Arbitrary, Unscientific, And Conflicting Lockdown Restrictions Confusing The Carens

theatlantic  |  Two weeks ago, I staged a reluctant intervention via Instagram direct message. The subject was a longtime friend, Josh, who had been sharing photos of himself and his fiancé occasionally dining indoors at restaurants since New York City, where we both live, had reopened them in late September. At first, I hadn’t said anything. Preliminary research suggests that when people congregate indoors, an infected person is almost 20 times more likely to transmit the virus than if they were outside. But restaurants are open legally in New York, and I am not the COVID police. Josh and I had chatted several times in the early months of the pandemic about safety, and I felt sure that he was making an informed decision, even if it wasn’t the one I’d make.

As weeks passed, my confidence began to slip. The number of daily new cases in NYC started to balloon, heightening the risk of transmission in any closed space, but Josh kept going to restaurants. Maybe he was misunderstanding something about the risk. Maybe he’d want to know. The next time he posted about COVID-19, I told him, as gently as I could, that if he was trying to stay safe, it would be a good idea to stop dining indoors.

My suspicions were correct. Because the state and city had reopened restaurants, Josh, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, assumed that local health officials had figured out a patchwork of precautions that would make indoor dining safe. He and his fiancé had even gone one extra step, making a Google Map of places they knew were being particularly strict with temperature checks. They were listening to the people they were told to listen to—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently released a book about how to control the pandemic—and following all the rules.

Josh was irritated, but not because of me. If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?

Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it. Often, safety protocols, of all things, are what’s misleading them. In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,” the science journalist Roxanne Khamsi recently wrote in Wired. “That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.

Caren An'Em About To Get REAL On The Mask Covidian Compliance Front...,

thefederalist  |  Lockdowns were once called an “unproven” hypothesis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its models of efficacy being unvalidated by “empirical data.” The World Health Organization called forced isolation and quarantine “ineffective and impractical.” Yet despite the devastating effects of banning “nonessential” businesses and social activities, countries around the world locked down.

Groupthink on non-pharmaceutical interventions spurred an uncontrolled drift away from scientific justifications toward hasty generalized rules predicated on an “abundance of caution” and straight-up fear. Fear quickly turned into a tool for maintaining political power and an opportunity for self-righteous snitches to exercise control over their fellow countrymen. Snitch-level devotion to harsh government mandates devolved into a religion in its own right, and now we must suffer oppression not just from authorities, but from private companies and our fellow citizens.

One can draw numerous examples of Covidian jihad from any given week of these hellish past six months, but the progression is obvious. In April, a father was arrested for playing softball with his family in an open field in compliance with state orders. In July, a woman was berated by a fanatical old lady at the superstore for not masking her children, who are a risk approaching zero for spreading the virus.

Now heading into fall, some people are being asked to wear masks alone in their own homes, out in open parks, and while exercising. They’re supposed to strap them onto infants and toddlers, who are essentially at zero risk for spreading the Wuhan virus, and they aren’t ever supposed to complain about dental problems, headaches, or dizziness while mask-wearing — because every good COVID fanatic knows masks are harmless.

This is our world in 2020. Ironically, not even the experts can keep pro-lockdown, pro-mask fanatics from harassing and endangering others. If you want to prevent this reality from becoming permanent, stand up to the bullies and stand firm on the science — including voting out politicians who’ve abandoned science and recalling those who aren’t up for re-election in November.