A good friend of mine of many decades is a retired anesthesiologist, but he began his medical career in family practice. He is 89 years old and he has stories to tell about public health of the past. Particularly polio. The statistics on polio were quite small. But because it was affecting children the impact was greatly amplified.
Decisions about polio were also made from emotion.
Tuberculosis, more than any sort of frontier spirit, sent people West. A study came out indicating that the disease would be less symptomatic, and less deadly, if patients breathed very clean air. So the phrase Go West Young Man arrived on the scene, and it came from brochures printed by Western towns hyping their very clean air in the mountains of Denver and elsewhere. Those towns needed population.
So the disease defined their policy, and when the patients arrived at the city limits they were often kept out.
My point I suppose is that this is not the first time disease has compelled government policy. TB has some similarities. Many infected people are asymptomatic. They’re walking around infecting people. 25% of the world’s population is infected with TB. About 1.5 million people die of it each year even with antibiotics, the most of those deaths do not received the entire treatment regimen which is multiple drugs over a long. Of time.
Coronavirus is not polio which is a crippling disease that incurs a life of costs, treatment, disability, and pain because it disproportionally strikes young children who have yet to live their lives.
My point is not that government has no role in these things. My point is that government's role in THIS, a pathogen that has a small mortality rate disproportionally weighted towards the elderly, was completely mishandled, and done so deliberately for political reasons, in my opinion.