Skip to main content

If Data Is Supposed to Be Our Guide, the Great Coronavirus Shutdown of 2020 Should End


According to the most widely cited model projecting the course of the coronavirus outbreak, today is supposed to be Oklahoma’s peak in daily deaths. Now is a good time to go back to the beginning of the Great Coronavirus Shutdown of 2020, review the goal of our policy, and assess our current status. If our policy should be “data-driven,” as we are constantly told, then let’s actually look at the data and determine our next policy steps accordingly.

Spoiler alert: according to the terms set out by those advocating for the shutdown policy, the policy’s continuance is no longer justified.

The stated goal of the shutdown policy was to “flatten the curve” so as to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed with COVID patients. The fear was that the virus would spread so fast that at its peak, the number of cases would exceed the overall capacity of the healthcare system. If that peak could be stretched out over a longer period of time, lives would be saved. This concept was illustrated through a rather cartoonish graph.




There were reasons to be skeptical from the beginning. The curve-flattening graphs rarely had any real numbers attached to them. Instead, a wide range of context-free numbers were tossed around by public health officials and in the media. The flatten–the–curve strategy also included some massive assumptions that policymakers seem to have accepted uncritically, or at least felt they did not have the time to examine closely. The dotted line that represents our “healthcare system capacity” should have been a red flag. What is this vague term even referring to? Does it include only hospitals? Just ICU beds? Will it fluctuate as the government surges resources and hospitals prioritize cases? None of these questions were answered, and from the outside, it appears they were not even seriously asked.

I will confess that my own skepticism of the shutdown policy included these questions, but was more focused on whether the graph-makers were drawing the dotted line too high, or overestimating the policy’s ability to bend the virus curve below it. That is, my concern was that we would undertake this massively disruptive and economically disastrous policy without any certainty that it would actually flatten the curve enough to prevent the overwhelming of hospitals. Assessing those certain costs against the highly speculative benefits of the shutdown, I was unconvinced. I feared we would have the worst of all worlds: a broken economy, lost liberty, and overburdened hospitals.

The opposite has transpired. In Oklahoma, we have never come close to our hospital capacity, and our curve has been basically flat. Our worst day so far saw just 18 percent of dedicated COVID ICU beds occupied by COVID patients. The Oklahoma Health Department reports these numbers every day, and from my review we have cumulatively had just north of 550 hospitalizations, with around 300 currently hospitalized. According to a recent report from a high ranking elected official, Oklahoma hospitals have 5,887 total beds, 991 ICU beds and 1,111 ventilators available for use by COVID-19 patients.

I do not wish to litigate here whether the shutdown policy was wildly successful at flattening the curve or whether it was wildly misconceived for the threat we actually faced. That is a very important debate to have, and I suspect 1889 Institute will contribute thoughtfully to it. I also suspect the reckoning will be ugly.

But it is important to note that some version of one of these two alternatives is correct. Whichever it is, the salient takeaway for Oklahoma policymakers should be that the threat our shutdown policy was implemented to prevent—indeed, the only thing offered to justify it—is not currently a threat. Hospitals are not overwhelmed.

If data is to be our guide, it’s time to end the shutdown.

Benjamin Lepak is Legal Fellow at the 1889 Institute. He can be reached at blepak@1889institute.org.


The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of 1889 Institute.

Popular posts from this blog

1889 Institute's Statement Regarding School Closures

The 1889 Institute, an Oklahoma think tank, has released the following statement regarding Joy Hofmeister’s proposal to keep schools closed for the remainder of the school year. We at the 1889 Institute consider Joy Hofmeister’s proposal to close Oklahoma’s schools for the rest of the school year a gross overreaction to the coronavirus situation. Even in the best of times and circumstances, suddenly shifting every student in the state from traditional classrooms to online distance learning will have negative educational consequences. This in addition to the economic burden on two-earner families forced to completely reorder their lives with schools closed. We believe many of our leaders have overreacted to worst-case scenarios presented by well-intended health experts with no training or sense of proportion in weighing the collateral damage of shutting down our economy versus targeting resources to protect the truly vulnerable. We say reopen the schools and stop the madness. ...

Can Government Force You to Close Your Business?

1889 Institute takes no position on whether any or all of these measures are warranted or necessary, or whether their economic fallout would inflict more human suffering than they prevent. We are simply evaluating whether they are legal.   With the unprecedented (in the last 100 years at least) reaction surrounding the outbreak of Covid-19, questions that few living legal scholars have considered are suddenly relevant.   Can a quarantine be ordered?   Can a mass quarantine, lockdown, or “cordon sanitaire” be ordered? Can businesses be ordered to change their behavior?   Can businesses be ordered to close? Can state governments order these measures? Can local governments order these measures? My legal brief addresses these issues from a statutory point of view; it is clear that state law gives the governor and mayors broad authority in a state of emergency. They must, of course, do so in a neutral way that they reasonably believe will help preve...

Legislating through Litigation

Oklahoma’s Attorney General and trial courts appear to now be in the business of taxing industries and appropriating funds to state agencies. These are powers that the Oklahoma Constitution explicitly grants to the legislature . They are certainly not given to the Attorney General or the courts. But in the name of mitigating a “public nuisance,” these legislative powers have effectively been misappropriated.   The $572 million judgment recently handed down in Oklahoma’s opioid litigation looks an awful lot like a piece of legislation. It purports to tackle a broad societal problem by taxing a company alleged to have contributed to it and using the money to fund government agencies and programs aimed at ameliorating the problem. The Court and Attorney General justified this approach by claiming an “abatement plan” was needed to counter the so-called public nuisance of prescription drug abuse. Besides stretching the public nuisance theory far beyond its historical application ,...

The Bravery of Those Who Died to Defend Us Highlights Our Cowardice

Memorial Day commemorates those who died in military service to our country. These people died not for a chunk of land, for the natural resources available on that chunk of land, nor for any such simple material possession. They died for an idea, a way of life, as well as for each other. We used to be the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave. Now we're the land of the lockdown and the home of the trepidatious.   The bravery of heroes past has been replaced by dirty looks for those who dare to go outside without a mask - even in their own cars – where mask wearing, at best, can only be justified as a sign of solidarity . But solidarity for what? Certainly not freedom. That solidarity happens when people stand shoulder to shoulder against the jackboots who would take someone to jail for what now appears to be the shocking desire to earn a living to feed a family. What follows are three stories of heroism, and four contrasting acts of cowardice. May the deeds of the...