Posted on 09/23/2020 6:24:36 AM PDT by karpov
If you’re a public-minded student or teacher committed to reducing the death toll from Covid-19, what is the morally correct way to behave?
According to the epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, you should do just about the opposite of what’s being preached by college presidents, teachers’ unions, political leaders, and the scientific and media establishment. Unless you’re elderly or particularly vulnerable, you shouldn’t be wearing a mask all day, or shaming others for going unmasked. You should be careful not to endanger the vulnerable, but otherwise you should be exposing yourself to the virus in order to promote herd immunity.
Gupta, 55, wants to teach her classes at Oxford in person, without a mask, and she is appalled at her colleagues’ reluctance to go back to the classroom.
“It’s such a disservice to this generation of students,” she says. “Teachers and students who are vulnerable should have the option to go online, but for the rest of us this virus is no bigger than other risks we take in daily life. It’s not rational, and certainly not communitarian, to avoid being infected with a pathogen that carries such a low risk to you when there’s a high benefit to the community by helping to create herd immunity.”
Gupta’s strategy is heresy to the public-health establishment, but it seems to be paying off in Sweden, and her research team at Oxford has a far better track record on Covid-19 than the scientists whose work inspired the widespread lockdowns and mask mandates in the first place.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
In our Boston surburb, not requiring masks would result in many parents keeping their children out of school.
The response to this pandemic has confirmed something I have long suspected.
Humans are too stupid for our civilization to survive.
Masks should probably be worn at the beginning of each school day in so much as possible.
Some parents will send a sick child to school. The Chinese governments have parents temperature check children before sending them off to school.
22 Sept: The Australian: We shut up shop for a coronavirus that was unlikely to kill us
by Adam Creighton
“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”
John Kenneth Galbraith’s quip couldn’t be more apt right now, where the world’s political class and their cheer squads in the media and pockets of academia are trying to justify the extraordinary attack on civil liberties and economic freedom over a disease that’s like a severe flu in its health impact. They will need more than: “China said it worked”, “it was popular”, and “it feels as if lockdowns must work”.
The aim of such blunt policies, enacted contrary to advice and without empirical support, has steadily shifted from “flattening the curve”, to suppression, and now, in Victoria, at least, “elimination”.
Regardless, we shouldn’t have copied the policies of an increasingly totalitarian state on faith; many terrible and stupid things are popular, and science doesn’t care about feelings.
In Sweden — a nation castigated mercilessly for taking sensible precautions rather than enforcing a China-style police state — total mortality has turned out to be much the same as previous years.
It’s had no “second wave”, unlike other lockdown-prone European nations, lending support to the idea Swedes have developed some herd immunity, and are getting on with their lives...
There is no link between lockdowns and reduction in deaths, let alone a demonstration of causality, as multiple analyses in medical journal The Lancet and elsewhere have shown. The sun doesn’t rise in the morning because the rooster crows.
Paris-based data scientist Ivan Debono published an insightful graph last week, putting the 960,000 global deaths from or with COVID-19, in context. You almost need a microscope to see the impact, given more than 60 million people, mostly aged, die each year...
If the virus had emerged in Sweden, Brazil, Japan or even Victoria, it is unlikely the world would have locked itself down in terror. History matters; China took the lead, we followed...
“Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome” quipped legendary investor Charlie Munger.
The pandemic has given the political class an opportunity to increase its fame, power and relative income under the self-righteous banner of “saving lives”...
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/we-shut-up-shop-for-a-coronavirus-that-was-unlikely-to-kill-us/news-story/bc032c8239f376690f44bb4f29aa3b1e
Schools and businesses can open at any time when HCQ+Zn is used as a preventative and as a treatment.
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