It has been a long year since the pandemic began. If you’ve spent these months fretting over the coronavirus and suffering the negative externalities of government lockdowns, it’s time to sit back and enjoy the good news that is finally pouring in.
There is a light at the end of this tunnel, and you can begin to bask in it now, if only you are willing to listen to science and ignore the doomers, gloomers, and anti-vaccine activists in the Biden administration.
Already, the medical profession’s year-plus of experience with the coronavirus has improved doctors’ ability to treat symptoms of COVID-19. The hospitals have not been overwhelmed by a surge of cases they cannot handle. And those states that have largely reopened or loosened restrictions, such as Texas, are not seeing surges of new cases as a consequence.
Even better, mass vaccination has finally taken root. More than half of all adults in the United States have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The nation is just weeks away from making new infections less and less common.
But wait — there’s even more good news. It turns out that everyone has been wrong in holding many of the reasonable fears about how the virus is transmitted. Life might be safer than we thought.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that coronavirus transmission via surfaces is not that much of a worry.
“CDC determined that the risk of surface transmission is low, and secondary to the primary routes of virus transmission through direct contact droplets and aerosols,” a CDC official told reporters during a conference call. The virus, he added, dies “rapidly” on porous surfaces.
That is, you don’t need to disinfect aggressively every surface that someone may have touched or breathed on.
This is especially good news because the constant sanitizing of every surface has been a source of great hassle and expense for many enterprises. It turns out that the obsessive and expensive (or at least time-intensive) cleansing of all surfaces with bleach (something not good for many of those surfaces) was mostly performative all along. In fact, the CDC official warned that excessive reliance upon such cleanliness theater might give a false sense of security. In fact, excessive use of certain chemical disinfectants, such as bleach, can be harmful to human health or dangerous.
So, it’s time now to follow the science and stop insisting on the complete industrial sanitization of every room and every object before it is safe for human use. This is particularly true in school settings.
It is unreasonable for teachers unions to continue to prevent schools from opening based upon the phantom of surface-borne coronavirus, just as it has been unreasonable for them to wring their hands over the phantom of child-borne coronavirus.
Some of the same people who pretend to be adherents of rational thinking and admonish their neighbors that “science is real” are the same ones who now cling irrationally to the idea that the pandemic is an eternal slumber party for which societal flourishing and economic development can be permanently halted.
If they were serious about science, they would now listen to what the science actually says, not to the political appointees who are being pressured by the Biden administration to make union bosses and other special interests happy.
