If you go to a restaurant in Gotham right now, you might be subjected to a temperature check. It’s no big deal, it takes a second — but it’s pointless; plenty of COVID-positive people don’t have a fever. So why do we do it? It’s part of a growing trend of COVID-19 security theater. We do things that have no bearing on our actual safety but that make us feel safe.
Take masks. It makes sense to wear masks inside businesses or for any close contact with strangers. But why are people wearing them outside, when they’re not near anybody? Neighborhood message boards across the country are filled with complaints like: “I saw a bicyclist without a mask today!”
The problem is messaging from the top. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coronavirus guru, is the man we all look to for direction. In March, he said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Now he’s gung-ho, yet his mask instruction is very convoluted.
He wore a mask to throw out the first pitch at the Opening Day game at Nationals Park — while standing more than 60 feet away from the nearest person. Then he sat down in the stands with his wife and friend, and they all took turns wearing and removing their masks.
In restaurants in New York, you must wear a mask to your seat. But then you take it off to eat, drink and talk, which is clearly where all the danger lies.
It’s obviously difficult to tell Americans that their best bet would be not to wear a mask on the street but to wear a mask when socializing closely. But the current counsel to wear a mask in situations where there is literally no risk, only to remove it when there is, makes no sense.
Fauci isn’t alone. Continuing his victory tour after presiding over 32,000 deaths in New York, Gov. Cuomo traveled to Georgia to “help them” fight the virus, urging the state to “follow the numbers.” He could have told them over Zoom or directed them to the dozen times he has said this before.
Cuomo forces the rest of us to isolate and socially distance, yet he jet-sets around and was even photographed on the plane wearing his mask like a “chin guard,” something he has also warned New Yorkers not to do.
In Georgia, maskless, he hugged a number of people in a crowded room. If you want a quick way to tell Americans that COVID-19 isn’t a big deal, and masks are pointless, nothing could do the job better than these pictures from Cuomo’s needless Georgia trip
Then there’s the intense disinfecting and sanitizing of everything in sight, despite the fact that scientists now say catching COVID-19 from a surface is unlikely. Yes, we wiped down our groceries in March, when we didn’t know better. But now there is talk of periodically closing schools to “disinfect” them. It would be nice to have clean schools, but it’s extremely unlikely that it will help with stopping the transmission of COVID-19. Meanwhile, closing schools to clean them will take time away from already-limited in-person education.
There are so many other ways the COVID guidance makes no sense. Forcing bars in New York to serve food and making them close by 11:30 p.m. will do exactly nothing to fight the virus but will do a lot to harm these businesses. We have plexiglass dividers in shops and salons, as if the virus can’t travel around them. Gyms, which keep people healthy and in good shape to fight viruses, remain closed.
Americans love their security theater. That was the lesson of post-9/11 air travel. And perhaps feeling safe might be good enough, for now. People wearing masks in ridiculous situations might be OK, if it means more people are going outside and we can return to normalcy.
But in the long-term, our pretend safety will have consequences. If rules seem dumb, and they do, Americans may stop following them altogether. The arbitrariness and hypocrisy displayed by the likes of Cuomo and Fauci could lead to people rebelling against following any of it.
We all want a sense of normal, and it has to begin with logic and consistency at the top.
One will not find a greater degree of compliance to a mask mandate than with one placed on military trainees by drill sergeants. That’s why, if masks are really the viral placebo their devoted cult worshipers make them out to be, one would expect mask mandates to work wonders in these environments. Except, they didn’t work – just like they didn’t work in Japan, Hawaii, Israel, California, Miami, or any other place where they’ve shown near universal compliance for months, yet the virus spread rapidly.
In the military, they don’t just virtue signal and wear masks as a symbol. If they are led to believe mask-wearing will work to stop the spread, they will wear them seriously with the boot of the drill sergeant behind them. Yet, despite universal mask wearing, the super social distance rituals, and all precautions imaginable, it failed to stop an outbreak at Fort Benning in Georgia in May.
Here’s how the outbreak unfolded, according to Elizabeth Howe of Connecting Vets. About 640 recruits from the 30th AG Battalion and 2nd Battalion, 29th Infantry Regiment arrived at Fort Benning in May for training and were immediately tested for COVID-19. Four recruits tested positive and were removed from the group while the remaining soldiers were placed in isolation for 14 days without any training exercises. After the 14-day quarantine, they were all retested and every single one was negative.
Only then did the training commence – with the full panoply of obsessive social distancing measures, including mask wearing. You can imagine that there will never be greater compliance to these rules than during military training. Yet, just eight days later, after one recruit exhibited symptoms, 142 of the trainees tested positive. That is 22% of the entire group isolated and quarantined together. As they were young, none of them were hospitalized and most were asymptomatic.
The case of Fort Benning should have served as a harbinger of what was to come in June with the surge of cases throughout the country, and now, the entire world. You cannot run or hide from God’s respiratory viruses that spread as ubiquitously as the flu. However, at the same time, we see God’s mercy – that the majority of cases are asymptomatic and there are very few serious cases outside of those who are immunocompromised.
Another important observation from this Fort Benning outbreak is in order. Notice how the masks did not help and the virus spread far and wide, but stopped at the 22% threshold?
This is another great example of what Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford professor John Ioannidis predicted early on based on the natural case study of the Diamond Princess cruise ship outbreak – that the virus hits a brick wall in most places around the 15%-20% marker. Seventeen percent of passengers on the Diamond Princess tested positive. The working theory is that most people have some degree of cross-immunity from other coronavirus colds and that the virus does not transmit homogeneously from every infected individual.
While there will be places where the virus hits up to 40% of the people, albeit with most not exhibiting symptoms, most states and countries seem to get a respite from the disease once they reach 15%-20% seroprevalence in the population, or even less. We are beginning to see this in the southern states that have already peaked and are seeing plummeting rates of new hospitalizations.
Thus, we see God’s judgment and mercy mixed together. On the one hand, nothing seems to prevent a spread in the population, but on the other hand, a de facto herd immunity threshold is hit around 20%. The quicker we achieve this through the younger population, the more we will see results like we’ve witnessed in the military.
There is no greater petri dish and natural case study of a confined universe than on an aircraft carrier. During the spring, there was an outbreak on the USS Theodore Roosevelt whereby 24% of the sailors tested positive. Yet, there was only one fatality.
Hence, it’s not like the mask mandate at Fort Benning worked even a little bit. They seemed to have suffered roughly the same infection rate as those places caught by surprise, such as the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
How much more evidence do we need before this mask cult takes its Jonestown mentality and seeks mental health treatment?
What we saw at Fort Benning is now playing out throughout the world.
Japan is a country where people have been wearing masks for months with a degree of discipline we would expect in our military. Yet, cases are soaring, despite the fact that they are not testing nearly as much as we are:
No comments:
Post a Comment