The End of Social Distancing

My emergency alert has been quiet for the last couple of days so no more curfew here. It also rained heavily here yesterday which may have made it less desirable to protest. I assume it hasn’t totally settled down everywhere but we seem to be over the worst of the violent parts.

Do we still have a pandemic going on? I may be wrong about this but I feel like our public health “experts” have surrendered their high ground. I mean there was no way we were going to stop these protests from happening but there were a lot of these “experts” who seemed to excuse the lack of social distancing because the cause was right. Unlike previous protests.

But the virus doesn’t really care WHY you are out in large groups. If it can spread, it is going to do so. It would have been a lot better if these so called public health “experts” had not excused these protests. Admit that you can’t stop them but implore people to attempt to protect themselves as best as possible. Then you still have a shred of credibility.

Same with the healthcare workers in New York who came out dressed in full PPE to applaud the marchers. The whole round of PSA’s from them imploring us to remain inside just goes right out the window. Also, I just hope they all changed their PPE when they got back inside.

At the very least, I would expect health officials to be recommending that anyone who attended a protest get tested for COVID. Maybe they have. I just haven’t seen it yet.

So we either see big spikes in cases in a couple of weeks or we don’t. Given that most of the protestors looked to be young, I’m not sure that we will. If they have mild cases, then would they even bother getting tested. Don’t know.

Either way, it seems unlikely that the vast majority are going to agree to quarantine restrictions. If we’ve had all these mass gatherings and it doesn’t cause a spike, then what possible logic do you have for not opening everything back up to pre-pandemic levels.

The worst case scenario is if we do see big spikes and certain state and local officials rediscover their authoritarian side and try to reimpose lock downs. My guess is there would be a significant number of people who didn’t go to the protests who would just be ready to tell the government to F*** off. I mean the point of lock down is for public safety but we just watched a lot of places where the authorities really did nothing when the violence started. So now you care about public safety? Again, F*** off!

I could be wrong because I think that a lot of people are basic rule followers but when your authorities lose their moral authority, why listen to them?

Actually, I just scanned the news headlines and there were many articles on “fears of a spike”. I guess that once we no longer have video of burning buildings, we’ll get back to 24/7 virus fear stories.

I think I just need to stop writing about these heavy subjects. It is hard to feel hopeful and optimistic when it just feels like the world is trying to tear itself apart. So I’ll just leave with this.