Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has made national news multiple times by taking a contrarian view on the coronavirus pandemic. This week, he spoke out against paid sick leave, suggesting it would only make people more likely to stay home from work, and voted against an aid package that passed Congress with Donald Trump’s support.
"We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu.”
“Right now, all people are hearing about are the deaths,” Johnson told The New York Times last week. “I’m sure the deaths are horrific, but the flip side of this is the vast majority of people who get coronavirus do survive.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Washington bureau chief, Craig Gilbert, visited Johnson in his mostly empty Senate office to give him a chance to respond to criticism that he is downplaying the pandemic.
Here’s what Johnson said: “I’m not denying what a nasty disease COVID-19 can be, and how it’s obviously devastating to somewhere between 1 and 3.4 percent of the population.”
“But that means 97 to 99 percent will get through this and develop immunities and will be able to move beyond this,” he continued. “But we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu.”
Johnson acknowledged that coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the seasonal flu, Gilbert writes. But he told Gilbert: “getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population [and] I think probably far less.”
(Keep in mind that 1 percent of the U.S. population is about 3.3 million people, more than three times the total number of U.S. fatalities in all wars in our nation’s history. Losing 3.4 percent of the U.S. population would mean eleven million deaths.)
Is Johnson suggesting that public officials are overreacting by instituting social distancing and closing schools and other gathering places?, Gilbert asked.
Johnson appeared to backpedal a bit:
“I’m saying, ‘follow the guidelines’ . . . I’m not being critical of the governors that are closing things down. . . . I understand it completely. I’m just saying I am hopeful we . . . can, in the end, put this all in perspective and we can get the economy back on track as soon as possible.”
So what exactly does Johnson mean?
“I’m not being critical of what people are doing,” he told Gilbert. “But we also need to really understand the costs of potentially going too far here. But nobody knows what too far is, which is what’s so difficult about the situation.”
This article first appeared in the Wisconsin Examiner.