seeks security in compliance with rules. She expects her government to look after her in times of emergency and will do her best to protect her family and friends from trouble when she can.

There are Janes in all walks of life. She represents women and men from across the occupational spectrum: manual labourers, office workers, computer scientists, nurses, teachers, farmers, housewives, househusbands, taxi drivers, journalists, policemen. She represents people of all ages, races and cultural backgrounds.