EP 880 The Trade-Offs Made in Fighting COVID: Was the Price Worth It?

We may be the only podcast to continue the conversation about our responses to COVID, but that’s fine with me.  It’s that important because we will be there again and yet we’ve barely touched the surface in doing a serious examination of our public policy responses. The COVID pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history.  By early April 2020 half the world’s population-3.9 billion people-were living under quarantine.  People were told not to leave their houses; businesses were shuttered, employees laid off and schools closed for months or even years.  In their book “In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us”, Frances Lee and our guest, Stephen Macedo, ask and dissect important questions: why did we ignore pre-COVID plans for managing a pandemic? Were the voices of reasonable dissent treated fairly?  Did we weigh the costs and benefits of different policy options?  It’s an important conversation and if we’re the only ones still having it, so be it.

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