The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘15 Days to Slow the Spread’

Posted on | March 16, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘15 Days to Slow the Spread’

Yes, today is a memorable anniversary. Jim Geraghty reminds us:

On Monday, March 16, 2020, the White House advised all Americans to avoid gathering in groups of more than ten and urged older people to stay at home in a set of new guidelines designed to fight the coronavirus outbreak, labeling the effort “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
That set of restrictions later was summarized as “two weeks to flatten the curve,” a slogan that grew more bitterly ironic as the pandemic and its quarantine restrictions dragged on and on — now for more than a year. That call for a voluntary avoidance of large groups quickly morphed into far-reaching restrictions upon the most basic rights and normal activities of American citizens: Forty-three governors issued orders directing residents to stay at home and nonessential businesses to close.

Read the whole thing. I was perfectly OK with 15 days, and it didn’t really bother me much when they extended that another month. After six weeks, though, I was like, “Let’s get back to business.”

Ah, but the “experts” (and the fear-stricken women who love to have “experts” tell them what to believe) wouldn’t let us get back to business. With a full year of data now available, what do we know?

LOCKDOWNS DON’T WORK!

If lockdowns were effective as disease prevention, the COVID-19 death rate in New York would be lower than Florida’s. Instead, Florida has been wide open for months — and mostly healthy — while New York is still locked down and Andrew Cuomo killed your granny. What happened is that everybody forgot the original rationale of “15 days to slow the spread,” i.e., governments, hospitals and medical personnel needed time to acquire the protective equipment (masks, etc.) to deal with this pandemic, and there were fears that a “surge” of patients would overwhelm hospitals, especially in terms of ICUs.

By instituting a preventive quarantine for a few weeks, we were buying time to “flatten the curve,” to prevent that drastic spike of cases that would flood hospitals with critical cases. That policy actually worked — with a few localized exceptions, our hospitals were never beyond capacity, and the dreaded ventilator shortage never happened.

What lockdowns could never do, however, was to completely eliminate risk of contagion, which is what the “Karen” mob of mask Nazis expect.

Do you see the difference between “slowing the spread” (the original goal) and eliminating risk altogether? One was feasible — and in fact, we did it — but the other is irrational, and especially so once (a) effective treatment protocols were developed, (b) widespread testing was available and (c) we discovered that almost no one under age 70 died from COVID-19.

But the fear-stricken women craved perfect safety:

The general lockdowns were never about protecting the general public.
They were only about protecting Karen.

All policies oriented toward the emotional needs of such people are bad.

How strange it is that the same dimwit women who demand the government shut down everything to protect them from germs are also generally in favor of open borders and “criminal justice reform.”




 

Category: Health Care, Science

Comments

Comments are closed.