A routine trope in the media is that people who oppose lockdowns are pushing freedom and wealth over safety and health. But as we can see from this clean examination of the results, the open states experienced less economic pain and less pain from the disease itself.
We are seeing desperate attempts by politicians, public health officials, and media commentators somehow to make sense of why the United States pursued the course it did with the closures, stay-home orders, travel bans, and near-universal quarantine, in violation of every principle that America has celebrated in its civic culture.
With the evidence coming in that the lockdowns were neither economically nor medically effective, it is going to be increasingly difficult for lockdown partisans to marshal the evidence to convince the public that isolating people, destroying businesses, and destroying social institutions was worth it.