During the Iraq war the Rabbi at my Synagogue used to read the names of the people killed that week in the war. He did it to show the horrors of war and also to blame President Bush for the war. A short while after President Obama was elected the roll call of the dead went away.

I suspect that the same thing will happen with Covid. After President Biden is elected the news will turn it attention away from the daily alarmist reporting about Covid cases and deaths and public anxiety will decrease.

I’m not saying that there was a conspiracy or any coordination to the over-reaction. It is just that if you already don’t trust your leader repeating things that make him look bad is a natural reaction. Millions of people doing it and what could have been a calm quarantine of the at risk population turned into shutting down the economy and bitter and still unresolved fights about when and how to reopen things.

Covid 19 has killed 200,000 people in the USA in 8 months. The average age of the victims is over 70 and more than 75% of them had other health issues. The median age of the victims is 80 according to the WSJ. In a country where more than 3 million people per year die of all kinds of causes an additional 200,000 should not have caused the widespread reaction it did.