Scared People, Stay Home And Leave Life To The Rest Of Us
Ireland will reimpose restrictions on social life this week, ordering nightclubs to close with restaurants reduced to table service only at a distance. Home gatherings will be capped at three households, with mass sports events limited to 50 percent capacity.
The lockdown implemented on Tuesday will last through the holiday season until at least Jan. 9 in the island nation where nearly 90 percent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated. Irish nightlife had only just reopened in October.
“[The] risks associated with proceeding into the Christmas period without some restrictions to reduce the volume of personal contacts is just too high,” said Prime Minister Micheál Martin. Despite near-universal vaccination, almost 5 million residents will be back under lockdown for an entire month.
The return of similar restrictions in spite of compliance with face masks and vaccines are already on their way to the United States. Oregon, with a nearly 65 percent vaccination rate boasting one of the highest in the nation, is about to become the first to make its state mask mandate permanent as liberal enclaves of the country embrace a permanent pandemic.
Five other states and Washington D.C. still maintain mask mandates regardless of vaccination status, according to a MultiState tracker, and 14 mandate vaccines on specific private-sector industries. As cases rise and new variants threaten to undermine vaccine-immunity, harsher restrictions are guaranteed to follow.
The United States is far from immune from the hysteria that’s gripped the globe, with states only saved from the same measures in Europe and Australia in thanks to grassroots opposition emanating from within the Republican Party. Even then, too many Republican governors have refused to fight the lockdowns.
An anxious population infected with media-induced neurosis is demanding restrictions become a permanent and mandatory fixture of American life to the detriment of their neighbors. In September, Gallup released results of an August survey that found 92 percent of 3,000 U.S. adults polled overstated the risks of hospitalization for the unvaccinated.
“62 percent overstate the risk for vaccinated people,” the group reported.
The survey was completed as a follow up to research from the Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economic Recovery Study last published December. It found Americans of all political stripes dramatically overestimated the probability of severe outcomes from COVID-19.
Five-thousand U.S. adults were asked, “As far as you know, what percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?” Only 18 percent said between 1 to 5 percent, the accurate answer at the time.
“A higher percentage of Republicans (26 percent) gave the correct response than did Democrats (just 10 percent),” Gallup reported.
The surveys’ results is a stunning indictment of American media. Reporters have likely become similarly infected by undue panic feeding their hysterical reporting.
Meanwhile, it seems nobody wants to tackle the underlying epidemic of obesity, a condition affecting at least 42 percent of the population that triples one’s risk of hospitalization with COVID.
True pandemic preparedness begins with a commitment to healthier lifestyles, so that if a coronavirus variant does emerge to evade vaccine immunity, a healthier population runs far less risk of overwhelming hospitals. After all, that was always the justification for lockdowns. In Ireland, more than 60 percent of its residents are overweight or obese, ranking it among the highest in Europe.
Heaven forbid scared people either stay home and exercise rather than demand the world come to a grinding halt over their misguided anxiety.
Instead, the lockdowns have become far too comforting for far too many. A basic internet search for “anxious return to normal” will turn up countless articles from legacy publications either profiling the anxious, counseling others over normalcy’s return, or outright arguing against it.
People conditioned to stay home now see no issue with ordering others to do the same perpetually, seemingly oblivious to their own demonstrated ability to do just that.
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