Last Wednesday, nearly a year after ordering extensive shutdowns of entertainment and sports complexes, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he will allow them to reopen on 23 February. One caveat: facilities seating over 10,000 can only allow a 10-percent capacity.
This comes after the governor permitted indoor dining to resume on 12 February with a maximum of 25 percent capacity.
But, as the 19 February Wall Street Journal headline revealed:
Health Experts Urge Caution as New York City Emerges from Latest Covid-19 Wave
The article, supporting the same fear-mongering, anxiety-inducing storyline of most mainstream media since the coronavirus first arrived a year ago, states:
“Some health and science experts said that such moves [to reopen] may be premature, warning that dangerous virus variants are continuing to spread and the number of people vaccinated in New York is a relatively small percentage of the state’s population.”
As the Trends Journal previously reported, all viruses naturally mutate into new strains, and history shows new strains are usually less virulent than the original. (See our 12 January article, “‘MUTANT’ STRAIN: DEADLY MEDIA HYPE & FEAR.”)
Moreover, as spewed from the mouth of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the virus infection rate in restaurants is a mere 1.4 percent. Yet, restaurants across much of the globe are prevented from having indoor dining or do so with severe restrictions. (They are allowed enclosed outdoor dining, however, as if the virus behaves differently when people eat closed up outside.)
Despite the very low 1.4 percent infection rate, regarding allowing restaurants to reopen, one of the “health experts” quoted in the Wall Street Journal article, Joseph Osmundson, clinical assistant professor of biology at New York University said, “I can’t imagine a good science-based argument.”
As the Trends Journal has been pointing out for many months, the exact opposite is closer to the truth. Lockdowns imposed by governors and local officials high on being authority figures have not presented any substantial scientific studies to support the massive shutdown of businesses and social interactions, which have wreaked havoc on tens of millions of citizens.
Flying in the face of cautions from fear-promoting health “experts” like professor Osmundson, who “can’t imagine a good science-based argument” for reopening facilities, the article points out that “cases have fallen in recent weeks.”
The article states that Governor Cuomo said, “Across the state, from hospitalizations to infection rate, our numbers are continuing to decline.”
Quoted in the article is another “expert,” Peter Chin-Hong, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who is concerned that not all restaurants have adequate ventilation and those attending sports events might spread droplets when cheering for their teams.
TRENDPOST: While the “experts” want to keep fighting the COVID War, millions of lives and livelihoods are being destroyed. The New York Post reported yesterday that more than 47 percent of small businesses citywide remain closed, while revenue for those that are open has dropped nearly 60 percent, according to TrackTheRecovery.org, a Harvard University-run database tracing the virus’ economic impact.
They also noted that in Lower Manhattan, commercial office leasing dropped nearly 70 percent in 2020, and 12 percent of businesses, ranging from hotels to department stores to restaurants, closed for good, as per data from the Downtown Alliance.
TRENDPOST: Soon after the announcement that indoor dining would be allowed again, on 10 February, the New York Times Editorial Board published an editorial titled, “The wrong time to ease restrictions.”
The “wrong time”?
The editors cited new strains of COVID as the reason the “plan to reopen New York City restaurants for indoor dining, at 25 percent capacity—and soon to relax other strictures, like those for weddings—is baffling.”
“Baffling”?
The editorial board, despite acknowledging that “state and local economies are hanging by a thread, and everyone is exhausted by restrictions and desperate to return to some semblance of normal life” and despite acknowledging “case counts are declining. The death rate is slowing down,” still had the audacity to write,
“This is a precarious moment in the fight against the coronavirus in the United States… the number of people who get sick or die from COVID-19 in the coming year will depend on the outcome of a desperate race that’s underway, between human vaccination and viral mutation.”
The New York Times Editorial Board then resorted to the analogy loved by mainstream media as it parrots the favored, warped world view of America’s political and business leaders: War.
The Editorial Board writes, “To get a sense of what this [reopening facilities] looks like to scientists and public health experts, imagine a military general leading the fight against a foreign enemy—and then selling that enemy deadly weapons on the side.”