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President Donald Trump has called the efforts to combatCOVID-19our big war.He has referred to himself as a wartime president and of hisadministrations efforts as a war against the virus. Last week he spoke ofthe virus as an invisible enemy.

Andto provideconfidence as well as calm, he has also iterated many times thatthis will not be forever, tweeting Monday: We cannot let the cure be worse thanthe problem, at the end of the 15-day period we will make a decision as to whichway we want to go.

Still, state and local governments are also engaging with war-likestatements by governors and mayors, several of whom have issued shelter-in-place orders, quarantinesand travel bans.More will soon join.

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Where businesses have not been ordered to close by governors, they have been greatly restricted.TheNational Guard hasbeen mobilized and bailouts have been proposed in the trillions ofdollars.Food and supplies are beingboth rationed andhoarded.And the president is criticized hourly for doing too much, and not enough, at the sametime.

For those who did not live through World War II, this is asmall window into what America looks like when it goes to war. Or is it?The word isdeployed and quickly civilliberties, including travel, are being curbed while the economy is melting fast.But the U.S. military is not invadinganywhere, artillery is not being fired,ordnance is not being dropped.This hasall the domestic attributes of war, with much of life disruptedandan economyheld in abeyance, but we know its not really a war.Not really.And our response is disproportionate.

Daily, the television and cable chyrons show numbers of sickand dead.Each loss is sad and horrible.In the U.S., as ofthis writing, those infected are 41,569, with504deaths.Admittedly, we dont know the full consequences of the virus, and thesmartest of analysts admit we are dealing withincompletedata. Yet more and more are beginning to question whatlawyers call redressability.Is theresponse to the virus equal to the problem?

What, a sane society needs to ask, is the national fatalityrate of the disease and what is the result of losing everything else?

We have had other non-kinetic wars before. Earlier we hearda lot about the War on Drugs, a full-scale effort that involvedenforcement, prevention and treatment. Perhaps warwas a good word, perhaps not, but the efforts were aimed at a problem that tookthe lives of some 870,000 Americansover the past three decades, with the U.S.congratulatingitself for reducing drug deaths to 67,367 last year.In that effort againstillegal drugs, we never even contemplated doing the variety of things we aredoing now.Maybe there never really wasa war on drugs.Certainly not like thisone.

Today, to paraphrase the Manhattan Institutes Heather Mac Donald, we have engaged inthe volitional destruction of the economy and caused unbridled panic over a number we dont know we will reach but most think will not surpass the combinedannual death toll of the regular flu and annual traffic deaths, to say nothing of opioid deaths.

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We are beingdisproportionate. The measures being undertaken now willhave far-reaching and potentially disastrousconsequences.We need to beattentive to isolation as potentially more dangerous than normal life, leadingto more suicide, more opioid abuseand more domestic abuse endemics we havewaged other wars on.We will soonstart see theconsequence of lost wages.And the elderly, who are most at risk for their physical health are alsonow most vulnerable from the economicconsequences as their nest eggs andretirements evaporate.

What, a sane society needs to ask, is the national fatalityrate of the disease and what is the result of losing everything else?As of now, we believethe first number is1.3percent. That is,if you catch this virus and if you test positive, yourodds of dying from it are 1.3 percent.And if youare under 60, much less than that.We have no idea of the results of losingeverything else.

As the economist Steve Moore wrote us: We have gone from acrisis from an act of nature to a crisis that is manmade from the stupidity ofshutting down our economic engines. I dont know how serious this virus will bebut I do know if the economy stays paralyzed for another monththe carnage willbe in the trillions of dollars. The health impact alone frombankruptcies, unemploymentand isolation could be worse than thedisease.

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Rudyard Kipling warned: Dont lose your head when all about you are losing theirs. Lets conclude the 15-day period as the president advises. That will get usto next Monday. Then see where we are. Then maybe we can get back to normal.

Every warhas its catchphrases and watchwords.Today,one important word and guidepost is missing: proportionality.

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Seth Leibsohn is a senior fellow at theClaremont Instituteand the host of The SethLeibsohn Show, heard dailyon 970am/KKNT in Phoenix, Ariz.

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