Most social obligations would be best left in the Before Times.
Jessica Grose, New York Times
When I was in my early 20s, my friends started calling me “The Bailer.” I was infamous for making plans and then canceling the day before. Even at the time, I knew this was irritating and ungenerous behavior. But I made the plans with the best intentions: I love my friends! I want to see their faces! That spoken-word event in a dank, low-ceilinged bar sounded like fun when you told me about it three weeks ago!
About 24 hours before many social outings, I would start to feel sweaty and inert. After a long day’s work at an office, I would often feel drained from human contact and all I would want to do is buy an enormous burrito at the spot near my apartment, get home, take off my pants and eat it in privacy while watching reality television. After a few years of disappointing my friends last minute, I learned that it’s much kinder and less stressful for everyone involved to be honest with myself — and my friends — about what I would actually show up for.
I began to evaluate what I really enjoyed doing and what I valued about interactions with friends. I did not like standing for prolonged periods of time, for almost any reason. I did not like waiting in line for food. I did not like anything that included the word “networking.” I did like getting drinks or dinner in a place where we could really talk, or lounging in someone’s living room, or going to a party if there were going to be lots of people I knew there and ample seating room.
Having children at 30 was a great excuse for being the hermit I naturally am, and it also helped clarify my socializing needs even further. I was both more tired but also more starved for grown-up conversation. I opted for even more socializing in small groups without my daughters, and when I was with them, I experienced the joy of raucous dinner parties with a separate kids’ table. I learned the valuable skill of continuing conversations through multiple interruptions.
During the pandemic I added a few more types of socializing to my repertoire, including outdoor walk-and-talks, like I’m some jerk in an Aaron Sorkin TV show. Though some pandemic behavior comes easily to me, because I do hate leaving my house, this year of enforced isolation has been depressing, and even a shut-in like me has been missing human contact with people I am not related to.
That does not mean I will come to your spoken word performance in the future. I am still short on time on this mortal coil, and I imagine I will return to my previous socialization preferences.
While obviously there are some obligations you show up to because you love and honor your friends and family even if you don’t want to attend, I invite you to figure out what you actually like about seeing people in the “After.” Especially now that people are making plans with frenzied abandon, saying yes to all manners of activities without a second thought because they are so starved for socializing. Yes to that group sound bath! Yes to the wine-cooler tasting! Yes to the early morning rave! Oh honey, no. No. No.
Be honest with yourself. If you like the energy of a big crowd, say no to that intimate coffee and parry with a trip to a concert. If you hate going out, invite people to come over.
Tell people the real reasons you’re saying no for things you say no to. This has two benefits: it will give you deeper intimacy with friends who will know you for the true crank you really are. And it will mean that they stop inviting you to things that you really don’t like to do. My friends no longer call me The Bailer, because now I always show up.
Studies show that moments of disruption offer a unique opportunity to set and achieve new goals.
Tara Parker-Pope, New York Times
If there was ever a perfect time to make a life change, this is it.
Behavioral scientists have long known that times of disruption and transition also create new opportunities for growth and change. Disruption can come in many forms, and it happens when life knocks us out of our normal routines. It can be moving to a new city, starting a new job, getting married or divorced or having a child. And for many of us, there’s never been a bigger life disruption than the pandemic, which changed how we work, eat, sleep and exercise, and even how we connect with friends and family.
“I think this fresh start is really a big opportunity,” said Katy Milkman, a professor at the Wharton School and author of the new book “How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. “I don’t know when we’ll have another one like it. We have this blank slate to work on. Everything is on the table to start fresh.”
Much of Dr. Milkman’s research has focused on the science of new beginnings, which she calls “the fresh start effect.” Dr. Milkman and her colleagues have found that we’re most inclined to make meaningful changes around “temporal landmarks” — those points in time that we naturally associate with a new beginning. New Year’s Day is the most obvious temporal landmark in our lives, but birthdays, the start of spring, the start of a new school year, even the beginning of the week or the first of the month are all temporal landmarks that create psychological opportunities for change.
In one study, Dr. Milkman found that students were most likely to visit the gym around the start of the week, the first of the month, following birthdays or after school breaks. Another study found that “fresh start language” helped people kick-start their goals. In that study, people were far more likely to start a new goal on a day labeled “the first day of spring” compared to an unremarkable day labeled “the third Thursday in March.” (It was the exact same day, just labeled differently.)
Another study found that when people were advised to start saving money in a few months, they were less likely to do so than a group of people told to start saving around their birthday that was also a few months away. The birthday group saved 20 to 30 percent more money.
Although the pandemic is far from over, for many people, the lifting of restrictions and getting vaccinated means planning vacations and returning to more-normal work and school routines. It’s exactly the kind of psychological new beginning that could prompt the fresh start effect, said Dr. Milkman.
“We have this opportunity with this blank slate to change our health habits and be very conscientious about our day,” said Dr. Milkman. “What is our lunch routine going to look like? What is our exercise routine? There’s an opportunity to rethink. What do we want a work day to look like?”
It’s Not Too Late to Reset.
As the pandemic recedes, some people are worried that the past year of lockdowns, restrictions and time at home was a missed opportunity. Leslie Scott, a nonprofit event organizer in Eugene, Ore., said she feels that she just muddled through a stressful year, rather than using the time to make meaningful life changes.
“I sometimes wonder if I squandered this gift of time,” said Ms. Scott, who is an organizer of the Oregon Truffle Festival. “I have all this anxiety that we’re just going to go back to what people think of as normal. As we come out of our cocoons, am I emerging from something and moving toward something new? Or am I just stuck?”
While some people did develop healthy new habits during pandemic lockdowns, it’s not too late if you spent your pandemic days just getting by. The good news is that the end of the pandemic is probably a more opportune time for meaningful change than when you were experiencing the heightened anxiety of lockdowns.
“Covid-19 was an awful time for many of us,” said Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale who teaches a popular online course called “The Science of Well-Being.” “There’s lots of evidence for what’s called post-traumatic growth — that we can come out stronger and with a bit more meaning in our lives after going through negative events. I think we can all harness this awful pandemic time as a time to get some post-traumatic growth in our own lives.”
So What’s Your Next Chapter?
One of the biggest obstacles to change has always been the fact that we tend to have established routines that are hard to break. But the pandemic shattered many people’s routines, setting us up for a reset, Dr. Santos said.
“We’ve all just changed our routines so much,” she said. “I think many of us have realized during the pandemic that some of the things we were doing before Covid-19 weren’t the kind of things that were leading to flourishing in our lives. I think many of us were realizing that aspects of our work and family life and even our relationships probably need to change if we want to be happier.”
One reason fresh starts can be so effective is that humans tend to think about the passage of time in chapters or episodes, rather than on a continuum, Dr. Milkman said. As a result, we tend to think of the past in terms of unique periods, such as our high school years, the college years, the years we lived in a particular town or worked at a certain job. Going forward, we’re likely to look back on the pandemic year as a similarly unique chapter of our lives.
“We have chapter breaks, as if life is a novel — that is the way we mark time,” said Dr. Milkman. “That has implications for the psychology of fresh starts, because these moments that open a new chapter give us a sense of a new beginning. It’s easier to attribute any failings to ‘the old me.’ You feel like you can achieve more now, because we’re in a new chapter.”
Take the Fresh Start Challenge!
While the start of a new chapter is a great time for change, the pages will turn quickly. Now that we’re emerging from the restrictions of pandemic life, social scientists say it’s an ideal time to start thinking about what you’ve learned in the past year. What are the new habits you want to keep, and what parts of your prepandemic life do you want to change?
“It’s time to rethink your priorities,” said Dr. Milkman, who outlines more detailed steps for change in her new book. “We have to ask ourselves, ‘How am I going to schedule my time?’ We have a limited window to be deliberate about it, because pretty quickly, we’ll have a new pattern established, and we probably won’t rethink it again for a while.”
A good first step is to take our 10-Day Fresh Start Challenge. Each challenge will prompt moments of mindful reflection, help you build stronger connections and offer small steps toward building healthy new habits. You can find all 10 installments on The Fresh Start Challenge page.
“I think a lot of us have realized how fragile some of the things were that gave us joy before, from going to the grocery store, to going out to a restaurant with friends, going to a movie, giving your mom a hug whenever you’d like,” said Dr. Santos. “My hope is that we’ll emerge from this pandemic with a bit more appreciation for the little things in life.”
As we have seen over the last year, perceptions of the Coronavirus/Covid lethality, the risks of contraction, and the vaccines available to contain it, vary among the population. The response has been predictably wide. Ranging from thoughtful and informed behavior from many states and communities country-wide, to outright flouting of any responsible behavior. Whether based on blind denial or blunt philosophical frankness in rejecting any unwanted lifestyle or behavioral modification.
The consequences from the latter group’s behavior have been clear and on display from the start of the Covid pandemic last Spring. It no longer matters how or why the net response to the pandemic became so fragmented and fractured instead of unified in battle. What matters now is that we all get on board now together unified against this thing. If we do not, it will spin out of control…again. More people will get sick…again. More people will die…again. Lockdowns will come back…again. Business will suffer and go down…again. People will argue and blame each other…again. The only thing possibly different this time around is that all of the above will be worse.
Because of the second group’s behavior above, along with worldwide breakdowns in political structures, public trust, information guidance, and inadequate health systems, the Coronavirus has infected far more people than it could have, and in the process, has mutated into more dangerous variants of the original strain that can escape vaccination defenses.
In particular, the South African variant, aka B.1.351, and the Brazilian variant, aka P.1, are concerning to all virologists and medical professionals. There are now reports these strains have infected previously vaccinated people and caused illness. Both of these variants are already in the U.S. in numbers enough to grow exponentially if they are not contained in the very near future.
BUT, there IS good news. It does NOT have to be this way. We have the power to prevent this from happening. It comes from medicine. It comes from informed and responsible behavior.
There is one way to fight the growth of mutated variants and thus, any virus. Stop infection transmission in the population with vaccines.
If you don’t want to get the vaccine, and you’re okay constantly wearing a mask, staying distant from everyone, being anxious every time you leave the house, and segregating from virtually everyone outside your home bubble, not being able to travel, for possibly ever, then stand your ground, and don’t get the vaccine. Maybe you’ll wait out the herd immunity thing (80% vaccination) hoping it’ll happen soon enough, and you’ll just get the benefits from everyone else’s immunity. You’ll then be part of the illustrious group tagged “Free Riders.” Not too flattering.
I’m not scared of medicine. I’m thankful of it. I’m thankful there are smart enough people in science and medicine that have confidence and skill to treat my ailments and those around me for years. It’s illness I have a problem with. Covid is a tough adversary. It caught us short sighted and required an EUA vaccine to help us fight it. That’s not something anyone I know has been through before. It’s understandable to be skittish. It’s normal.
We’ve been here before. Humanity has been here before. The global timeline of health, illness, disease, treatments, medicine, vaccines, and recovery are long and rich enough in detailed history to give us all perspective. In most ways, medicine is so far advanced today that it almost isn’t meant to be understood by patients. Not unless you want to study genome sequencing and DNA up close. No. What ultimately matters is trust. You either trust medicine and your health providers, or you do not. If you’re already receiving medical care, you’ve decided to trust the doctors.This doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to be anxious or scared. That’s called being normal. But trust is a conscious, necessary decision to make. If you trust medicine, and doctors (in general) you have to trust the EUA vaccine. Get it done. Help us fight this damn thing, or, just stop going to the doctor altogether. You can’t have it both ways.
If you’ve been vaccinated. You’ve already taken a crucial step to helping all of us out of this muck and mire. The vaccine, however, is not an automatic ticket to freedom and normalcy. Many states have opened up businesses and relaxed restaurant and congregant capacity guidelines as infection rates have dropped. But (again another “BUT”), the political and commercial pressure on state governors is tremendous. It’s not right that these factors are playing a role in public health decisions, but unfortunately that is reality. This is why it is incumbent on all of us to not look to political leaders for guidance on our personal decisions going forward from this pandemic. It is naiive and dangerous to do so. The people to look to for clues and cues on what to do and how we should do it after vaccinations are medical and health professionals who have no political ties.
Beyond that, don’t push aside your own deductive reasoning and common sense for assessing risk just because you can’t wait to go out with friends, jump on a plane, get a facial, a massage, or go to a gym. It doesn’t work that way.
You may not like math, but the math here is simple. Take a few measly minutes and look at what’s happening with the variant trend in your state. There are some good interviews available with medical people. There are articles, columns, op-eds, easy to read graphs and charts. There is plenty of good info out there. There is no excuse to not be informed with credible health and safety guidance about what’s going on. Whether it’s deciding on the vaccine, or how to act after you’ve gotten the vaccine. Like anything worthwhile learning, or understanding. It takes your time. It takes your effort. Give both to learn and understand.
I don’t use the term lightly. It sounds harsh because it is harsh. I confess there’s something about avoiding premature, preventable death that brings out the judgement in me.
Its a shame that differing opinions on protecting ourselves from Covid continues on a similarly divisive track that politics has for the last several years. I do not speak entirely for the camps on both sides here. There are always odd exceptions of mixed breeds among us, but as far as I can tell so far, a sizable amount of Conservative and Trumper sympathies are also very gung-ho about going back to eating INSIDE restaurants, gathering among groups of vaccinated or non-vaccinated, and cheerfully eager to drop their masks and make believe things are normal again. The problem is, things are not normal, and saying they are doesn’t make it so. Nor does a politically pressured state governor have a right to say it is by rolling back restrictions or lockdowns. If anyone doesn’t realize the political pressure put on state Governors right now, in spite of medical evidence urging caution, they are burying their heads, or don’t know politics. Again, see above post title.
It’s one thing trying to analyze certain (mostly Florida?) spring breakers, who by ritual indoctrination, get possessed to risk any and every thing for the sake of boozing themselves to unconsciousness, having sex with anyone who looks sideways at them, to proving they know how to define a party at any cost. Its quite another thing to observe the adults doing something that is, while much quieter, also risky.
There are people taking the reopening edicts and their holstered vaccines as a racehorse does at the track when the steel gate flies open for them. “And they’re off!” They can’t wait to do something normal, and they go for it when the first authority figure gives their permission. The problem is, there should only be one type of authority figure here to guide us, Health and medical authority figures. No businessman. No friend or family members. And definitely, no politician.
If you want to know the risk for Covid right now outside a household or controlled bubble, the answer is not radically different than it was six months ago. This goes even if you’ve already been vaccinated. Read it again. It goes even if you’re vaccinated. For some reason, there is a real tone deafness among the populous that doesn’t seem able to understand the language and word choices coming from every public health official, virologist, and virtually all medical professionals right now. For some reason, there is a deafness in the populous to the warnings of the threats of the emerging and established variants.
I get the fatigue. But we’ve come a long way to get here. What’s the rush now? Why is it so necessary to lunge back into the fray while we’re still in the hot middle of this mess? The sun can and will come out. We can not blow the clouds away before they’re ready to blow away. There is still a serious viral overcast. Why is it so imperative right now to open and run into the restaurant where many servers and others remain unvaccinated.
There is no free ticket to immunity here. Even with the vaccines. The variants have already shown concerning resistance. People have gotten reinfected with and without vaccines. There are people with good immune systems who have gotten infected, gone on ventilators, and died. There are many explainable deaths and sickness from Covid. There are also plenty of unexplainable deaths and sickness. Try reading some of those stories, instead of just talking about the elderly and infirm nursing homes victims.
Listen to the national health spokespeople and professional medical consensus, and then blend it with some common sense. Sure this is all hard. It’s been a year. I choose to look at things from the other side. Its actually not been that long a time. And it actually is quite easy.
>MB
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said on Friday.
Daily infections rose about six weeks after counties allowed restaurants to open for dining on the premises, and death rates followed two months later.
Even if restaurants limit capacity, however, aerosolized virus may accumulate if ventilation is inadequate, Dr. Allen said.
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant, spin class, a gym, a choir practice — if you’re indoors with no masks, or no ventilation, we know that’s higher risk,” he said. “Respiratory aerosols build up indoors. It’s that simple. This is a real problem for restaurants.”
The Virus Spread Where Restaurants Reopened or Mask Mandates Were Absent
C.D.C. researchers found that coronavirus infections and death rates rose in U.S. counties permitting in-person dining or not requiring masks.
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the C.D.C. director, said Friday.Credit…Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press
Federal researchers also found that counties opening restaurantsfor on-premises dining — indoors or outdoors — saw a rise in daily infections about six weeks later, and an increase in Covid-19 death rates about two months later.
The study does not prove cause and effect, but the findings square with other research showing that masks prevent infection and that indoor spaces foster the spread of the virus through aerosols, tiny respiratory particles that linger in the air.
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the C.D.C., said on Friday. “And so we would advocate for policies, certainly while we’re at this plateau of a high number of cases, that would listen to that public health science.”
On Friday night, the National Restaurant Association, which represents one million restaurants and food service outlets, criticized the C.D.C. study as “an ill-informed attack on the industry hardest-hit by the pandemic.” It pointed out that researchers had not controlled for factors other than restaurant dining — such as business closures and other policies — that might have contributed to coronavirus infections and deaths.
“If a positive correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks is found, that would not mean that ice cream causes shark attacks,” the association said in a statement.
The group also faulted federal researchers for not measuring compliance with safe operating protocols, and it noted that the research did not distinguish between indoor dining or outdoor dining, nor whether restaurants had adhered to distancing recommendations or had adequate ventilation.
“It is irresponsible to pin the spread of Covid-19 on a single industry,” the association said.
The findings come as city and state officials nationwide grapple with growing pressure to reopen schools and businesses amid falling rates of new cases and deaths. Officials have recently permitted limited indoor dining in New York City. On Thursday, Connecticut’s governor said the state would be ending capacity limits later this month on restaurants, gyms and offices. Masks are still required in both locales.
“The study is not surprising,” said Joseph Allen, an associate professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the university’s Healthy Buildings program. “What’s surprising is that we see some states ignoring all of the evidence and opening up quickly, and removing mask mandates and opening full dining.”
Other researchers said the new study confirmed the idea that viral transmission often takes place through the air, that physical distancing may not be sufficient to halt the spread in some settings, and that masks at least partly block airborne particles.
President Biden’s health advisers have said in recent days that now is not the time to relax. As of Thursday, the seven-day average of new cases was still 62,924 a day, according to a database maintained by The New York Times.
Mr. Biden on Wednesday criticized the decisions by the governors of Texas and Mississippi to lift statewide mask mandates and reopen businesses without restrictions, calling the plans “a big mistake” that reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
The president, who has asked Americans to wear masks during his first 100 days in office, said it was critical for public officials to follow the guidance of doctors and public health leaders as the coronavirus vaccination campaign gains momentum. As of Thursday, about 54 million people had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
“It may seem tempting, in the face of all of this progress, to try to rush back to normalcy as if the virus is in the rearview mirror,” Andy Slavitt, a White House adviser on the pandemic, said on Friday. “It’s not.”
Diners in San Antonio on Wednesday. Credit…Eric Gay/Associated Press
C.D.C. researchers examined the associations between mask mandates, indoor or outdoor restaurant dining, and coronavirus infections and deaths last year between March 1 and Dec. 31. The agency relied on county-level data from state government websites and measured daily percentage change in coronavirus cases and deaths.
Infections and deaths declined after counties mandated mask use, the agency found. Daily infections rose about six weeks after counties allowed restaurants to open for dining on the premises, and death rates followed two months later.
The report’s authors concluded that mask mandates were linked to statistically significant decreases in coronavirus cases and death rates within 20 days of implementation. On-premises dining at restaurants, indoors or outdoors, was associated with rising case and death rates 41 to 80 days after reopenings.
“State mask mandates and prohibiting on-premises dining at restaurants help limit potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2, reducing community transmission of Covid-19,” the authors wrote.
Shortly after publishing the report, the C.D.C. amended it, urging establishments that resume serving diners to follow agency guidelines for reducing transmission in restaurants.
“The message is, if restaurants are going to open for on-premise dining, it’s important to follow C.D.C. guidelines to do so safely and effectively,” said Gery P. Guy, a scientist with the C.D.C.’s Covid response team and the study’s corresponding author.
That includes “everything from having staff stay home when they show signs of Covid or have tested positive or been in contact with someone who has Covid, and requiring masks among employees as well as customers who are not actively eating or drinking,” Dr. Guy said.
Other steps include adequate ventilation, options to eat outdoors, spacing customers six feet apart, encouraging frequent hand washing, and sanitizing of surfaces that are touched a lot, such as cash registers or pay terminals, door handles and tables.
Even if restaurants limit capacity, however, aerosolized virus may accumulate if ventilation is inadequate, Dr. Allen said.
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s a restaurant, spin class, a gym, a choir practice — if you’re indoors with no masks, low or no ventilation, we know that’s higher risk,” he said. “Respiratory aerosols build up indoors. It’s that simple. This is a real problem for restaurants.”
Linsey Marr, an expert on aerosol transmission at Virginia Tech, said Americans could not be expected to follow all the latest science, and so many simply rely on what is open or closed as an indicator of what is safe.
But indoor dining is particularly risky, she added. People typically sit in a restaurant for an hour or more and don’t wear masks while eating, leaving them vulnerable to airborne virus.
“Limiting capacity will help reduce the risk of transmission, but indoor dining is still a high-risk activity until more people are vaccinated,” she said.
Restaurant workers are particularly exposed. While they can wear masks, diners do not, reducing protection against the virus. And workers spend many hours inside with every shift, Dr. Allen said.
He recommended that restaurant workers double-mask, wearing a surgical mask covered by a cloth mask, or buy high-efficiency masks like N95s, typically reserved for health care workers, or KN95 or KF94 masks, taking steps to assure they are not counterfeit.
“Now is not the time to let our guard down and pull back on the controls when we’re so close to having a lot of people vaccinated,” Dr. Allen said.
College students crowded the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on March 11.
Reading the latest CDC guidelines, as well as recognizing some states’ loosening, one would hope, think, we are moving in the right direction. Its something at least. Right?
But, given the UK B1.1.7 variant (already dominating the U.S.), the So. African B1.351, and the P.1, both here ashore as well, albeit expected, I wonder if this loosening up is fueled more by politics, especially state and local, than science. No matter the Democratic President or the appointed CDC head.
Factor in the dumbfounded recent decisions in Florida, Texas, Mississippi, all now wide open states, who gather and travel amok, plus the 50%-80% higher transmission rate of the new variants, plus the increase in severity levels, plus the still open question of transmitting the virus even if vaccinated and/or asymptomatic, and I’m not sure how to relax at all outside of the tightest, most trustworthy bubble of a single household, or maybe two, that are almost clones of each other’s controlled activity patterns.
People gather for spring break on the beach in Port Aransas, Texas on, Friday, March 12, 2021.
Politics aside, which is already barely possible to remove from the current guidance, the new guidance right now, today, is positive. BUT, when the guidance is merged, as it must be, with aggregated human behavior right now, today, it becomes a different calculation. One with a bold asterisk.
A look back at the past year, and already questionable current activity, is enough to see how thoughtless, selfish, ultimately clueless human behaviors can always upset any positive outcome of scientific trajectory. No matter how promising it might sound in the beginning.
States like Florida, Texas, Mississippi, and all the other usual actors defying common sense, are already playing the same losing hands as recklessly as they did last Summer of 2020. We know what then followed in this country.
I wish I could fully embrace the new CDC guidelines, including the state where I live, but I just can’t. I honestly don’t even know why anyone could.
>MB
Related News:
CORONAVIRUS IN CONNECTICUT Experts concerned that rolling back restrictions will cause a COVID surge in CT
Connecticut Post March 9, 2021
Gov. Ned Lamont’s decision to loosen COVID-19 restrictions has experts concerned about an increase in coronavirus cases and possibly deaths.
“I am concerned that we, yet again, have lulled ourselves into a false belief that we have gotten SARS-CoV-2 under control,” said immunologist Kristian G. Andersen on Twitter. “We’re getting close — much closer, in fact — but we’re not there. Yet.”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky, told National Public Radio Wednesday that although cases are dropping, the pandemic is not over yet.
“I think the next two or three months could go in one of two directions,” Walensky said on NPR following the Texas governor’s decsion to recind that state’s mask mandate. “If things open up, if we’re not really cautious, we could end up with a post-spring break surge the way we saw a post-Christmas surge. We could see much more disease. We could see much more death. In an alternative vision, I see we really hunker down for a couple of more months, we get so many people vaccinated and we get to a really great place by summer.”
Lamont announced Thursday that capacity limits will be lifted for restaurants and other businesses, though social-distancing rules and mask mandates will still be in effect.
Under the new rules, social and recreational gatherings will be limited to 25 people indoors and 100 people outdoors. Sports teams will be allowed to practice and compete again, and venues will be allowed to include 100 people indoors and 200 outdoors.
The loosened restrictions take effect on March 19, 2021.
Excellent points here on the dishonest, and/or, incompetent ruling and opinions from the Conservative Supreme Court justices. When opinions like this are heard from anyone, most dismayingly, from federal judges, it really is impossible to believe they are literate. MB
Supreme Court’s scientifically illiterate decision will cost lives
Opinion by Jeffrey D. Sachs
November 27, 2020
(CNN)Last month, I wrote that Amy Coney Barrett would help to usher in a new post-truth jurisprudence on the Supreme Court. While I had cited her anti-science statements on climate change, her arrival on the court has created a new 5-4 majority against public-health science at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
When it ruled this week against New York state’s decision to limit religious gatherings in a few high-incidence parts of New York City, the court proved the dangers of scientifically illiterate judges overturning government decisions that were based on scientific evidence.
The immediate effect on New York City is moot because the state had already lifted the particular orders under review. The grave, imminent danger lies in the rest of the country, where public health authorities will feel hamstrung to restrict religious gatherings even when the virus is spreading out of control.
The two cases under review were brought by two religious bodies: the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. Both objected to stringent limits on religious gatherings in particularly hard-hit neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The court’s five conservative justices, a new majority with Barrett now on the bench, argued that the state’s limits on religious gatherings violated “the minimum requirement of neutrality” to religion under the First Amendment.
The court majority characterized the violation of neutrality this way:
“In a red zone, while a synagogue or church may not admit more than 10 persons, businesses categorized as ‘essential’ may admit as many people as they wish. And the list of ‘essential’ businesses includes things such as acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, garages, as well as many whose services are not limited to those that can be regarded as essential, such as all plants manufacturing chemicals and microelectronics and all transportation facilities.”
In his concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch opines as follows:
“So, at least according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience? … The only explanation for treating religious places differently seems to be a judgment that what happens there just isn’t as ‘essential’ as what happens in secular spaces. Indeed, the Governor is remarkably frank about this: In his judgment laundry and liquor, travel and tools, are all ‘essential’ while traditional religious exercises are not. That is exactly the kind of discrimination the First Amendment forbids.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued similarly:
“The State argues that it has not impermissibly discriminated against religion because some secular businesses such as movie theaters must remain closed and are thus treated less favorably than houses of worship. But under this Court’s precedents, it does not suffice for a State to point out that, as compared to houses of worship, some secular businesses are subject to similarly severe or even more severe restrictions … Rather, once a State creates a favored class of businesses, as New York has done in this case, the State must justify why houses of worship are excluded from that favored class.”
The problem is that the apparently scientifically illiterate majority on the court missed the entire point of the restriction on religious services. Gorsuch mistakenly claims that New York state deems laundry and liquor as essential but religious services as not essential. That is false. Kavanaugh mistakenly claims that New York state failed to justify why houses of worship are excluded from the “favored class” of businesses with lesser restrictions. This too is false.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, writing in the minority, explained the basic scientific facts that were completely overlooked by the majority:
“But JUSTICE GORSUCH does not even try to square his examples with the conditions medical experts tell us facilitate the spread of COVID-19: large groups of people gathering, speaking, and singing in close proximity indoors for extended periods of time … Unlike religious services, which ‘have every one of th(ose) risk factors,’ … bike repair shops and liquor stores generally do not feature customers gathering inside to sing and speak together for an hour or more at a time. (‘Epidemiologists and physicians generally agree that religious services are among the riskiest activities’). Justices of this Court play a deadly game in second guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily.”
In fact, the great risks for transmission are indoor places like religious services, restaurants, concert halls and theaters where large groups are together for a considerable period of time, typically an hour or more. As Justices Sotomayor and Kagan point out, “New York treats houses of worship far more favorably than their secular comparators,” by “requiring movie theaters, concert venues, and sporting arenas subject to New York’s regulation to close entirely, but allowing houses of worship to open subject to capacity restrictions.”
A recent study by Stanford University researchers published in Nature Magazine made the same point regarding the highest risks of viral transmission: “on average across metro areas, full-service restaurants, gyms, hotels, cafes, religious organizations, and limited-service restaurants produced the largest predicted increases in infections when reopened.”
What is especially disappointing in the Supreme Court decision is that the lower court had made the correct points very clearly in a decision that was brazenly overlooked by the majority decision. The Federal District Court had noted that: “Among the other problematic features of religious gatherings, congregants arrive and leave at the same time, physically greet one another, sit or stand close together, share or pass objects, and sing or chant in a way that allows for airborne transmission of the virus.”
None of this is to argue that New York state’s regulations were perfectly drawn. That is not the point. The point is that the Supreme Court should be on the side of saving lives and urging rational, science-based behavior by all, especially at this moment of maximum peril to the population. Even more than the Supreme Court, religious groups should also be siding actively and energetically with public health authorities, both to protect their own congregants and all of society. Pope Francis succored Catholics around the world by shifting to an online Mass in response to the quarantine. His recent New York Times op-ed eloquently makes the point that the common good takes precedence over simplistic appeals to “personal freedom” in protests against justified public health measures.
Our religious faiths are the great teachers of the supreme value of human life, and they can be great healers for those in mental distress during the pandemic. The message to the American people should be a united one, with the nation’s faith leaders, public health specialists, the politicians and, yes, Supreme Court justices using scientific knowledge combined with compassion to end the pandemic with the maximum speed and the least further suffering and loss of life.
