The Pandemic Blog

    Today, April 30, is the 45 th anniversary of what we in the US know as the “fall of Saigon”, and what is known in Vietnam as Reunification Day (this is their great national holiday every year, like our Independence Day. Vietnam’s Independence Day is September 2, the day that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam – and really just the northern part - independent of France in 1945. Since that turned out to be just the beginning of an eight-year war with the French, followed by a 15-year war with the Americans and the South Vietnamese, it was hardly a climactic moment). On this day in 1975, the North Vietnamese army and their National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) allies in South Vietnam took control of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, overthrowing the government the US supported during what we call the Vietnam War – and what the Vietnamese today call the American War. The first thing the North Vietnamese did when they took over Saigon was to change its name to Ho Chi Minh C...

Holman Jenkins, Jr., editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal , clearly thinks of himself as a realist in the midst of a sea of journalists who don’t necessarily mean harm, but are causing more harm than good by calling for continuing lockdowns to fight the coronavirus pandemic. In a column this morning, he very cogently makes the argument: Given that there’s no cure or vaccine for Covid-19 on the horizon in the near term, we’re going to have a certain number of deaths – there’s very little we can do at this point to change that fact. The rationale for lockdowns is that they “flatten the curve” to keep hospital systems from being overwhelmed, as we wait for a cure or a vaccine to get us out of this mess. Yet even New York City’s hospital system didn’t get overwhelmed by the recent crisis, which is definitely past its peak. Therefore, given that nothing we can do now is going to significantly lower deaths over the course of...