Tag Archives: Social distancing

MIT Study Suggests Six Foot Social Distancing, Limited Occupancy Rules Are Completely Pointless, by Tom Pappert

SLL suggested the same thing a year ago. Oh well, better late than never for MIT. From Tom Pappert at nationalfile.com:

After over a year, scientists have determined that social distancing and limited occupancy rules may be totally useless.

A new study conducted by MIT scientists and released this week reveals that the six foot social distancing and limited occupancy guidelines made law in most of the civilized world have done little to slow the spread of COVID-19, and suggests the only way to reduce the spread of COVID-19 is to limit exposure to highly populated areas and areas where people are physically exerting themselves, such as gyms, or areas where people are singing or speaking, such as churches.

The study reveals that the social distancing guidelines employed throughout much of the world for over a year have done nothing to limit the spread of COVID-19, suggesting that the adaption of the guidelines did not stop the spread of the of the China-originated virus, and it can only be slowed with the employment of severe lockdowns. Paradoxically, states and cities that have engaged in severe lockdowns have seen the largest spikes of COVID-19.

“We argue there really isn’t much of a benefit to the 6-foot rule, especially when people are wearing masks,” MIT professor Martin Z. Bazant said, as reported by NBC. “It really has no physical basis because the air a person is breathing while wearing a mask tends to rise and comes down elsewhere in the room so you’re more exposed to the average background than you are to a person at a distance.” In other words, widespread mask wearing may simply change the physical vectors of transmission within a given room rather than stop it, effectively making six foot distancing rules pointless.

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The Gradual Return of Good Sense, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

An article laced with, hold on, optimism! Americans are gradually coming to their senses about Covidiocy. I can only hope that it eventually reaches New Mexico. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at aier.org:

President Biden made a statement last week that Americans might be able to gather in small groups by July 4, to celebrate Independence Day. One wonders who is protecting him from the reality: most of the country is almost entirely back to normal.

Outside of California and some Northeast states, the lockdowns have largely ended, with ever more states repealing restrictions and mandates. Reimposing them for any reason seems almost unthinkable at this point. Anthony Fauci’s constant prattle about the dangers of opening up is falling on deaf ears.

The few states that are still locked down are rapidly losing residents and businesses. States that are entirely open are gaining them. As for the travel against which the CDC warns, the nation’s airports and highways are back to pre-lockdown levels of normal. The slogan “land of the free” is starting to mean something again.

Even the New York Times, which has led the lockdown effort for longer than a year, is starting to back peddle, finally. An article called “I Would Much Rather Be in Florida” points out:

[M]uch of the state has a boomtown feel, a sense of making up for months of lost time.

Realtors cold-knock on doors looking to recruit sellers to the sizzling housing market, in part because New Yorkers and Californians keep moving in. The unemployment rate is 5.1 percent, compared to 9.3 percent in California, 8.7 percent in New York and 6.9 percent in Texas. That debate about opening schools? It came and went months ago. Children have been in classrooms since the fall….

Florida’s death rate is no worse than the national average, and better than that of some other states that imposed more restrictions, despite its large numbers of retirees, young partyers and tourists. Caseloads and hospitalizations across most of the state are down….

Try to buy a home and the experience is frustrating for a different reason: an open house will have 30 cars parked outside. Though Florida’s population growth has slowed during the pandemic, documentary stamps, an excise tax on real estate sales, were 15 percent higher in January than they were a year ago. Filing fees for new corporations were 14 percent higher.

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Image Shows School Band ‘Socially Distanced’ Inside Human Tents, by Paul Joseph Watson

The picture tells the whole story. From Paul Joseph Watson at summitnews.com:

Clown world strikes again.

An image shows students at a school in Wenatchee, Washington State socially distanced inside what look like human tents as they perform in a band.

The picture appears to show two girls playing saxophones while trapped inside the awning-like structures, while others in the background play flute.

According to the article, “You can’t see them smiling beneath the masks,” but the kids are happy to be back at school.

The article quotes Wenatchee Principal Eric Anderson, who celebrates the fact that the school environment has been carefully tailored to ensure that students never remove their face coverings.

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Why Social Distancing Should Not Be the New Normal, by Joseph Mercola

Having sick people stay home is as effective, if not more so, in addressing the coronavirus as lockdowns and social distancing. From Joseph Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

According to some, Bill Gates prominently among them, social distancing is part of “the new normal.” Alas, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest social distancing and lockdowns will not be necessary at all, and were probably a bad idea in the first place.

According to Nobel-prize-winning scientist Michael Levitt,1 the rate of SARS-CoV-2 mortality never experienced exponential growth, as was predicted, which suggests a majority of people may have had some sort of prior resistance or immunity.

Levitt, a professor of structural biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, received the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.

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Oxford Experts: ‘There is No Scientific Evidence for COVID Two Metre Rule’, by 21st Century Wire

Seeing as how the social distancing idea came from an Albuquerque high-schooler’s social studies paper, it’s not surprising that it has no scientific support. From 21stcenturywire.com:


While other countries and societies are getting back to life as normal, in Britain, the social distancing folly continues. For whatever reason, UK government officials seem desperate to cling to the crisis, and impose new restrictions every week which are only really effective at one thing: hampering business and trade.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson remains confused on the issue, and for some reason can’t seem to fully let go of the sacred “two metre rule”.

It’s become a farce of historic proportions. As a general rule, the government has resisted any demands by businesses to reduce the government’s arbitrary limit from 2 metres to 1 metre. This would have greatly helped businesses to avoid expensive health and safety compliance and reopen this summer.

While the government and its science team dither back and forth, the economy continues to crater, and unemployment is spiralling.

Meanwhile, scientists from the vaunted committee of experts known as ‘SAGE’ (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), are busy issuing warnings to ministers that the public will need to wear masks and also ‘minimise their time together’ if they sit closer than 2 metres apart.

It’s already well-known by now according to real data and the experience of European countries – that the virus was seasonal and has already ‘left the building,’ and that the only demographic who were ever at any serious risk were elderly persons with chronic comorbidities, and more specifically, those residing in care homes.

Why are UK government officials still resisting relaxing social distancing measures? Has this become some sort of elaborate political face-saving exercise now, or is there a larger social engineering agenda in motion?

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You can’t rally. We can riot, by Stephen L. Miller

Perhaps you didn’t know that Covid-19 made distinctions between good and bad social undistancing. From Stephen L. Miller at spectator.us:

The staggering hypocrisy of the Democrats over COVID-19

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Protesters crowd down Hollywood Boulevard

Are you ready for the second blame wave? As the country braces itself for an inevitable repeat surge in COVID-19 infections, we’re told red-state governors ‘opened too soon’. The next outbreak, we can be sure, will be something to do with the fact the President decided to resume his political rallies, approximately two weeks from now.

What nobody says is that individual or social behavior is the cause. It can’t possibly be the thousands of people closely together marching down city streets yelling and chanting, some with masks, some not. The guidelines fell completely by the wayside for the Democrats and much of network cable news.

In the middle of May, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser extended her lockdown order through to the June 8. Two days prior to her own lockdown order was to be reviewed, on June 6, she encouraged mass gatherings of protests, in a tweet saying ‘Let’s all meet here soon #BlackLivesMatter’, with a photo showing off her big block yellow letters painted down a DC street. In a press release about a possible spike in coronavirus cases in her city, after two weeks of protests she encouraged herself, Bowser announced that ‘DC Health has confirmed that a new peak was detected in the data, resetting the Districts Phase One count to nine days of sustained decrease.

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The ‘Science’ Behind Social Distancing, by Jeff Harris

It all started with a high school student’s computer model. From Jeff Harris at ronpaulinstitute.org:

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The world has been turned upside down with draconian government orders to “flatten the curve” with what is called Social Distancing. Schools have been closed for months, businesses have been involuntarily shut down and travel restrictions have idled 90 percent of the airlines. The net result is over 36 million American’s are unemployed and the number is rising.

Now we learn the whole social distancing lockdown that has paralyzed the nation comes from a very surprising source. A May 2nd article in the Albuquerque Journal reveals social distancing hysteria is NOT based on scientific evidence or clinical medical trials for that matter.

How would you feel if you learned your normal way of life had been completely upended based on a computer model created by a 15 year old Albuquerque New Mexico High School student named Laura Glass?

Glass, along with her Dad Robert (a government scientist then working at Sandia National Laboratories) cooked up a home brew computer model for a science and engineering fair in May, 2006. Robert Glass had been working on computer models for the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center at Sandia and often worked from home.

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The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Believe or not, the social distancing idea originated in a 14-year-old’s paper for a science class. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at aier.org:

Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.

There was nothing normal about it all. We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.

How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causing worker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion and demoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?

Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warned ferociously against it – but by politicians.

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A Silver Lining, by Robert Gore

Who will fight for your rights?

…we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Ayn Rand, Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, Appendix, “The Nature of Government,” 1967

We are no longer fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion, we’ve arrived. It is the stage of which every would-be dictator dreams, where his whims are absolute, and everything everyone else says, does, or thinks must comport with those whims, even—impossible though it would be—when they are contradictory.

Science is anti-whim. Nature, as Francis Bacon observed, to be commanded must be obeyed. Nothing illustrates the ultimate inversion of the official coronavirus response better than its leaders’ assault on science in the name of their “science.”

Doctors have been discouraged or prohibited from administering hydroxychloroquine, by itself or in conjunction with other medications, vitamins, and zinc compounds, to treat Covid-19. They have observed and documented the effectiveness of such remedies—mitigation or elimination of the disease’s symptoms—but their observation and documentation are dismissed. Only the validation procedure mandated by the medical bureaucracy—the expensive and complex multistage tests required of new drugs to establish their efficacy and safety—will suffice for official permission. It’s what their “science” demands of a cheap and seemingly effective remedy that’s been on the market for years as a treatment for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and malaria.

So where were the tests and control-group studies for the pandemic models, lockdowns, social distancing, masks, flattening the curve, closing businesses, and contact tracing that have been the official coronavirus responses? Projections are hypotheses, but only one class of hypotheses was officially accepted—disaster scenarios that fed panic and paved the way for further expansion of governments’ power. The doomsday models have been discredited; cases and deaths have been orders of magnitude less than projected.

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‘Social Distancing’ is Snake Oil, Not Science, by William Sullivan

No science supports the efficacy of social distancing. From William Sullivan at americanthinker.com:

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York says that it’s “shocking” to discover that 66 percent of new hospitalizations appear to have been among people “largely sheltering at home.”

“We thought maybe they were taking public transportation,” he said, “but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”

“Much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself,” he continues.  “Everything closed down, government has done everything it could, society has done everything it could.”

It’s your fault, he says to the hospitalized New Yorkers who loyally complied with his government directive.  But here’s an interesting alternative theory as to why, mostly, old people who are staying at home are being hospitalized.  What if the government directive to close everything down and mandate “social distancing” actually made the problem worse?

Dr. David Katz predicted precisely this outcome on March 20, in an article that is proving every bit as correct in its predictions and sober policy recommendations as Dr. Anthony Fauci has been proven incorrect — which is another way of saying that the article has proven flawless, so far.

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