Daniel Halperin is an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. He says he understands why people get upset when politicians are caught doing something they are admonishing everyone else not to do. But as he explains in his recent book, “Facing COVID Without Panic,” he believes a bigger part of the problem has been the reliance on mandates, especially those that have only a marginal impact on the virus’s spread.
“Many of these mandates and guidelines fixate on behaviors and settings where the actual risk is very low, such as fleeting public encounters, surface-based transmission or beach visits,” he says in an email. “Meanwhile, measures which could have the greatest prevention impact, such as re-engineering buildings to improve air circulation, are still not widely prioritized—not to mention even simpler actions, such as opening windows to allow outdoor air to circulate indoors.”
Unlike the “science” invoked for some of the more dubious restrictions (e.g., broad lockdowns and school closures), concerns about large Thanksgiving gatherings are legitimate. Certainly the risk of transmission goes up with indoor gatherings that bring together people from multiple households. This is why Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order limiting New Yorkers to 10 people for at-home gatherings.
But manifestly it isn’t working. Police are making clear they can’t and won’t enforce such a ban. At a gym outside Buffalo on Friday, dozens of business owners who had met to discuss how to survive new Covid-19 restrictions chased away a health inspector and two sheriff’s deputies who had gone inside to break up the meeting because it violated the governor’s limit. It’s a good example of how relying on government edicts rather than persuasion breeds contempt for both health experts and the law.
What might have been a more productive path for dealing with Thanksgiving concerns? Certainly Mr. Cuomo could discourage large family celebrations. But he would have done better to underscore where the greatest risks are—i.e., that a Thanksgiving with a half-dozen septuagenarian uncles with diabetes and heart conditions is a far riskier proposition than a turkey dinner shared by young parents and children. And maybe put the emphasis on ways to mitigate risk, such as opening windows or moving such celebrations outside where possible.
Consider another celebrated gotcha. Recently the president of Notre Dame, the Rev. John Jenkins, was raked over the coals by students and faculty after he appeared at a White House ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett without a mask. Later he tested positive for Covid-19. It appeared karma was catching up with him.
Lost is the real Covid-19 story here: Unlike many other university presidents, Father Jenkins kept Notre Dame’s campus open this semester. It wasn’t without outbreaks and setbacks, but the university adapted and succeeded in keeping life as normal as possible. Doesn’t it suggest the better path forward is to lay out the risks and the ways to mitigate them rather than pretend risk can be eliminated with some sweeping decree?
Certainly leaders ought to live by the same rules they impose on everyone else. But as we celebrate this Thanksgiving amid the many examples of double standards, maybe we should take them as less a morality tale than a sign we need workable guidelines that even politicians could obey.
Additional evidence comes from Wisconsin, whose number of COVID cases at the start of Gov. Tony Evers’ first mask mandate Aug. 1 was 54,002. Yesterday it was 357,771.
