Our reader and commenter Cogito, a General Practitioner, wrote the following as a comment on our post Boom again? (May 9, 2020).

With his  permission, we feature it here as an article with which we wholly agree.

We don’t know everything about the COVID virus certainly, but we know quite a bit.

We know that the virus can be very dangerous to the elderly and the medically fragile. Indeed the vast majority of deaths are precisely in this group.

We also know that the overwhelming number of people who contract the disease (possibly 99.9%) will survive. We know that most people will have minimal or minor symptoms.

COVID is not and should not be seen as a significant threat to our way of life. It is not the biggest crisis ever faced by Western Civilization. It is not the biggest public health crisis ever faced by Western Civilization.

Yet, it is astonishing that a virus of such low lethality and morbidity could bring the world’s mature market economies to their knees. It makes no sense logically or empirically.

Furthermore, there is no convincing scientific evidence that lock-downs even work. We know this simply by observing and comparing those states such as Sweden and Taiwan, and Japan which did not lock-down or did so only minimally have fared as well or better than those states who locked down tightly.

Another issue about lock-downs that disturbs me is that they run contrary to medical science and history. Quarantines, as far as I can determine, have always been used to isolate the sick. But here, we are isolating healthy symptom-free people. Most unusual.

In addition to these medical observations, I have other concerns social, legal, and political. Lock-downs are proving to be harmful. We are beginning to see (anecdotally for now) more suicides and domestic violence. I witness the growing depression and anxiety in my patients every day.

Then there is the question of civil liberties and overreach by our political masters. Political leaders threatening to follow us on our cell phones, lock-downs which are nothing but a kind of house arrest of citizens who are guilty of nothing, police ticketing people for sitting in parks, “snitch” lines being instituted so neighbors spy on neighbors. Readers of George Orwell would find these measures disturbingly fascistic.

And then, of course, there is the catastrophic economic downturn we are facing now. If Mr. Trump can’t turn this around, we are doomed to a new Dark Age of grinding poverty and misery.

Under (probably gynocratic) communist tyranny.