When the COVID outbreak in the U.S. began, no one knew anything. That was the problem. What we all knew what that the media and the Democrats hated Trump. They wanted him gone, and they weaponized a pandemic to get that done. With COVID causing the Dow Jones to sink faster than the Andrea Doria, the Trump White House signed off on the initial round of lockdowns governors implemented. Looking back, it was a one-size-fits-all approach that came with the byproduct of the public trust being shredded. Red states are seeing cases spike now because they were never touched by the initial first wave. Rural communities were mostly untouched in the spring but were ordered to shut down their businesses leading to untold economic destruction. Now, months later, with cases spiking again coupled with the media peddling the most hysterical narratives—people are finished.
The media, by far, has spread more damage and fear than the virus. They zero in on the rarest stories because if it bleeds it leads. It’s that simple. You all know this. Democrats did their part in spreading that fear. In the end, bars, restaurants, gyms, hair salons, and barbershops were all classified as low-risk areas regarding sources of spread. In New York, one of the hardest-hit states, bars, and restaurants account for 1.4 percent of COVID spread. Gyms, hair salons, and barbershops were responsible for one percent. Households accounted for almost 75 percent of COVID spread, which is the irony of the lockdown orders.
Now, with Biden’s new COVID team, we have one member saying that the spring lockdown rollout was botched and went too far (via Bloomberg):
University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, a member of Biden’s advisory board, said one March mistake was closing businesses in places in the middle of the country that had seen almost no cases. “Was it appropriate to shut down so many things back then when there was so little, if any transmission? I think you can argue now that probably was not the best use of resources … it clearly alienated the very populations that we needed to have work with us,” he says.
The time was squandered and so was public trust. He compares the situation to hurricane warnings. People take them seriously because they are usually right. In many Midwest states, people went into emergency mode at the wrong time.
Last spring’s approach left the public full of rancor and deeply divided, with some seeing the restrictions as tyrannical and others convinced, just as wrongly, that if people weren’t “selfish” the control measures would have eradicated the virus. That’s never been feasible in a country where so many people live in crowded housing and can’t afford to stay home.
Risk communication consultant Peter Sandman had it right last summer when he said any policy people don’t follow is a bad policy. Although containment strategies matter as much as ever, because it could take months before a vaccine relegates this crisis to history, politicians and public health officials have squandered people’s willingness and ability to stay home.
Last April, public health experts recognized that lockdowns were never going to eradicate the virus from the U.S. Once hospitals were no longer in danger of being overwhelmed, they argued that the purpose of continuing to restrict businesses and schools was to buy time to get a good testing strategy in place. But that didn’t happen.
Credit to @mtosterholm for acknowledging this,??
— Wes Pegden (@WesPegden) December 30, 2020
At some point we will need to reckon not just with incompetence we suffered in government and administration but also the deficit, from the ID epi community, in realistic and strategic long-term thinking.https://t.co/ap4RX4w7EE pic.twitter.com/SnggfKRZET
Alas, it’s the same culprit time and again: government. If Trump weren’t the president and this wasn’t an election year, no doubt there would have neem a more grounded and rational approach. Before COVID hit, the economy was cranking, the Democratic field looks naïve, old, and totally not ready for primetime. The economy was booming. Trump was cruising to re-election and then this virus presented the opportunity to create a mass panic, which I initially bought into, in an effort to influence the election. It worked. The downside is that everyone from hippy California to South Carolina is through with the lockdowns. It’s to the point where even Biden has said spring-style shutdowns are happening, even though he probably wants to enact one. It’s too unpopular because the Democrat-media complex made it so. It’s over. And let’s not forget that this virus has a very high recovery rate. I mean, super high—90+ percent across the board. You don’t want to get it, yes. But if you do, you’re probably going to survive. That’s not everyone, I know—but this isn’t a Black Death or Spanish flu situation where 25 and 50 million died respectively; the Black Death killed one-third of the population of Europe at the time. Is COVID bad, yes. It’s horrible, but it’s nowhere near past pandemics that wiped out tens of millions of people. We have two vaccines now. They’re being administered as we speak. We have light at the end of the tunnel.
(H/T Daily Caller)
