A Case Against COVID-19 Amnesty in Canada

In October 2022, The Atlantic Magazine published an Emily Oster piece entitled "Let's Declare A Pandemic Amnesty." Oster is an economist at Brown University. Hers is not the only voice calling for a new beginning, putting the COVID misdeeds behind us so we can move on, but it was the first notable one. 

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

The first paragraph of Oster's essay reads: "In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her ‘SOCIAL DISTANCING!’"

The whole thing was misguided, Oster figures because they didn't know the cloth masks didn't work. Governments didn't know what they were doing. That may be true, but it’s irrelevant. The first observable thing in that fir…