A few months into the pandemic, two basic models emerged for responding to COVID:

1) Make it endemic. Also known as “herd immunity” or, pejoratively, “Let ‘er rip!” Georgia and Florida, among other states, cautiously followed that path, as did the nation of Sweden.

2) Lock down the populace in order to prevent a single COVID molecule from ever drifting within 10 yards of a human being. Remember “Fifteen days to stop the spread!”? In the blue states, two weeks became two years—finally being abandoned this week only because Democrats fear the coming elections.

RESULT: Places that pursued the endemic route did no worse, and often quite a bit better, than the fascist lockdown states. Apart from preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed when the virus first hit New York, no benefit was derived from strict COVID policies.

The reason the virus hit so hard in 2020 was that our immune systems had never encountered anything like COVID before. “[T]he population was immunologically naive,” explained statistician Philippe Lemoine, “which means that nobody had immunity against it.” It’s the same reason Native Americans were annihilated by viruses that Europeans had lived with for centuries. Now their immune systems recognize those viruses, too.