[mbgerring]

No, I lived in San Francisco, a city where we had reasonable restrictions in place in enough time to make a difference, because our policymakers remembered the plague years of AIDS and knew what to do.

A lot of people who pretend to be smart fled the city during the pandemic, claiming, falsely, that it had become a lawless, post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Early on in the pandemic, I participated in the COVID Tracking Project, which was the only reliable source of data on the pandemic in the US for almost a year. I was also a reporter, covering local politics and small business in San Francisco as the pandemic and the regulatory response unfolded.

So, no, I wasn’t living under a rock, and in fact was closer to the action than most people.