WHAT WE ARE DOING IS NOT WORKING.

The extreme micromanagement of California's public health bureaucrats turns people off.

“It’s not because the public is irresponsible; it’s because they are losing trust in public health officials who put out arbitrary restrictions,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco. “We are failing in our public health messaging.”

California public officials indulging themselves like Soviet nachalstvo probably has something to do with that.

[B]anning relatively safe outdoor activities risks alienating people who want to follow the rules but feel exhausted, disregarded and sometimes confused by them, Brown University health economist Emily Oster said.

“Some of the things they’re telling you not to do are incredibly low-risk,” Oster said. “When you are so strict about what people can do, they stop listening.”

But if we bet on emergence, that reveals how irrelevant the experts often are.

A pandemic response guided by harm reduction would explain the risk levels of different activities and let people decide their comfort levels, with perhaps the most dangerous settings prohibited altogether. Public health research has found that this strategy makes people feel empowered to make their own choices and that, ultimately, they don’t take more risks than they would have otherwise.

Did I write "irrelevant?" I should have written "wrong."

Rabi Abonour, 30, enjoyed masked bike rides with friends to break up the monotony of living alone during the pandemic. But he feels let down by the latest policies, which seem unnecessarily punitive and not aligned with the available science, he said.

“The numbers continue to rise,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Is this really working?’”

No. Next question?