Criticizing Australia over their handling of Covid is unwise.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-australia-lockdowns-11627237927

This has got to be one of the dumbest op-eds that I have read in a long long time. Australia has one of the lowest covid mortality rates per capita in the world. Thanks to the vaccine, when they have completed their vaccination campaign, they will be able to come out the other end of this pandemic nearly unscathed by the virus itself.

This op-ed purports to criticize Australia on the basis of the fact that they have been extremely successful in curbing covid-19. The argument is quite literally that they don't need to do what they've been doing, because what they have been doing is so successful.

I understand the libertarian impulse to criticize non-pharmaceutical measures aimed at preventing the spread of disease. Libertarians should also recognize that the most important right is the right to life.

Some people may claim that Australia was at an advantage because it is an island. This is certainly correct, but only correct because Australia chose to utilize its status as an island to its advantage in terms of preventing the entry of this pathogen and its spread.

A conservative estimate of the lives saved by Australia's policies would be 30,000. More liberal estimates might put it at over 100,000.

In my book, you've got to have a pretty darn compelling reason to criticize a policy that results in somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 lives saved.

Some might criticize Australia's policies by rightly pointing that they had very negative economic consequences. Those economic consequences are likely to translate into excess deaths. However, people are making a grave error if they think that places that followed the advice of the libertarian peanut gallery are going to have fewer economic consequences. Large numbers of people dying is economically disastrous. Large numbers of disabled people is economically disastrous. Most of the rest of the world has to deal with both of these things. At some point in the future we'll be able to measure the economic outcomes of countries and compare them to their covid-19 pandemic policies. Australia very well might come in behind some place like the United States; but anybody who thinks they can tell you that for sure, has way too much confidence in their predictions.

Someday this will all be said and done, and the numbers will show unequivocally that Australia did one of the best jobs protecting its citizens from death by covid-19. I don't think I would like to go on the record criticizing an accomplishment like that; certainly not when the alternative is to just let tens of thousands of people die.

*For what it's worth, I think there are a lot of things that the Australian government is doing that are likely unnecessary. I think it is particularly troubling that Australians need to get a permit to leave Australia. It is actually possible to think that something is being overdone, without rabidly criticizing any effort to do anything, and while acknowledging the objective success of what has been done.