The Good Part of the COVID Pandemic

Let's agree with this. the COVID pandemic was not a fun time.

Many people died, although we will never have a remotely accurate estimate of deaths directly caused by COVID infections.

The massive overreach by governments worldwide led to individual impacts, from people kept away from dying loved ones and their funerals, to others having ventilators forced on them when just letting them recover would have been satisfactory treatment.

But the lessons, ah, the lessons.  May we only appreciate that miserable time for what benefit we achieve in hindsight.

I mentioned the lack of an estimate of how many deaths were directly due to COVID infections. We'll never actually know how many, and we'll never know because -- yep, government.

Let's recall the history. At the time the pandemic started, in only a couple states, it was depicted as an "often fatal" infection. We started counting how many states had had people test positive, until it was all 50 and the answer was simply "lots."  

But what we did not know was what should have been the obvious question -- "What is the fatality rate?"  Very simply, what percentage of people who were exposed to, and infected with, the COVID virus, died as a direct result of COVID infection?

You would have thought it was 50%, by the level of panic by spring 2020. We were running around wearing masks and running at the sound of someone coughing or sneezing. We had to stand six feet apart as if there were something magic about that distance. We stayed home.  We canceled school. We delayed weddings. We were kept from funerals.

The reason we didn't know the fatality rate though, was quite simple. We did, in fact, know early on that there were people with infections but no symptoms at all; the earliest versions of tests exposed that people could test positive but have no symptoms. The problem was that it was almost impossible to isolate a population enough to know how many had been infected, how many of those showed symptoms, and how many of those died.

The best isolation models were from a couple of cruise ships that had COVID outbreaks and were able to do the assumption that all passengers were exposed. The asymptomatic rate there, surprisingly enough, was high -- in the 50-60% range -- and the death rate very small -- in other words, much like a typical flu. Had those figures been seriously analyzed, we would have treated COVID much like a typical flu, and just let it ride through the population.

As it turned out, a couple years later, with reams of data to lean on, the CDC finally was able to provide the answer that the fatality rate for COVID was about one-fifth of 1% of infections -- in other words, one person died from COVID out of every 500 people infected -- lower than most flu strains.

I used the words "from COVID" very carefully and intentionally. One of the worst unintended-consequence factors in the first year or two of the pandemic was that, for some reason, the government decided to provide a higher subsidy to hospitals based on the number of deaths shown as "from COVID."

Well, just ask yourself what you would do if you were a hospital and needed the cash. You would report every death in the hospital where the decedent had a positive COVID test, and declare that the person died "from COVID", even though they might have died from heart disease, lung cancer, a fractured skull, or lupus (OK, it's never lupus). People died with COVID but were deemed to have died from COVID. Why? Because it paid.

That 1-in-500 death rate itself needed clarification. Ask any family practitioner, and they'd tell you (as it turned out) that the true deaths from COVID were almost entirely in specific patient populations -- diabetics, obese people, people with heart disease, and people with auto-immune conditions. Almost nobody without one of those risk factors (and almost no one under 18) died from COVID, although the hospitals' propensity to over-count COVID deaths to claim the cash made it harder to show that. 

So what did we learn?

We learned that government, which is supposed to protect us, is capable of the most evil power grabs imaginable. You think dictators in other countries will do anything to expand their power? Ha! That is a default position for anyone in government. 

Look what happened with the COVID pandemic. The state governors, whose states are typically the laboratories for what works and what doesn't, were all over the place in their reactions. Most of them immediately took excessive action, closing schools, imposing the 6-foot standing gaps, mandating masks all over (including outdoors!), etc. 

The government shelled out billions in PPP payments -- those questionably-audited checks to employers and independent contractors whose business was affected by all the shutdowns -- which were, of course, shut down by an overreaching government.

And yet that was a good thing, at least in one way. 

 No one grabs power like Democrats, and when the people who told Joe Biden what to do grabbed power in 2021, they tried hard to keep things shut down as long as possible to maintain control. The teachers unions embarrassed themselves by trying their hardest to keep schools closed, which we all saw as a powerful union with the Democrat leadership in their pocket, doing everything it could to prevent its members from having to, you know, work.

We all saw that.  Even had the Democrats not shot themselves in the foot by nominating an utter joke of a presidential candidate in Kamala Harris, Americans were so suspicious of the Democrats' use of power to control their lives, that Trump would have gotten elected regardless.

Republicans will always be able to point to the COVID experience as the threat of Democrat rule, as long as they're smart enough to keep pointing it out.

But there was another thing that came out of the COVID experience that wasn't really political, but has had -- and will continue to have -- long-term effects on the life of Americans.

I work from home.  I have a home office, which I use for conference calls and where my desk sits. there is no office building that I go to, because there is no office space assigned me by my employer. And that's a good thing, because their headquarters is 450 miles away from where I live, and I'm not moving.

Another reason I don't have an office space with my employer is that they were bright enough to dispose of tens of thousands of square feet of office space in the past ten years, and worked hard to put employees on customer site and home offices wherever possible.

It costs far less for a company to let its employees work remotely than it does to pay a proportional chunk of office space rental for them to be physically present. Multiply that by a corps of, say, 1,000 employees on an ongoing basis, and costs can go way down.

Obviously we're talking about employees who actually can do their work remotely, on line (vs. employees in areas such as health care, retail,and manufacturing), but that still amounts to a goodly percentage who no longer needed office space. Let's just say that I wouldn't want to be in commercial real estate right now.

This is probably one of the 3-4 most prominent permanent outcomes of the pandemic. Companies all over discovered that one of their biggest costs was no longer needed. Employees were happier, and any company worth its salt can easily determine whether a remote employee is doing his job. I work in golf shirts and sweat pants, and get my work done just fine.

I meant "permanent." Remote work. something hardly discussed 25 years ago, is now encouraged. As a result of the pandemic, we have learned that a remote work model is every bit as productive (with the right employees) as herding people in expensive office space, and a whole lot cheaper.

We're all sorry for the people who lost family members due to the pandemic, although that number is surely far smaller than any number you will read.

But there were positives that came out of it, things we learned about government and its lurch to grab power in any possible situation allowing it.

I wonder, though, if perhaps the most beneficial will be the ability of working people to work from wherever they choose. And as long as there are places people no longer want to live (coughCaliforniacough), remote work is here to stay. 

Copyright 2026 by Robert Sutton.  Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.