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It’s easy to feel like we’re done with Covid. But Covid isn’t done with us.
On this day six years ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom locked down his state. It wasn’t the country’s first Covid shutdown, but Mr. Newsom’s stay-at-home order was the most draconian. Forty million California residents were ordered to shelter in place. Within days, police were writing tickets for the crime of “watching the sunset” on a SoCal beach.
It wasn’t crazy to suggest people temporarily avoid gatherings where virus transmission was likely. But California’s edict went far beyond a nudge, carrying the threat of a six-month prison sentence. The federal government expanded its power too, telling landlords they couldn’t evict deadbeat tenants, for example, and censoring online discussions of the lab-leak theory and other unapproved topics. As the pandemic dragged on, almost all Americans faced serious restrictions on their freedoms. And those didn’t always let up after vaccines arrived or the virus evolved to become less deadly. In many communities, students wouldn’t return to full-time schooling for more than a year.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.
