Posted on 03/17/2021 7:19:42 AM PDT by george76
With election season over and a Democrat president safely in the White House, the mainstream media appears to have gained an increased willingness to acknowledge greater nuances in the debate over COVID-19 response policies than was the norm at the height of the public health panic.
Over the weekend, the Associated Press published a report acknowledging that “California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates,” despite the former state imposing some of the most draconian lockdown measures in the United States under Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, and the latter state remaining mostly open under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Per Worldometer, both states have similar case rates and death rates, despite their vastly differing policies (as well as Florida’s large elderly population, which is particularly vulnerable to COVID-19). Another example, the AP notes, is the comparison between Connecticut and South Dakota, both of which “rank among the 10 worst states for COVID-19 death rates” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), despite the contrasting policies of the former’s Democrat Gov. Ned Lamont and the latter’s Republican Gov. Kristi Noem.
“While so many other states kept locking people down over these many months, Florida lifted people up,” DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential contender, argued in his annual State of the State address earlier this month. “Florida’s schools are open — and we are one of only a handful of states in which every parent has a right to send their child to school in-person. All Floridians have a right to earn a living — and our citizens are employed at higher rates than those in the nation as a whole. Every job is essential.”
Economic lockdowns are a luxury of the largely affluent Zoom class,” he noted. “Many Floridians can’t do their jobs over a computer, they need to show up.”
One of the biggest differences between conservative and liberal states has been the question of mandating mask-wearing outside of residents’ homes. In the early days of the outbreak, the CDC and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams counseled against wearing masks, as did White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, claiming they were ineffective at blocking COVID. But the public later learned that health officials actually wanted to discourage the general public from buying masks to conserve the supply for health workers.
Despite the popular insistence that masking is essential outside one’s home, there remain reasons to doubt their effectiveness, such as the CDC’s September acknowledgement that masks cannot be counted on to keep out the coronavirus when spending 15 minutes or longer within six feet of someone, or a May 2020 study published by CDC’s peer-reviewed journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.”
While lockdowns, which caused hundreds of thousands of job losses and business closings, seem to have had little effect on the spread of the virus itself, they were responsible for a spike in deaths for another reason: suicides brought on by prolonged social isolation.
Last July, CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield admitted that the “cost to our nation in continuing to keep these schools closed is substantial,” especially the mental and emotional toll. “We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID,” he said. “We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID.”
Even so, conservatives allege, many Democrats and the public employee unions that support them continue to resist reopening public schools for in-person learning.
Nuances? Really? Freedom and liberty are nuances now. Get real.
Misinformation seems to be the hallmark of this Wuhan Virus.
This time next year, will we be told that the hastily distributed vaccines were also a terrible mistake ?
The CV19 mitigation protocols (masks, occupancy limits, social distancing, etc.) were imposed to give the illusion that individuals had some element of control over the virus, they could do something. Similarly, these protocols ensured politicians could also give the illusion that they were doing something to stop the virus. And, these protocols were enacted to stem any panic until the vaccines became available.
Nah...they’ll just say you need the vax every year, or every 6 months...or whatever is needed to keep revenues up...
German socialists required yellow stars in the 1930s... like political mask mandates on healthy people with no symptoms today.
Man, it’s almost like they wanted the lockdowns and fear and a crushed economy because it was an election year.. but that’s crazy, right?
Trish Regan said that this China virus is another impeachment scam against Trump all over again.. like the fake Russia - Mueller witch hunt.
Then, Fox Business ( RINO Ryan ) pulled her show
I hope we learn from this. Just like I hope people who voted for BiteMe learn what happens when you vote for a big problem. And I hope we learn how to run a fair and honest election. Hope doesn’t mean it will happen, but if we all have a survival instinct, maybe. Anyway, I’ve been telling people a virus can get through a mask as easily as I can walk through an open doorway. So I got the shot.
“This time next year, will we be told that the hastily distributed vaccines were also a terrible mistake ?”
OMG! You are agitating the pro-vaxers and Bill Gates trolls here on FR. Come on man, don’t you know it’s better to “take the jab” than to risk a 99.8% chance of surviving covid, if you happen to get it?
I mean the side effects of the fake vaccine, probable death, unknown genetic consequences, the fact that you can still get the disease and transmit it, plus still having to social distance and wear the mask after taking the shots. This all makes getting the shots so worth while. You are a an anti-vaxer anti government loser to think otherwise.
(sarcasm heavily intended)
No harm done
Once again, LifeSite is twisting the data to feed a narrative.
Mandates for mask use do decrease transmission by about 1.8% (as another recent study showed), but the real factor is how many people are wearing masks properly and how many people observe the social distancing guidelines. All of these factors add up. The real determinant of the efficacy of control measures is individual behavior.
What this opinion piece and every other piece written to support an untrue narrative does NOT show is that infection control measures do not work. They clearly do. Without social distancing, masking, limiting people in normally crowded venues, etc., the entire population of the US would theoretically have been infected by June 2020, with over 4 million deaths. The fact that spread was slowed down so much demonstrates the efficacy of the control measures.
Let’s try to use some common sense. Covid-19 is spread through breathing infected air exhaled by a sick person. If you don’t do anything to stop people from breathing that infected air, do you really expect the disease to not spread?
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The lockdowns WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO REDUCE INFECTIONS OR DEATHS, they were supposed to 'flatten the curve' so that hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed with too many simultaneous cases. The point was to reduce the RATE of infections so that the cases were spread out over a longer period of time.
It turned into "you're killing grandma" only to use it against Trump.
Imho The Covid lockdown was to instill fear in order to validate and manipulate mail in ballots for the 2020 election. It was all about the big steal to get rid of President Trump and to give democrats and China total control of DC. They won. End of story.
Media is trying to get their credibility back. They are picking and choosing what they will affirm that pretty much everyone knows.
It’s not going to work.
It wasn’t about stopping CV-19 but getting mail-in voter fraud.
Facts and AP seldom mix oil and water
You know what the sick thing is? The .eft now admit they didn’t work, BUT,if a republican becomes president again, and another pandemic hits, the left will go right back to dema ding lockdowns UNTIL a lib is president again, and act like they never admitted that lockdowns were useless
Previously. The ,eft have absolutely no shame
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