ORCHARD PARK, NY - DECEMBER 06: A Buffalo Bills fan grabs his head while watching game action against the Houston Texans on December 6, 2015 at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, New York. Buffalo defeats Houston 30-21. (Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)
On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government ended the lockdown in Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days – two and a half months during which no one was permitted to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, much alone leave their homes. Until the Chinese government implemented this strategy, a rigid batten-down-the-hatches method had never been used to combat a pandemic. Yes, for generations, diseased people were isolated at home, where they could either heal or die. But that was far different from closing down an entire city; the World Health Organization described it as “unique in public health history.”Wuhan residents referred to their 
position as fengcheng, which translates as “shut city.” However, the English-language media quickly adopted the term “lockdown” and reacted with horror. “That the Chinese government can imprison millions of people in cities with almost no advance notice can not be considered anything less than alarming,” a China human rights specialist told The Guardian. Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”
However, the Chinese government was dedicated to the “zero-COVID” plan. In mid-March 2020, after over 50 million individuals had been forced into lockdowns, China reported its first day without domestic broadcasts since January, citing this as proof that its strategy was effective. Chinese citizens saw being confined to their houses as a patriotic obligation.
For the next two years, anytime an outbreak occurred anywhere in China, draconian lockdowns were the default response. However, by March 2022, when the government decided to lock down much of Shanghai due to an increase in cases, there was no longer any talk of patriotism. People reacted angrily, screaming from their balconies, posting vehement condemnations on social media, and, in some cases, committing suicide. When a fire broke out in an apartment building, residents perished because the cops had closed the doors from the outside. And when the Chinese government finally lifted lockdowns, an implicit admission that they had failed to eradicate the epidemic, there was a wave of COVID-19 cases comparable to anywhere else in the world.
One of the biggest mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s lead. Lockdowns, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, changed from being considered as something that only an authoritarian government would undertake to an example of “following the science.” However, there was never any science behind lockdowns—not a single study had ever been conducted to assess their effectiveness in avoiding a pandemic. Lockdowns were essentially a massive experiment.
One of the most perplexing aspects of the pandemic was why so many countries followed China’s approach. Lockdowns, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, have shifted from being viewed as something only an authoritarian government would do to an example of “following the science.” However, there was never any science behind lockdowns—no study had ever been undertaken to determine their effectiveness in preventing a pandemic. Lockdowns were essentially a huge experiment.
Henderson was 78 years old when Bush began pushing his administration to develop a pandemic plan. Ten years before, he had attended a series of top-secret briefings where he heard a Russian defector tell how he supervised a team attempting to adapt the smallpox virus for bioweapons. Henderson got so concerned that he established a tiny biodefense facility, effectively defending against a pandemic. He and his colleagues at the center had spent years attempting to persuade government officials to take pandemics seriously—with little success. When the Bush administration began debating its pandemic approach, Henderson seemed an obvious choice.
Henderson firmly disagreed. For starters, he did not believe computer models, which generated estimations based on hypotheticals. Furthermore, they could not have anticipated the complexities of human behavior. “There is just too little experience to forecast how a 21st-century population would react, for example, to the closing of all schools for several weeks to months, or the cancellation of all gatherings of more than 1,000 people,” he said.
Furthermore, he believed that the worst thing officials could do was overreact, thereby causing panic. In 2006, as the discussion within the Bush administration was coming to an end, he co-authored a document in a final attempt to persuade those developing the approach. The report concluded: “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other undesirable events adapt fastest and with the least worry provided the community’s normal social functioning is not disturbed. Strong political and public health leadership is essential for providing reassurance and ensuring the availability of necessary medical care services. If either is deemed suboptimal, a controlled pandemic may spiral out of control.”
The Bush team’s final document, published by the CDC in February 2007, got as close to prescribing lockdowns as its authors dared, recommending the use of “social distancing measures to restrict contact between adults in the community and workplace.” One of the effort’s leaders, a government scientist named Richard Hatchett, would later tell Lewis what he truly believed: “One thing that’s undeniably true is that if you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you wouldn’t have any disease.”
In some ways, that is correct. However, there were other questions that were equally important. Could the kind of lockdowns that are possible in
Henderson, who died in 2016, never stopped arguing the latter point. “D.A. kept saying, ‘Look, you have to be practical about this,'” explains Tara O’Toole, his former deputy. “And you have to be realistic about what public health can accomplish, especially over time. Society is multifaceted, and you have no influence over it.”
As the United States distances itself from the COVID pandemic, the picture of what worked and what didn’t becomes not only clearer, but also more stark. Operation Warp Speed stands out as an outstanding policy success. When the vaccines became available, most states did an excellent job of distributing them to the most vulnerable, particularly senior nursing home residents.
