Open Everything!
I said very similar things almost two years ago. Why did it take so long for the world to catch up?
“A Progressive" Approach To Handling The Coronavirus - OPEN EVERYTHING!” was the title of a piece I wrote in June of 2020.
This was in response to Yascha Mounk’s Atlantic piece Cancel Everything. His article was published on March 10, 2020. I remember it well because that was one of the last days I was allowed to work at my job and caused a 19-month closure of Broadway shows. I started asking my friends, do people really want everything to be closed? How long show everything shut down?
I knew then that this idea was bad.
In my piece, I wrote:
We have a society where remaining in lockdown mode feels safe, but it is not. Staying in this never-ending limbo has made things worse. Lockdowns are causing societal disruption. Businesses cannot survive with so many restrictions. Without city and state governments providing for all of their expenses, they will inevitably fail. Being forced to operate at 25% of their potential earnings is unsustainable.
Citizens of states who do not allow businesses to be fully operational will feel the pain as well. How can people who have been laid off and are receiving unemployment survive without the state providing for their every need? How will people pay for their healthcare expenses, rent, mortgage, food, clothing, and bills without providing for themselves at some point? The state government cannot, and the federal government is not interested in providing money to states in the manner certain politicians would prefer.
Wouldn't it be time to stir the pot and try some new, radical ideas? With so much emphasis on people protesting, tearing down statues all over the country, taking over parts of major cities with CHAZ/CHOP, why not take that same way of thinking and shake things up.
Here's my radical idea: OPEN UP EVERYTHING! Yes, that means starting tomorrow; all business, courts, sports, entertainment, social life, and anything related to human connection will be back to how it was on March 1st of 2020. Nothing will be closed.
To make this happen, whatever business, venue, or institution to re-open is allowed to make their own rules. Every state must repeal its "state of emergency" and allow its citizens to resume all activities in the manner they so choose.
Instead of opening things up, public health officials, TV “experts,” and the mainstream media opted to spend a year and a half terrifying the population to ensure compliance (and profit). It’s clear to me that most Democratic-led big cities that imposed stringent covid-19 restrictions are all reaping what they sowed. Today, people who are living in these places want to “Open Everything.”
Yascha Mounk and many others who are fed up with what they are dealing with are saying, “The time to end pandemic restrictions is now.”
Yascha states on today’s Twitter feed:
Restrictions on everyday life are less severe than at the height of the pandemic. But children still wear masks in school. We still engage in pandemic theater like deep cleaning. People still stay home a lot. Fewer than 1 in 5 Americans say their lives are back to normal. At first, the point of social distancing supposedly was to stop community transmission. Later it became about avoiding a collapse of ICUs. Neither of these goals now holds. We long ago gave up on reaching zero Covid. And emergency rooms are not in imminent danger of collapse.
It's time to end our pandemic purgatory. We should: * Lift all remaining restrictions on everyday activities * Finally allow children to take off their masks. * End pandemic theater like deep cleaning * Resume playdates and dinner parties without guilt.
Most Americans are now vaccinated. And for them, the risk from Covid is very low. From October to November, 7.8 out of 100,000 unvaccinated Americans died from COVID every week. Among the vaccinated, 0.6 out of 100,000 did. Among the boosted, 0.1 out of 100,000 did.
What about the unvaccinated?
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