My favorite Covid counterfactuals

What if Trump had followed his own guidelines?

Ross Douthat published a couple of speculative columns on Covid Counterfactuals. As someone who loves alternate history as a genre and also took a whole very serious philosophy class about the importance of counterfactual analysis for thinking about history, I like this type of column.

But Douthat left on the table my two favorite counterfactuals, both of which hinge on places where I think close-run decisions plausibly made big differences in the outcomes.

So here they are:

• What if Donald Trump hadn’t abandoned his own task force recommendations on reopening?

• What if Pfizer announced its efficacy results before Election Day and narrowly pushed Trump over the top?

In both cases, I don’t think we’d necessarily see huge changes to public health outcomes, because I think the evidence shows that Covid has been pretty responsive to changes in human behavior, but not that responsive to changes in policy. But I do think we would have seen significant changes in our politics and discourse.

(J…