Due to the nature of a respiratory disease like COVID, mass quarantine efforts were doomed to failure.
We’ve got to breathe; we are social creatures — so locking everyone down, as started in the Spring of 2020, didn’t appear to “slow the spread” (the original aim) and it certainly did not decrease the overall infected or death counts (something the policy did not originally pretend to do). Yet that policy, enacted as an emergency protocol in many states by many governors and mayors extended lockdowns far beyond Trump’s original call for “fifteen days.”
The extensions were never squared with the initial rationale.
Never.
Quarantining the sick, or those who “test positive” for the virus, makes more sense. But only in context of options and human behavior.
“Students who test positive for COVID-19 at the University of Michigan this fall will be forced in many cases to leave campus,” explains Robby Soave at Reason, “an extreme measure that may well encourage sick people to avoid seeking medical attention at all.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya dubs it a “cruel policy” seemingly “designed to spread covid from the university into the wild.”
That is, this quarantine effort “won’t stop [COVID] from spreading,” the doctor summarizes.
“Instead of creating a police state to punish students for contracting COVID-19 — something that is, let’s face it, wholly unavoidable,” Mr. Soave speculates, “perhaps university health officials could work harder to provide accommodations for students who get sick and voluntarily agree to quarantine.”
But administrators rule that out: they don’t have the accommodations.
So the policy will inevitably cause hardship while not promoting public health, much less the health of individual students.
Doesn’t make sense.
I’m Paul Jacob.
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7 replies on “Expulsion of the Sick”
An element of irrationality is virtually unavoidable in collective decision-making. But, rather than simply declaring that this policy doesn’t make sense, we should recognize that to some extent it does make sense, but only given that administrators formulating policy are pursuing very different objectives from what they pretend. They are not trying to take responsibility but to escape blame for the spread of SARS-CoV‑2 amongst students, faculty, and staff.
No inquiry as to why the per capita fatality rate of the US was 4 times higher than those countries that did not have lock downs and quarantines.
They are lying about the procedures or the results. Or both.
Let’s hope this policy doesn’t spread to all colleges. Given that this is happening in Michigan, it appears that the supporters of the state government want to justify draconian lockdowns even as COVID-19 variants grow milder. If a student is forced to leave campus, he should have his full yearly tuition refunded.
Nothing regarding the reaction to COVID-19 makes any sense, at least given the narrative which we have been provided regarding it.
It does not remotely resemble the reactions to SARS, MERS, Swine flu and other previous outbreaks of allegedly similar respiratory viruses.
That raises many more questions than the current governmental and media proclamations address.
Will agree to disagree on pandemic policy. But let us go straight to Edward Young. So we’ll give him 18th century norms for the gender identification of reason. But I cannot give him is a confusion between reason and wisdom. The upright stature of the soul is wisdom which understands from reason that reason alone is not sufficient.
Or the idiots could get vaccinated for Covid!
Pam, for months now, the Narrative of your tribe has acknowledge that those who receive the injections will still get infected.
And these injections are simply not vaccinations. By definition, a vaccine is “A preparation of the causative agent of a disease, its products, or a synthetic substitute, that has been specially treated for use in vaccination” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). These injections instead deliver mRNA.