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'Social Distancing' Is Snake Oil, Not Science Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York says that it’s “shocking” to discover that 66 percent of new hospitalizations appear to have been among people “largely sheltering at home.”
It’s your fault, he says to the hospitalized New Yorkers who loyally complied with his government directive. But here’s an interesting alternative theory as to why, mostly, old people who are staying at home are being hospitalized. What if the government directive to close everything down and mandate “social distancing” actually made the problem worse? Dr. David Katz predicted precisely this outcome on March 20, in an article that is proving every bit as correct in its predictions and sober policy recommendations as Dr. Anthony Fauci has been proven incorrect -- which is another way of saying that the article has proven flawless, so far. Dr. Katz writes:
One might be inclined to simply accept this as an unintended consequence of “social distancing,” but accepting that would require there to be some kind of benefit to “social distancing” that would make it worth the cost. Is there? Very likely, you already instinctively know that the guidelines suggesting that it’s somehow helpful to keep a six-foot space between healthy people, even outdoors, is not based on science, but just an arbitrary suggestion we’ve been conditioned to accept without evidence. And your gut feeling would be right. There’s a reason that “social distancing” wasn’t a buzzword common to the American lexicon prior to 2020. There’s very little science behind “social distancing” at all.
There’s a reason for the lack of peer-reviewed studies on the CDC website. She continues:
“Social distancing” is very much a newfangled experiment, not settled science. And, Kelley writes, the results are suggesting that our “Great Social Distancing Experiment of 2020” will be “near the top of the list” of “bad experiments gone horribly wrong.” You also don’t have to be a scientist to also instinctively know that “two weeks to flatten the curve” becoming “America must lock down until a vaccine is created” is more social experimentation than science. But what the data have fleshed out, beyond the point of argument, is that the proximity of one human being to another has proven to be a very small factor in determining the impact of Covid-19 infections. What’s far more important is which human beings happen to be in close proximity of one another. According to Dr. Steven Shapiro and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center:
The USS Theodore Roosevelt had a crew of 4,800. Given the acute sample, testing was holistic. This yields an actual infection rate of roughly 23 percent, and among those infected, the fatality rate is 0.09 percent. Among the Roosevelt’s entire crew of assumedly healthy and able-bodied sailors, on a floating Petri dish, during the thick of viral outbreak that shut down all schools and placed healthy citizens across America under house-arrest, the fatality rate was .002 percent. It seems more than obvious that there is little sense in quarantining the young and healthy. As Dr. Shapiro also observes:
Here’s another thing you likely already know. Politicians and the media are committing to damage control to hide all of these facts from you. In fact, finding any news relating to Dr. Shapiro’s somewhat revelatory comments online is, so far, quite difficult. That’s because, for the people who pushed “social distancing” and destroying the economy as an absolutely necessary evil, this is a matter of self-preservation. If this information were widely known, citizens might be more inclined to demand that schools and parks and restaurants and malls be opened. But if schools open tomorrow, without testing, and there is not a surge in hospitalizations or deaths, then the obvious question is why the schools closed in the first place. If restaurants and other shuttered businesses open without a spike in hospitalizations and deaths, then why did they ever close? There’s value in the media and government officials maintaining the public perception that the costs of “social distancing” have been offset by its benefits. But while those benefits are elusive in the data, and require mountains of presumption to imagine that they even exist at all, the costs of “social distancing” couldn’t be clearer. As Dr. Steven Shapiro concludes:
At this point, this is little more than common sense, and the truth can’t continue to be suppressed for much longer. It’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s well past time to take a more tactical approach to mitigation, as Dr. Katz suggested back on March 20, allocating resources and efforts toward protecting and caring for those most at-risk, and ending this soul-crushing and economy-crashing experiment with holistic “social distancing.”
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