Early in 2020, shocked citizens and social scientists predicted the widespread imposition of extreme “non-pharmaceutical interventions” in response to COVID would prove to have horrible and costly human and economic trade-offs — turns out they were right.

In early 2020, when authorities in China implemented — overnight — a draconian “lockdown” of 100 million citizens in response to reports of a new virus, the rest of the world little suspected that in short order, the same unprecedentedhome incarceration policy, along with a host of other “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) would be coming soon to a locality near them.

Never before have so-called NPIs — which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also euphemistically refers to as “community mitigation strategies” — so aggressively taken center stage during a declared disease outbreak.

In the U.S., the five most adopted state-level COVID NPIs have been state-of-emergency orders, bans or limits on social gatherings, school closures, business restrictions (notably, restaurants) and stay-at-home orders.