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.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai
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