More than a year after schools shut down, they have not fully reopened in many places — and it still is an open question whether all schools will be back to normal in the fall. In Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser is now allowing weddings to take place — as long as they don’t allow dancing. She would not commit to considering easing up the rule so that vaccinated people would be able to dance at their own weddings. In Brookline, Mass., and Montgomery County, Md., local officials decided to maintain outdoor mask requirements even after their states mostly ditched them. The CDC, despite revising mask guidance, has maintained recommendations that children’s summer camps require everybody to wear masks outside unless eating, drinking, or swimming. This, even though outdoor transmission is rare at best and again, children are incredibly low risk. Particularly in areas where it can get brutally hot and humid during the summer, forcing children to wear masks all day is simply inhumane. This particular recommendation is so absurd that Fauci himself couldn’t maintain a straight face when asked to defend it in a television interview.
The common thread in the “institutionalized” concept of COVID-19 is a disproportionate emphasis on low probability events and unknowns. People always take on some degree of risk in their lives. They could die in a car accident, but they still drive. They could drown, but they still swim. In 2019, there were 93,700 preventable injury deaths occurring in Americans’ own homes.
It is true that when it first arrived, COVID-19 presented an unacceptable risk, especially to many vulnerable populations. But with the exceedingly high vaccination rates among the most vulnerable, the situation is dramatically different today.
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