Look, I'm just a guy with a weblog and some F. U. money. I'm not the mayor of Naperville. "Steve Chirico on Friday said COVID infection rates in neighboring states without mask mandates are similar to those of Illinois." Welp, there it is: lift the indoor mask mandate. Naperville is probably too establishment a city to declare itself a sanctuary city with respect to the corona tyranny. I do observe a lot of non-observance of the mandates at businesses elsewhere.
Kevin "Healthy Skeptic" Roche, who has some understanding of health policy, notes, "The governmental response to the epidemic has, in my opinion, generally been atrocious, with particularly pathetic communication to the public." Dear reader, read and understand that post in full. Here is a tease.
In any event, some genius decided that telling people to stay home, closing businesses, closing schools, just shutting people in, would interrupt transmission. Kind of funny since a lot of transmission occurs in the home. All I will say is that people can do all the dumb modeling studies they want, look at epidemic curves everywhere and explain how any of those tactics made any difference, especially in the long run.I would add: people in both government and academia are quite good at peacocking and straining at gnats. There has to be a better way. Maybe healthy skepticism works.
Our public health experts, most of whom are employed by the government or academic medical centers, have distinguished themselves with their unrelenting poor advice, usually backed with no data or research. And I say this seriously, while some of these people may be bright and productive, you end up in government for a reason and people in both government and academia are highly risk-averse and not very good at logical analysis or sound decision-making. And as Exhibit A, I give you the responses they have crafted and are still crafting to this epidemic. Two years in, no evidence that any of it works–closing things down, testing everyone constantly and tracing contacts, masking, social distancing, plastic barriers every where–none of it has made a bit of difference. But they are still pushing the same insipid, inane measures, because by God, they might work this time. The politicians and the public health experts lack the basic common sense to say “we aren’t going to do anything until we have clear evidence that it will actually lessen spread”.
What would a better approach have been? It would have started with more respect for real data and science and more tailoring of mitigation measures to address the obvious bifurcation of serious disease. We should have focused on protection of the frail elderly, although realistically there was never a lot that could be done, and we forced absolute isolation on an already lonely group. We never should have closed schools or businesses. Mask mandates were and remain a delusion and a fetish. So yes, we should have accepted the inevitable and let people make their own decisions, with as good a data and advice as we could provide, about what activities they would engage in and what protective measures they would adopt. We would be in no different place than we are now, just faster and with less total pain."Zero covid" is a dream of the followers of Leon Trotsky, but he did qualify that question with an "in their right mind."
CV-19 is taking us where we were always going to go. It is going to run through the population until enough of us have adaptive immunity, potentially aided by vaccines, to keep transmission and serious disease to a very low level. Florida may be there. Even then, it isn’t going away. Can anyone in their right mind actually believe we are going to suppress this virus?
It is long past time for the mask mandates to end.
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