NYT finally admits: our behavior doesn’t seem to affect the virus
Well, it took only 19 months, but the New York Times is admitting that the progress of the virus does not appear to have a whole lot to do with our behavior.
In an artlcle this week called “Covid, In Retreat,” David Leonhart of the Times observes that U.S. cases have fallen 35 percent in a month — a month that included Labor Day, whose celebrations were supposed to have made the numbers worse.
(Yes, I know the problems with “cases,” but he later notes that this general trend extends to hospitalizations and deaths as well.)
The virus appears to move in two-month cycles, says Leonhart, and epidemiologists “do not understand why” it works like that. It has occurred “even when human behavior was not changing in obvious ways.”
“We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus,” says Michael Osterholm, the former Biden COVID adviser who has occasionally said sensible things.
Leonhart is also cautiously optimistic that the worst may be behind us — a rare thing coming from a New York Times writer.
He cites Scott Gottlieb, formerly of the FDA, as saying, “I’m of the opinion that this is the last major wave of infection.”
Gottlieb could be wrong, of course. That’s almost not the point. It’s that they’re talking in ways that are clearly different from the Fauci wing of all this, and that’s better than nothing.
Now back to Leonhart: his point about a two-month cycle, and Osterholm’s point that we’ve been overemphasizing the role of human interventions in controlling the virus, obviously extends to masks as well: nobody is wearing masks in two-month cycles, and yet the virus observes that pattern anyway.
Nobody in the article extends the analysis to masks, but there’s no other way to interpret what they’re saying.
Still, despite this, we have kids masked in school all day and crazy deep-cleaning protocols as if we haven’t learned a thing in 19 months.
Someone joked that we should just pretend schools are restaurants so kids can just take their masks off when they sit down.
It’s never too late to say: sending the kids to this school was a mistake.
Header image: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
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