The Morning Briefing: Lockdown 2, BS Boogaloo Is Upon Us

Lock Down Your Enthusiasm

We’re back to this already. While enjoying a perfectly lovely dinner with nine other people as we were celebrating a friend’s birthday, I discovered that I’d missed the news that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey had issued another lockdown edict. I really wanted to like Ducey when I moved back to my native state a couple of years ago, but he’s been a continuing disappointment and makes me worry about Arizona’s ability to resist becoming purple for good during this next election.

The move wasn’t entirely surprising. I felt that another lockdown was imminent when Vice President Mike Pence canceled a visit that he was scheduled to make here today because of increasing coronavirus concerns. The weak Ducey was bound to use that as cover to issue Lockdown 2.0.

The move here comes shortly after Greg Abbott in Texas issued another executive order for a partial lockdown and Gavin Newsom in California is quickly slipping back into petty tyrant mode. None of these orders are lockdowns as comprehensive as what we all went through in March and April, but we know that’s coming. Newsom is already signaling as much.

The lockdown virtue-signaling is already back in full bloom. Il Ducey’s Twitter feed was positively insufferable on Monday night. It was almost as if he were auditioning to be the Democrats’ new favorite useful idiot Republican. The liberal responses were so laden with hysteria that I think the poor dears are at greater risk of succumbing to cardiac arrest than they are COVID-19.

What’s most infuriating here is that we’re being asked to engage in some monumental suspension of disbelief and pretend that people hanging out in bars are responsible for some recent spikes in infection rates but that thousands of people marching, rioting, and looting for weeks had nothing to do with it. In fact, those still aren’t going to be shut down. When Ducey was asked about protests he was suddenly a huge fan of the Constitution and the right to peaceable assembly, no matter how lacking in peace the assemblies happen to be.

There will be no lockdown for anyone who wants to break windows downtown but I’m a COVID monster if I want to have a beer at my local pub with a friend.

Matt had a great post on Monday about what a bad idea Lockdown 1.0 was and pointed a finger at the real culprit right now:

Young people, possibly from the recent protests and riots, are likely behind the recent spike in cases, and that tells us a lot about why the data looks the way it does right now. According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the fatality rate of the coronavirus for symptomatic cases only are as follows:

0-49 years old: .05%

50-64 years old: .2%

65+ years old: 1.3%

Overall ages: .4%

When you take into account that approximately 30% of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic, that drives the fatality rate down even further.

Again, I’m not in the “possibly” category; I firmly believe it was the riots that are causing the spikes.

We discussed in a Briefing a couple of weeks ago the fact that a frightening number of small businesses probably aren’t going to survive the first round of lockdowns. If there were any that were going to have some new life breathed into them, new lockdowns are going to kill that in a hurry.

The usual suspects will no doubt complain about my irascibility here but the complete lack of honesty about the riots and protests has left me off in the land of the skeptical once again. If we’re doing more lockdowns it would be nice if it were a bit less arbitrary than the first time. As long as we’re pretending that there’s some big magical cone of protection over the looters, I’m going to like Lockdown 2.0 even less.

This makes me feel as if we’ll be in varying degrees of lockdown for at least the rest of the year now. If that’s the case, then Biden will probably be elected and at that point who cares anymore.

The Morning Briefing: Lockdown 2, BS Boogaloo Is Upon Us

Lock Down Your Enthusiasm

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