Think of all the things we know now about Covid-19 that we didn’t know on March 1, and all the things we still don’t know. Yet our leaders, the Prez and VP, the governors, the mayors, etc. had to make real-time decisions about how we would react to a disease about which little was known.
Inevitably many of their decisions were less than optimal, based on guesses about what we faced and its severity. Exercising the proverbial 20-20 hindsight to second guess them is unfair and petty.
Some guessed right and some guessed wrong. Do I think any of them were wrong on purpose? No, I don’t, and that includes some who made decisions that hindsight shows were awful.
For example, I suspect truly awful decisions were made because long-term-care facilities are sometimes euphemistically called “convalescent hospitals.” The title is misleading because hardly any residents ever convalesce and they clearly are not hospitals in any meaningful sense of treating illness or maintaining sterile conditions.
Had Gov. Cuomo of NY thought of them as “assisted living facilities,” he probably wouldn’t have mandated they accept people with active Covid-19 cases. Particularly if, when the decision was made, he had understood the news from Washington state which showed that the residents of these facilities were particularly at risk of getting very sick and dying of Covid-19.
Do I suspect that today some Democrat governors are prolonging the lockdown to create economic hardship and thus help Biden beat Trump in November? I’m beginning to, but I believe that is a thought that came upon them in say the last month. I don’t think that was on their minds in March when the big decisions were made.
