, Columnist
The Unbearable Cost of Waging a Forever War on Covid
What may have been necessary in an emergency is intolerable on a permanent basis.
No going back.
Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
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Covid caseloads are rising again, with the seven-day average even exceeding the peak last summer. Just as in the spring of 2020, newspapers are running stories that the White House thinks are exaggerating the threat. Governments are reintroducing mask mandates, and public-health experts are calling for more. Opponents of mandates and lockdowns are saying, as they did at the start of the pandemic, that liberty is being unjustly infringed and health fetishized.
But three things have changed since then, and all of them suggest that this time we should have a more libertarian response to the virus.