Get this folks: There’s a very real chance that we locked Americans in their homes for months, shut down the economy, cost the nation trillions, caused countless small businesses to fail and cost Americans millions of jobs for absolutely no reason.
Permission to be cynical:
California’s celebrating news that confirmed cases of coronavirus finally went down this week. The vast majority of the state, including the L.A. and S.F. Bay Areas, continues to be on strict lockdown.
This chart is very hopeful news for California. Coronavirus confirmed cases dipped this last week — remarkable given how much testing there has been https://t.co/cg77ciNXg4 great data from @irisslee @seangreene89 @ronlin pic.twitter.com/vJh1UKlNE1
— Shelby Grad (@shelbygrad) May 20, 2020
Meanwhile Denmark is almost completely opened up, has virtually no new deaths and shut down around the same time as California. The same is true of Austria and Norway. And Florida has been reopening since mid-April with excellent results after virtually no shutdown at all.
We’re still seeing no evidence of a ‘second peak’ in European countries that eased their lockdowns first.
— Professor Karol Sikora (@ProfKarolSikora) May 19, 2020
Austria, Denmark, Norway eased their lockdowns around a month ago and cases are continuing to fall.
We need to move forwards with caution, but with confidence it can work.
The funny thing is, nobody has the slightest idea what worked or didn’t because no states or nations have control groups. Nobody knows if lockdowns helped at all or whether continued shelter in place orders might not be hindering recovery by keeping people cooped up in their homes.
A New York study showed 60% of new cases coming from people who were sequestered at home. Go figure.
The vast majority of deaths have been among the elderly and those with certain preexisting conditions. You’ve got to wonder why we didn’t just isolate those people instead of locking down the entire populace.
I’ve got to be honest with you guys. We may very well have locked ourselves in our homes for months, shut down the economy, cost millions of Americans their jobs and lost a third of our small businesses for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The truth is nobody knows. And anyone who says otherwise either doesn’t know the first thing about how the scientific method works or is a big fat BSer.
Meanwhile, the idiots calling the shots in New York and California and Washington’s top health officials continue to advocate for draconian measures. They call that science. But it isn’t science. Not even a little.
Two words: The first is bull. You can figure out the second.
Look. I could be completely wrong about this. And if I am, I’ll be the first to admit it. But the way our governments so authoritatively ended our inalienable rights as Americans without any real basis in logic, let alone science, is perhaps the greatest travesty I’ve witnessed in my lifetime.
Image credit Thomas Cizauskas and Dan Gaken / Flickr