The Cato Institute came out Tuesday with its Pandemics and Policy collection of coronavirus-and-pandemics-related articles described as purposed to “provide policymakers with an actionable guide to policies that can harness [old‐fashioned American ingenuity] and foster a resilient society capable of meeting the challenges ahead.” Among the articles is “Balancing Tradeoffs between Liberties and Lives” by Cato Institute Director of Economic Studies Jeffrey Miron and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Peter Van Doren.
Tag: coronavirus
Remember President Donald Trump saying he wanted things to open up in America by Easter? Oh well. Throughout most of America, the coronavirus crackdowns are continuing strong five months after Easter. And United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert R. Redfield said Wednesday at a US Senate subcommittee hearing that “regular life” will not begin to return until, he predicts, the “late second quarter, third quarter” of next year — around the middle of 2021.
Why the long wait? Redfield says the wait is so a coronavirus vaccine can be distributed and injected around America first.
Many state fairs across America were canceled this year. The reason offered: coronavirus.
It should be no surprise that among the states where an annual state fair did occur this year is South Dakota. South Dakota is the state whose governor — Kristi Noem — has resisted, more than has any other governor across America, the temptation to use coronavirus as an excuse to exercise dictatorial powers.
At first, coronavirus was sold as a very dangerous disease for everyone. Some people still believe that line, but the facts were clear months ago that for healthy, younger individuals the risk of severe illness or death from coronavirus is very low. And the risk diminishes the younger one is, with children being at nearly zero risk of death and tending to have no to minor symptoms if infected.
As these facts have become more generally known, politicians and media have shifted the emphasis in their promotion of fear and the continuation of coronavirus crackdowns. They have talked more about the need to protect older and less healthy individuals from coronavirus. Yet, overall, it seems like the fearmongering and governments’ coronavirus policies have brought more harm than help to these higher-risk individuals.
This week, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, has been the subject of much attention because of her on the sly visit at a salon in her hometown of San Francisco despite such being forbidden under the local coronavirus crackdown and despite Pelosi being one of the most prominent coronavirus fearmongers in America. A few months before Pelosi’s salon visit, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was similarly in the spotlight. A picture circulated in April of Lightfoot with her hair stylist at a haircut appointment after Lightfoot had been encouraging people to adhere to the local shutdown of hair cutting business operations.
College, long a fun and liberating experience for many young adults, has become a dreary and oppressive experience for many students living under the weight of a multitude of restrictions imposed at American college campuses in the name of countering coronavirus.
It does not take nearly as much to be a rebel at college as it used to. With a multiplicity of rules restricting college students’ activities at campuses across America in the name of countering coronavirus, a significant act of rebellion can be to shake hands with a friend, leave your nose and mouth uncovered, or congregate in a group. In other words, rebellion can be to take ordinary actions of the verboten “old normal.”
Administrators at Syracuse University in New York appear to be hopping mad that a group of largely freshmen students on Wednesday evening, during the students’ time on campus before fall semester classes begin, did something you would expect them to do — join together in a group and socialize.
Many parents have been fearful that their children may be harmed or killed by coronavirus if in-person attendance at high school resumes. This fear, however, has little basis in reality. Among teenagers overall, the risk of death from coronavirus is virtually zero, and most teenagers who are infected experience no to minor symptoms.
Instead, parents would be smart to be concerned about a threat at schools that could more surely lead to their children’s death or serious injury, physical or mental. That threat is military recruiters who may be on campus selling students on joining the military.
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Grim College Coronavirus Rules
College ain’t what it used to be. Supposedly because of a virus that for most college students is less of a threat to their lives than riding in a car, students at college campuses this fall will be subjected to dystopian controls from required mask wearing and “social distancing” to surveillance via contact tracing and health monitoring.
In a Friday Reason article by Zuri Davis, Davis discusses a conversation she had the day before with Libertarian Party presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen. It was interesting to see Davis recount in the article that Jorgensen expressed approval of mask mandates for government buildings.