Remembering the Cost of the Lockdowns

This month is the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdowns in California. In March 2020, I was studying abroad in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I had heard rumors about lockdowns in the West, but nothing had changed in Russia. People continued to move about without a mask, and people certainly were not locked down. Life was normal.

Amid the normalcy, I suddenly received a shocking email: my study abroad had been canceled by my university in the United States. They told me that I needed to return home immediately and to “self-isolate” for 14 days after my return. The contrast between the vibrant streets of Saint Petersburg and that email captured the core of the pandemic; the response to COVID-19 was completely subjective, and these subjective preferences were imposed on the general population, depriving people of liberty, autonomy, and freedom of choice.

While I originally resisted this decision, seeing other foreigners leave Russia stoked my fears and I eventually caved in. I returned home to Los Angeles and was shocked by the state of the society I encountered there. I came home at the end of March, weeks after the pandemic had been declared; yet, this was the first time I had ever seen anyone wear a mask. Almost everything was closed by mandate and most of my friends were living in fear, refusing to see me.

I did the logical thing: I researched how deadly COVID-19 was. I quickly learned that the virus was only marginally more deadly than the flu; the data was available very early into the pandemic. I had debates with my friends about the fatality rates of COVID-19. They told me that I needed to “trust the science” and that this was the “new normal.” I told them that science can provide descriptive information (such as transmission rates, fatality rates, etc.), but there is nothing intrinsic to science that prescribes how one needs to react to that information.

I realized that the way in which most governments in the United States responded, while perhaps originally well-intended, exemplified “woke” ideology (and the precautionary principle) in its most extreme form; we locked down and jeopardized our economy and mental health to cater to the most risk-averse and sensitive among us. 

Moreover, on the macro level, lockdowns also proved ineffective in preventing COVID-19 related deaths. Sweden, for example, never locked down, yet their COVID-19 death rate at the beginning of the pandemic was lower than many countries that locked down, and their excess mortality rate (which measures deaths relative to recent mortality trends) was one of the lowest in Europe during the pandemic. Scientists knew early on which demographic groups were most at risk, and—as with the flu—the most stringent precautions should have been directed at the most vulnerable populations while others could move about freely. People should have been free to choose how they responded to the potential threat of COVID-19 based on their own risk preferences and as informed by scientific knowledge about the fatality rates for different population subgroups.

The different responses to COVID-19 struck me even harder when my Russian friends told me in the summer of 2020 that their lockdowns had been lifted, and that life had generally returned to normal. Meanwhile in the United States, especially in Los Angeles, the situation was draconian. I was prohibited from doing something as simple as sitting inside a McDonald’s. I knew that I had to leave.

My experience in Russia had been so incredible that I intended to go back in some capacity, especially because my time abroad had been forcibly ended early. America’s response to the pandemic accelerated my timeline. I decided to finish my bachelor’s degree that summer—a year early—so that I could return to Russia, this time to Moscow, for a master’s degree, and escape to a society that handled the pandemic more reasonably.

Russian borders were initially closed due to the pandemic, so I did my classes remotely while spending time in Ukraine, Serbia, and other Eastern European countries, eventually making it to Moscow in 2021. All of those countries were alive, unburdened by masks, restrictions, or unreasonable fear. Some Eastern European countries even adopted strong anti-lockdown positions; Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, refused to implement a lockdown, citing that other countries had been consumed by “frenzy and psychosis.”

It was clear to me that America’s approach to the pandemic was not the global norm; lockdowns were a choice of governments. How could the so-called “land of the free” do this to its own people?

California did not fully re-open its economy until June 2021, but even then, the mask mandate was in place. Los Angeles County did not lift its COVID-19 emergency declaration until the end of March 2023, more than three years after the official beginning of the pandemic.

To my fellow Gen Zers, most of society has moved past the pandemic, but I ask you never to forget what government officials took from you. They diminished your youth. They diminished the best years of your life. They stole your graduation ceremonies. Americans paid tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to expensive American universities only to watch lectures over Zoom. And what was it for? It was to “fight” a virus marginally more deadly than the common flu, which barely impacted the Gen Z demographic. This was more than a mistake. It was a betrayal. We must learn a lesson from the pandemic and never allow governments to prioritize uninformed, extreme risk aversion over individual liberty and the ability of individuals to assess their own risk and act on it as they see best.