Those of us of a certain age will remember the Y2K panic. For those who weren’t around or need an oversimplified refresher, there was concern leading up to the turn of the millennium that computer programs that used two digits for the year instead of four wouldn’t be able to distinguish between 2000 and 1900, which would lead to all sorts of problems.
People believed that banking computers would fail, effectively freezing the assets of millions of people. The fear was that inventory and scanning computers in stores would lock up and disrupt commerce. In the scariest doomsday scenarios, power grids would go dark, cars would cease to operate, and planes would fall out of the sky.
The Y2K issue was in some programmers’ minds in the early part of the decade. Peter de Jager began to raise the alarm as far back as 1993, but as the year 2000 drew closer, the fears increased. In some ways, the Y2K worries birthed the doomsday prepper mindset.
Back in 2015, I wrote, “I think back to 1999 during the whole Y2K scare when the pastor of our church at the time held a seminar about what to stock up on when all the computers failed on New Year’s Eve at the stroke of midnight. I’ll never forget grown men arguing over who had the bigger food stash. My own personal stash consisted of two cans of green beans, and those cans helped me survive the crisis of what to serve with pork chops one day in January 2000.”
Fortunately, programmers devised fixes for the issue, and some systems proved more resilient than we feared. We discovered that Y2K wasn’t the threat that everyone thought it was. I remember volunteering at our first youth group New Year’s Eve party at church wondering what would happen with the computers and the power shortly after midnight. The answer was nothing, and our biggest crisis was how difficult it was to clean up the metallic confetti we dropped at midnight.
Y2K has become a joke — or at least a memory for which we shake our heads when we recall how people behaved. Yet 20 years after Y2K, we didn’t learn our lesson when it came to COVID-19. Many people bought into the panic hype with COVID just as people panicked when it came to Y2K.
Before I go on, please don’t misunderstand me. I know that Y2K and COVID are apples and oranges and that the stakes were higher with COVID. I definitely don’t mean to overstate one or diminish the other. However, we can look back and see how panic drove both crises.
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The origins of Y2K and COVID had similar warnings. In the same way that people like de Jager saw the potential problems coming with our computers, medical experts warned us that a pandemic was on the horizon. Unlike with Y2K, too many bureaucrats saw the solution in unchecked government power.
We didn’t know what we were doing at first, which meant that there was a certain amount of throwing policies at the wall to see what stuck. Of course, we kicked things off with “15 days to slow the spread.” It didn’t take long for that narrative to fall apart.
“The stated theory behind the ‘15 days to slow the spread’ was that so-called mitigation measures were needed for a short period of time to reduce the incidence of infection, which would 'flatten the disease curve' and hopefully provide more time for hospitals and the medical system to prepare for surges of patients hospitalized because of the Coronavirus,” Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote in his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” adding, “The stated aim was to ‘slow the spread’ not ‘stop the spread.’”
Of course, not every leader wanted to lock their states down in what Dr. Deborah Birx told DeSantis was “kind of like our own science experiment,” and most of them were red-state governors who took a beating from the left and the mainstream press.
When Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) opened Georgia back up first, President Trump attacked him, which opened a rift between the two leaders that didn’t heal until the last few weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign. The Atlantic criticized what it called “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” Other freedom-loving governors faced similar criticism.
Social distancing and wearing masks — even while outside or alone in the car — became the fashion for some Americans. Somebody came up with the idea of putting one-way signs on grocery store aisles as if people walking toward each other on the cereal aisle constituted a super-spreader event. I still occasionally see people wearing masks in public.
Then came the vaccines. I’m not sure any one item in modern memory divided people the way COVID vaccines did. Most people went about their business, and it didn’t matter whether the people around them were vaccinated or not. But the left took every opportunity to divide others based on vaccination status.
The Biden administration and other left-leading jurisdictions enacted vaccine mandates. Newspaper columnists advocated otherizing the unvaxxed. Bands demanded vaccinations before entering concert venues — how rock-and-roll of them. The president himself promised a “winter of severe illness and death” for those who refused to comply with the jab. His administration declared that COVID was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” And don’t get me started on the suppression of speech. All of this was over a disease with a minuscule death rate.
As I said before, Y2K and COVID were totally different situations, but they both thrived on panic. A quarter of a century after Y2K, everyone has moved on. Unfortunately, some people are still thriving on COVID panic five years after the threat began.
I hope that one of these days, Americans will learn not to panic.
