Months-old data out of Europe told us that schoolchildren were in little to no danger from the Wuhan virus. As City Journal recently reported:
For young students, the risk of dying from Covid is lower than the risk of dying from the flu, and researchers have repeatedly found that children do not easily transmit the virus to adults. The clearest evidence comes from Sweden, which did not close elementary schools or junior high schools during the spring Covid wave, and which did not reduce class sizes or encourage students and teachers to wear face masks.
Not a single child died, and there was little effect beyond the schools, as a team of Swedish economists reports after analyzing records of Covid infections and medical treatment for the entire Swedish population.
Even Dr. "follow the science" Fauci finally agrees that schoolchildren are not significant spreaders of the Wuhan virus! Yet, in U.S. schools, sporting events continue to get postponed or canceled, and many schools remain in remote learning mode or are threatening to move back in that direction. Again, every instance of this is driven by "cases." Yet the vast majority of students and student-athletes are not getting sick, and if they are, they are certainly not sick to the point of death or even hospitalization. The longer this pandemic propaganda continues, the longer it becomes clear that shutting down schools and athletic events is nothing more than a political stunt perpetuated by leftist authoritarians, or at least an ignorant reaction to the left's Wuhan virus fear mongering.
The same is true for the lockdowns imposed on businesses and churches. As is the case with schools, there is still zero evidence that churches and businesses are in any way significantly complicit in the spread of the Wuhan virus. As RedState reported recently:
[T]here was never a shred of scientific evidence that putting healthy people in quarantine would do anything to ameliorate the spread of COVD-19. Moreover, everything we knew about viruses made the idea of quarantining people who aren't sick completely absurd.
Even the CDC's most recent pandemic planning guide from 2017 admitted that "direct evidence for the effectiveness of these measures is limited." And by "limited" they meant non-existent. There wasn't a single study that supports the idea that quarantining healthy people was going to do a damn thing to stop a virus from spreading.
The European Centre for Disease Control's summary of the research was more honest. They noted that "there are few, if any, empirical data underpinning" the assumptions that workplace closures do anything to stop viruses from spreading. Indeed, they found no evidence for the effectiveness of any social distancing measures.
In spite of the science and the months of real-time data that proved it unnecessary, the left has persisted with shutting down businesses and churches. As a result of these state-enforced lockdowns, hundreds of thousands of small businesses in the U.S. have shut down — many of them permanently.
Data from late September show that between March 1 and August 31, a total of 163,735 businesses on Yelp — which is especially representative of small businesses — closed. According to Yelp, about 60 percent of these businesses (nearly 98,000) will never reopen. The Yelp data reveal that small restaurants and retail stores have been hit particularly hard. It has made zero sense that Walmart, Target, Home Depot — none of whom were requiring masks as late as middle July — and the like have been allowed to remain open, while your local diner, gun store, or gym was forced to close.
Nor do the data back the mask mandates. Comparing maps of mask-wearers in U.S. states versus average daily Wuhan virus cases, John Hinderaker at Powerline reveals that there is "no evident correlation between mask wearing and new Wuhan infections." A recent Danish study on masks — the largest of its kind — agrees.
Kevin Roche at Healthy Skeptic recently reported on the Danish mask study and reveals the study's conclusions: "wearing a mask makes no difference in cases or in level of transmission in the community." Data on mask mandates versus Wuhan virus infection cases across the U.S. and Europe reveal the same.
What's more, anyone paying attention well knows that masks on the public at large are useless for stopping or even slowing the spread of a virus. Among other things, this is because, outside a surgery room, virtually no one is wearing masks according to CDC standards. People constantly have their hands on them, they wear them below their noses, they fail to clean them properly, and so on.
After nine months of near meaningless measures by leftist authoritarians and those duped by their fear-mongering, time has made it clear that the Wuhan virus is simply going to do what most viruses do: run its course, have exposure to the vast majority of us, and have little to no impact on the vast majority of us. It is past time for the decision-makers in our society to heed this mountain of information and end the cancelations, mandates, shutdowns, and lockdowns.
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