Horowitz: Liberal governors publish plan to reopen society … never

The plan to reopen our lives and economy posted earlier this week by a group of liberal governors creates enough unrealistic benchmarks that society will never reopen, which is clearly their plan. Taken in totality, it ignores all the recent evidence debunking the premise of the lockdown, creates a massive, unconstitutional surveillance state, hires enormous numbers of government workers to do useless testing and tracing long after the virus already spread, and permanently makes us vassals to the state.

On Tuesday, the National Governors Association, led by “Lockdown” Larry Hogan of Maryland and Andrew Cuomo of New York, released a 38-page, 10-point “Roadmap to Recovery,” but it’s more of a roadmap to permanent lockdown and a police state.

When you cut through all the political-speak, this is essentially the punchline of the report: “Opening prematurely — or opening without the tools in place to rapidly identify and stop the spread of the virus — could send states back into crisis mode, push health systems past capacity, and force states back into strict social distancing measures. This scenario would repeat the negative economic consequences of pandemic response and reduce public confidence, further deepening a recession and protracting economic recovery.”

The central flaw of the report is that it ignores all the new information we have since March – that this had already spread to tens of millions for several months. As such, it makes no sense to build an entire surveillance state around contact tracing and hiring government workers to do that surveillance. Yes, some Asian countries did this successfully, but they did so early on when it was possible to stop the spread. Now that we know that at least 21.2 percent of New York City residents alone have the antibodies for the virus, the entire approach is unworkable and unnecessary.