Pandemics Are Over When The Public Decides They're Over
Profile picture for user Tyler Durden Sun, 11/22/2020 - 18:15

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,



“They don’t want to have restrictive orders that people just entirely ignore,” Fenberg said. “Once you cross that line, that seriously, then it really starts to unravel, when people completely check out from following the orders.”

We’ll ignore the creepy framing of the issue around how citizens have lamentably “grown accustomed to certain freedoms” like being able to leave one’s home. But Fenberg is right to think the public is unlikely to be nearly as compliant this time around.

And what happens if Americans start acting as if there is no pandemic? Then, the pandemic is at a de facto end, even if “experts” insist that it is still a de jure reality.

Medical Pandemics vs. Social Pandemics

In other words, government agencies may issue declarations of when Pandemics end, but as noted in The New York Times last May,


“When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins. In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and learn to live with a disease

This has happened before. During the 1957-1958 Asian flu pandemic, for example, the public took little notice of the fact the flu was especially virulent that year. It is now estimated that more than 100,000 died from the flu in the period, which would be the equivalent of 220,000 Americans today. Indeed, American continued to die from the Asian flu into the 1960 flu season and beyond. But as far as the public was concerned, there had been no pandemic that required staying home or closing schools.





Moreover, many currently unemployed Americans—who number in the millions—may conclude collecting unemployment checks indefinitely is not a satisfactory substitute for making a living the ordinary way.

Making Risk Assessments

All of this will go into calculating risk, and this is why the public's recognized end to pandemics is often different than the “official” end. The public is made up of countless individuals who make their own risk assessments based on the available facts.

This also is why it’s impossible to declare with finality when “herd immunity” has been reached. As Michel Accad explained last month at


For one thing, there is no objective way to establish that herd immunity has been achieved, since a “stable” rate of new infection is a subjective notion. What is a stable or tolerable rate of infection for me may not be so for you.



How Much Risk Are We Willing to Accept When Driving?

Governments have tried this in other contexts as well.


This in itself was not an unreasonable goal, of course. Nowadays, more than 38,000 people die every year in crashes on US roadways. An additional 4.4 million are injured seriously enough to require medical attention, and auto accidents are the leading cause of death in the US for people aged 1–54.




The same thing, of course, has always occurred in the context of disease, and it is likely to occur in the context of Covid-19. As time goes on, more and more Americans will simply accept that the risk of catching various diseases as a part of life. This long ago occurred with the flu which still kills tens of thousands of Americans per year.

When this does finally happen with most of the public in regards to Covid-19, the pandemic will be de facto over, although may politicians and bureaucrats will no doubt disagree.