This is not a New York City hospital; it’s footage aired nearly a month earlier from Italy.

Milton Friedman apocryphally said that if we put the government in charge of a desert, we’d end up with a shortage of sand. Now, we see that in Michigan Governor Whitmer’s takeover of medical care—in the name of increasing hospital beds—is instead causing a shortage of hospitals. Whitmer, like many governors, shut down “elective surgeries”. Elective is a very dangerous misnomer—it doesn’t mean what it sounds like.

An elective surgery does not always mean it is optional. It simply means that the surgery can be scheduled in advance. It may be a surgery you choose to have for a better quality of life, but not for a life-threatening condition. But in some cases it may be for a serious condition such as cancer.

But shutting down elective surgeries, even the non-serious ones, also had another side effect: hospitals didn’t have enough work, and ended up laying off employees. In other words, government actions meant to increase the ability of hospitals to respond to the crisis worsened the ability of hospitals to respond.

The more evidence I see from COVID-19 studies, the more likely it becomes that this particular panic will go down in history as yet another example of the madness of crowds rather than a reasoned response to an epidemic. The fatality rate was never near the rate we thought it was when we were only testing people at risk of dying. It was a classic self-selection bias. The only places that approximated those predictions were in states where governors forced nursing homes to house the sick with the healthy. The only explanation for such behavior is madness.

But there will be a truly universal epidemic at some point, and it’s probably better that we failed badly on a COVID-19 than on a Spanish Flu. Despite all the people we killed by closing down hospitals and doctors and dentists, and all the lives destroyed by closing down people’s life’s work, the destruction would have been even worse if COVID-19 had been as bad as the experts said it was going to be. If we respond this way to a truly excessive disease, the death toll will be unimaginable.

For just one example, if the virus had been as bad as the experts said it was, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania’s decisions to force nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients wouldn’t just have killed thousands in those homes; it would have killed everyone in those homes.

And if a second crisis had hit during this shutdown? We would have been completely unprepared, completely unable to resist. We shut down our resistance.

The most telling, and frightening, response was the Mongols and the Turnips in all its forms. In a real epidemic, we must be able to both fight the virus and harvest the turnips. If we stop creating, if we stop growing food and making vehicles and generating medicine and clothing and all the necessities of life, we cannot fight the virus. Further, we reduce our ability to fight the next virus, or the next hurricane, earthquake, or other crisis. It seems crazy to even have to make the point—even in our panic, we considered six feet of separation enough to “fight the Mongol”, which meant that most jobs didn’t need to be lost, people didn’t need to forgo healthcare, and most businesses didn’t need to be abandoned. Most businesses could have stayed open with six feet of separation. Most jobs could have been kept with six feet of separation.

The most dangerous reaction to COVID-19 was a murderous spiral where governors outdid each other isolating the citizens of their states, and individuals outdid each other justifying the completely unhinged reaction of shutting down what didn’t need to be shut down even under the logic of the time. The overreaction in some of our states was phenomenally deadly, and would have been far worse if the disease had been as deadly as originally claimed, or if some other crisis had happened during this one. Imagine shutting down food and medical production, distribution, and services and also having a deadly hurricane. Imagine if a deadly disease that didn’t look like COVID-19 had started spreading—while we were telling everyone to ignore symptoms that didn’t look like COVID-19.

We shut down the incredible workers, the drivers of the great engine of innovation that could have best and fastest defeated the virus, and instead waited on a handful of experts who were already wrong and who we knew were wrong.

The fearmongers are going to use the elephant whistle analogy. You know the old joke:

“Why do you keep blowing that whistle?”

“It scares away wild elephants.”

“This is the United States! There are no wild elephants here.”

“See? It’s working!”

In this case, the total lockdown is the whistle. Their models said that if we went to a lockdown, we’d still see a massive number of deaths. Those deaths never (thank God) materialized. And their response? “See? It’s working!”

I’m very happy that their models were wrong and fewer people died. I’m not sure the media is. But regardless, the models were wrong. The elephant whistle is not what drove the elephants away.

By this time next year, the anointed will be seeing elephants everywhere, comparing every flu and cold to COVID-19. We’ll be told that we need to shut down roads to combat highway deaths—it’s another COVID-19 every day! Fast food is killing people. We need to shut down every vendor of fast food, soft drinks, and candy until we can combat their deadly addictions! Everywhere they see something they want to shut down, they’ll call it the new COVID-19.

Whenever the left wants to devalue someone’s life, they call it economics, and they’ll be doing it more now that they’ve seen it work so spectacularly.

Every time people started calling for being able to go see their doctors again, called for being able to build again, called for being able to feed people again, the left accused them of just wanting to go out to restaurants or clubs.

In a crisis we need to be clear about our goal—and remain clear. There is always a strong tendency to turn the process into the goal. Our goal was, flatten the curve so that we don’t overwhelm hospitals. Our process was a combination of shelter-in-place and physical distancing. Somewhere along the line, a lot of people forgot that the process was just a means to an end. And for some people, the end they claimed they wanted was always just an excuse to justify the means they really wanted.

We started the shutdown because we were told we needed to preserve our parachute until the appropriate time to open it. Then we started pretending that the fall was the parachute. That’s as deadly as the analogy makes it seem. As the curve flattened, we suddenly saw people screaming, literally, that we shouldn’t open the parachute yet, we need to wait until we land. They made the process—the lockdown—into the goal. But that process was always a deadly tradeoff. It meant trading COVID-19 deaths for non-COVID-19 deaths; it meant trading lives for lives, which is why it was always meant to be merely temporary.

This is especially true when it came to the health care shutdown. Many states shut down non-essential health care. But most non-essential health care is only non-essential in the short term, and barely even then. All of the preventive care, from routine dental care to regular checkups to vaccinations to physical and mental therapy, all of it saves lives. And cutting it off or slowing it down takes lives.

People put up with it for a while. But after a month passed and governors started talking about shutting down for several more months, I started hearing from friends who were seriously in fear for their lives. Not because of COVID-19, but because of the shutdown.

Unlike some of the bot-driven fake nurse memes, or the overseas, government-run hospital chaos photos that the media tried to pass off as American hospitals because they couldn’t find any chaos in the United States, these are real people and real stories. I’ve met them all and talked to some.

• [We have] a friend whose wife needs an organ transplant. She has a donor—her daughter. She NEEDS this. Yet, they won’t do it now. It was scheduled because she needs it, and she was sent home. At some point it will be too late. This is in Michigan.
• She has a WEIRD eyeglass prescription. Not a bizarre one, but she can’t get glasses off the shelf. And, she can’t drive without them and she’s the only person in her household that CAN drive. So, if her glasses break (has two spares, but she also has cats and a family member with a nerve disorder that causes flailing), $50 minimum taxi ride at best. Optometrist is closed. Not a critical need, so she’s waiting. If her eyes change (she’s on the far end of her cycle, but not THAT far) or she loses what she has, $50 minimum ride for groceries and she lives just far enough outside of most place’s delivery areas.That $50 is about two days and some change of groceries.
• “So here’s the thing—I have cancer. At least, my doctor believes I have cancer, but we can’t know for sure until the lump is removed from my breast and we get the test results back. That can’t happen for as long as this lockdown continues because the governor has decided that, in spite of what I or my doctor thinks, I don’t need that surgery right now. I’m not alone in my situation. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who are blocked from access to the care that we need. Please PLEASE STOP behaving as if the only reason people want this to end is so that we can hang out with our friends and go get our hair done. Most of us are worried about our health, our jobs, and our families who depend on us being able to do what we need to do every day. No one is forcing anyone to break your self quarantine. We just want freedom to do what we need to do before our lives are destroyed.”
• When our state started loosening restrictions, the facility started letting the residents out into the common areas and have limited visitors. On one of these visits with my aunt, Grandma started ranting and yelling about Grandpa having an affair and demanded my aunt bring her a gun so she could shoot them both. I guess it was pretty scary, because Grandma NEVER yells like that…. Since I got off the phone with Mom, I’ve been trying to find out the effects of isolation on people with dementia, especially ones who are in the earliest stages. The articles I’ve been able to find have indicated that it certainly doesn’t help matters when someone with dementia is shut inside without human contact for prolonged periods of time… I’m pissed as hell, but I can’t do a damn thing about it. And I’m tired of all the sanctimonious Karens throwing around “you just want to kill Grandma!” when the topic of ending lockdown comes up. Right now, I don’t think those measures to protect our elderly really protected my Grandma.
• …yes, the isolation and lack of normalcy is very likely making things worse. I am seeing it constantly in patients. Every facility I go into, dementia units are madhouses. Even healthy people are declining hard because they have nothing to hold onto. It’s pretty terrible, and I couldn’t agree more about the horror of the situation. On one hand, these patients are really vulnerable. On the other, we’re placing potential quantity of life ahead of quality of life, and we’re doing it without giving the residents a choice.

We could have focused on the people who needed it—the elderly, and others more vulnerable. Instead, we spread our response to everyone, spreading it so thin that we not only didn’t help the vulnerable, we killed them. Some of the frighteningly counterproductive orders, in New York and New Jersey, in Michigan, and in Pennsylvania, forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients. Unsurprisingly, the greatest numbers of deaths happened in these states, and at these homes.

A general lockdown instead of a focused response killed them. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg on how many people this lockdown has killed and is killing. It is difficult to protect the vulnerable during a crisis. It is impossible if we spread our response around to everyone instead of focusing on those who need it.

But think again what we supposedly knew about COVID-19. What made it dangerous was its interaction with various co-morbidities. Treatment for co-morbidities were classified as non-essential health care by many states that limited health care access. In the name of making the virus less deadly, we made it more deadly. Our next response must not shut down the greatest weapon we have against a crisis, especially our health care system.

We have to maintain our ability to meet the next crisis, even during a current crisis.

Our “shortage of sand” well predated this crisis. Why did we need a temporary shutdown to get hospitals ready? Why were hospitals not already prepared for the crisis? Because many state governments literally force hospitals not to prepare for emergencies. In states like Michigan, due to “certificate of need” laws, hospitals cannot add more beds without permission from their competition. When someone wants to open a new hospital, open more beds, or buy more equipment, they must go before a board of their competitors to get permission. They need an acknowledgement from their competitors that those added beds or new equipment are needed, or they can’t install them. Imagine if your local Safeway could forbid not just a Ralph’s or a Meijers from moving in to the community, but could even forbid neighborhood grocers from expanding their food aisles. That’s what certificate of need does for health care: drives up prices, drives down availability, and discourages planning for emergencies.

Certificate of need laws have to go. They literally limit hospital capacity and health care capacity to what we needed yesterday, forbidding building up for what we might need tomorrow.

And socialized health care should be off the table. Looking at what happened in other countries, having to refuse ventilators and hospital space to people who needed them because the government system already relied on rationing rather than building. That’s our future if we put government agencies even more in charge of hospitals and medical supplies. The media had to go to government-run hospitals overseas to get the video of hospital overload that they wanted to scare us with, pretending that they were domestic.

If the left has their way, the media will be able to find all the chaos they need right here at home.

Of the five deadliest outbreaks at a nursing home, three of them were in government-run nursing homes. That doesn’t sound like a big deal—it’s only 60%, after all—until you realize that only 7% of nursing homes are government-run. Why did it happen? The same reason it always happens in government-run health care, from the VA to the NHS to Canada: bureaucrats lied. There is no accountability when government bureaucrats lie.

State officials had apparently lied about staff not coming down with the virus, workers were told not to wear protective equipment, and the Paramus facility wasn’t following CDC disinfection guidelines. At Menlo Park, the family of a Vietnam veteran complained that he was wrongly placed with coronavirus patients leading to his death, and family members of other deceased residents reported facility failures.

We have to stop trying to run health care at the government level. Remember Bernie Sanders’s complaint about how much choice we have in supermarkets, how abundant our options are? As it turns out, we didn’t have too much deodorant on our grocery shelves. We didn’t have too much toilet paper on our grocery shelves. And the moment politicians started treating toilet paper like they do health care, shutting down the distribution chain and threatening the industry for trying to meet demand, we ended up with not enough toilet paper on our shelves.

We need the same choice in health care that we had in toilet paper before the politicians got involved. We need what socialists think is too much hospital beds, too much health care. We will never have that abundance as long as government bureaucrats are managing hospitals and health care providers. And without that abundance we are unprepared for crises.

Our devil’s bargain was to trade the lives of the healthy for the lives of the sick. We ended up killing both. In any future crisis we must not shut down preventative care—vaccinations, checkups, follow-ups, and surgeries.

And what we need to do before the next crisis is find all of the roadblocks to providing health care and supplies and get rid of them. The medical device tax is probably the major reason we didn’t have enough ventilators. Fortunately, that tax is gone—too late to matter in this case. But there remain a mountain of taxes penalizing companies for being prepared for a crisis. They all need to go, from Thor Power Tools on down. Businesses should not be penalized for building up supplies in preparation for increased demand.

And we have to recognize that everything is health. This business of pretending we can segregate the economy into silos easily managed by the government is the same old flawed socialist thinking. Everything is connected. I have a friend whose refrigerator went out during the shutdown. It was nearly impossible to get replacement parts, or even a replacement. Do you know how hard it is to keep food safe during a shutdown when food availability is already sporadic because of the shutdown, and you don’t have refrigeration? Everything is essential to someone, or it wouldn’t have been made.

Most importantly, in future crises we must focus our response on the people who need help rather than dilute our response away from the vulnerable as we did for COVID-19. Our shotgun approach to this crisis allowed obvious failures to go unnoticed until after thousands died. If we had been focusing on protecting the elderly in nursing homes, for example, instead of on controlling everybody everywhere, it would have been impossible for governors to get away with forcing nursing homes to accept patients with the virus. But because we weren’t focused on those who needed help, those orders went unnoticed until after thousands of unnecessary deaths brought the madness to light.