Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Bad, and Making It Worse

Let’s be clear right from the beginning . . . pandemics are bad. Better said, pandemics are horrible. With a pandemic people will get sick, and people will die – many people will die, and many, many, many more people will get sick. However bad it is, let’s not make it worse.

Most everyone has bet all of their chips on the vaccine, and without question the vaccine will help. However, the rollout of the vaccine is already beset with delays, seemingly due to unpreparedness in some states, e.g. California.

When this pandemic is looked in retrospect years down the road, many will ask why the concept of herd immunity was not recognized and acted upon earlier – perhaps from the beginning? From my point of view, in the end this will turn out to be the only logical solution. Keeping those at low risk sequestered is insanity. Keeping college students restricted to their dorms, and keeping elementary-aged school kids out of in-person schooling will turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes of this young century. Not using common sense and advocating for herd immunity instead of lockdowns has turned something bad into something worse. (For those interested, there is a chapter on the practical use of herd immunity in my fictional novella, The Keneally Chronicles.)

However, the focus of this piece is about how “those who know best” have made things worse, and continue to double-down on their failed policies with the detrimental effects on innocent bystanders, namely small business and restaurant owners.

The following stats are from a Wall Street Journal article by Andy Puzder on 1/5/21:

  • The latest lockdowns across the country will be deadly for the small businesses that have endured the pandemic this far. While there are no official numbers yet, business data show significant losses. Yelp’s Local Economic Impact Report found that, from March 1 through Aug. 31, nearly 100,000 businesses listed on Yelp had closed permanently due to the pandemic, an average of more than 500 a day. 

To me this certainly sounds like making a bad situation worse !

  • Consider restaurants, America’s second-largest source of private employment. According to the National Restaurant Association, 110,000 have permanently closed and more than 500,000 are “in an unprecedented economic decline.” In November alone, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, restaurants and bars lost 17,400 jobs as new state lockdowns took effect.

To me this certainly sounds like making a bad situation worse !

If blue states, and here I am speaking specifically about California, really want to help those who are down and sinking fast, perhaps they should start by not making a bad situation worse. 

Namely, instead let’s make things better for small businesses and restaurant owners. Let them open up, so that both the owners and their employees can feed their families.

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