What is the great COVID
mystery, you’re wondering? Is it “Where did the disease come from?” Or “Why is
the infection rate so high?” Or perhaps you’re asking “When will the pandemic
end?” All good questions but none of them is the great COVID mystery.
The great COVID mystery
is “Why is government singularly focused on stopping the disease and ignoring
the impact of shutdowns on the American people?” Why not pursue a balance between
controlling the disease and keeping our social infrastructure intact?
States across the nation
have imposed severe restrictions on human behavior to slow down the spread and preserve
hospital capacity. But this isn’t March anymore. We now know who the most vulnerable
are and what needs to be done to protect them. For those who are sick, we are
better at treating them. We notice the average age at diagnosis dropping, because
younger people are the primary cause of the latest surge. But, it’s also true
that forty percent of all patients are asymptomatic, meaning that disease will have
very little impact on their lives.
Perhaps the second worst thing
about this pandemic is it becoming politicized. It was a great chance for the
country to come together, but no. The pandemic emerged during an election year
and put another target on Trump’s back. He completely
flubbed the PR side of managing the disease, but the Federal government still
addressed the major problems of the pandemic like they were supposed to. Medical
experts became political too, which is a major corruption of a system that
should operate based on science and public health guidelines.
In general, blue states
are more locked down than red states. I don’t know why exactly. The Left likes
to control people more. Maybe that’s it. The Right believes in liberty and resists
oppression, so the Republican governors are more in tune with that thinking.
Why has no one been
focused on the damage to small businesses because of the restrictions? Is it because
they have no advocate?
The big corporations did a
great job asking for government money. They called their friends in Washington,
who got out their checkbooks. The Los Angeles Lakers basketball team got a
check for $ 8 million to help them survive the pandemic. How many private restaurants,
bars, gyms, barbers, and salons received nothing? The pandemic’s greatest impact
has been on small businesses because they face the public all day every day. Unlike
grocery stores, they aren’t lucky enough to receive an essential business designation.
The disease data
presentation is a significant factor in all of this. The charts and counts are
displayed every day across the media. It’s a conspiracy to scare people. Data,
data, and more data. Mass hypnosis. What if in some year prior, like 2015, the
government would have publicized flu data in the same format? Wouldn’t that have
scared people in the same way? They would have seen cases go up in the fall and
not go down until spring. They would have seen the death count increase steadily.
And that was a situation where a vaccine was widely available!
There are no charts
logging the human cost of the lockdowns being shown. How many new child abuse
cases, opioid cases, suicides, marital fights, and bankruptcies are being logged
and reported? Kids needs to be in school for the sake of retaining a stable environment,
which gives them the best chance to learn. That’s not a high enough priority.
Already, test scores for 2020 show a big drop from last year.
A few weeks ago, an
organization of well-known scientists proposed a limited herd immunity strategy:
protect the vulnerable and open everything else up. The Great Barrington Declaration
was authored by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard
University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University, and Dr. Jay
Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School. The declaration
clearly tries to balance the cost of the pandemic against the cost of the
shutdowns. To date 12,000 medical scientists and 37,000 physicians have signed
the petition.
The declaration was
immediately attacked, discounted, and has disappeared under a mountain of criticism.
So much for the small business owners. Their lives don’t count.
This pandemic stands as
one of the greatest failures of the American government in our history. Follow
the science is the big LIE. You only follow the science if there is no collateral
damage. It’s the job of politicians to arbitrate conflicting policies and chose
the right course of action for all Americans, not take themselves off the hook
by deferring to science.
It doesn’t appear that governors
are looking at the experience of other states, which are demonstrating what is
working and what isn’t. We have 50 states taking 50 different approaches. What
a great laboratory. For example, Florida is open. Why not use some of the
Florida approach in other states.
I’d rather live there.
