Public Health Experts Say Covid Isn’t Over, but the American People Believe Otherwise

I work for the government, so I know what I mean when I say that the government often makes rules so stupid they should be ignored.

And the majority of the Covid regulations of the past two years have been stupid in the extreme. Here in California they closed all the parks and tennis courts, and they even tried to close the beach. “Stay home, stay safe!” 

I rarely stay home and I’m always out exercising: thus it has been all my adult life. So from the beginning I ignored these “stay at home” rules. Here is a telling example: In the height of the lockdowns on Easter of 2020, I and another tennis fanatic found maybe the last open tennis court in all of Ventura County and we played singles there. It was a dilapidated tennis court at an Oxnard extended stay hotel, and we just went and played there and the management didn’t report us to the police. They had taken the nets down on the other courts to stop anyone from using them, but inexplicably one court still had its dilapidated net up — and we sniffed that court out and took advantage. I knew I was not going to spread Covid by playing tennis or going to the beach, or by taking my kids to the park. All those activities were banned in the middle of 2020. I knew it was bullshit.

And the mask wearing, too. Your average cotton facemasks don’t much limit the spread of Covid. It was an exercise in panic and overreach. When my teacher’s union asked me in early 2021 if I would be good-to-go teaching in a crowded classroom without a facemask, I wrote the following: “Sure! In Florida not many people wear masks like we do here, and their Covid numbers are no better and no worse than those in California. I’m fine with getting rid of the mask requirement.” If you wore a heavy-duty N95 face mask all the time, and did not even take it off when you were home with family at night, that might very well make a difference. But short of that, facemasks were an exercise in virtue signaling which made no real difference in the pandemic; over time the numbers proved this. I never wore a face mask willingly.

Not long after the outbreak started, I could see clearly two facts: there were those who had gotten Covid, and those who would eventually get it. Sooner or later, the virus would arrive. And with two vaccines and two boosters shots in my system, I was not afraid of Covid at all. When those I know finally got the virus in 2022, I would tell them, “Congratulations! Rest up, monitor your health, let your immune system do what it does, and when you will fight off the infection and have the antibodies on board – and you should be good for the next year or so. Then you will probably get mildly sick and adapt to the newest strain of Covid.” Getting Covid was an opportunity to keep your antibodies up to date, and to put it behind you for the foreseeable future; it’s going to happen sooner or later, unless you want to live like a monk – without ever coming into contact with others. Almost everybody I knew got Covid, and nobody was too terribly sick; no one was even close to being hospitalized. Nobody I knew died of Covid. Those who never were exposed to the virus would become the most “at risk” over time: get Covid once every year or so, get mildly sick, acquire antibodies, and get on with your life – like you do with rhinoviruses and coronaviruses out there in more normal times. I was DONE with Covid and departments of public health. Nowadays if I see any news about Covid or Donald Trump, I automatically roll my eyes in annoyance and skip over it.

During those months of quarantine and lockdowns, I got in some of the best shape of my life. When the pandemic closed certain avenues off, I adapted and got my needs taken care of in other places. I took advantage of the time. I contemn those who put on weight by “stress eating” or developed drinking or drug problems in response to Covid. On more than one occasion someone would tell me, “Well, as you know we all gained weight during the pandemic” or “everyone was taking anxiety medication in 2021,” and I would tell them politely but firmly that was not true. Plenty of people weathered the Covid-era relatively well. 

But it could get ugly. There were those nosy neighbors, mostly women, who became a sort of “mask police” and would very much be in other people’s business about Covid rules. I would never be one of those people, and I never paid the least attention to them. I would live my life as I pleased. There was a nasty undercurrent of judging and acrimony about mask wearing and rule following about Covid which is still present at a lower level. I referred to it as Covid communitarianism. Its loci was in the departments of public health and on social media, and I will forever look at those places with great suspicion.

The argument was this: in the names of protecting the immunosuppressed, the elederly, the diabetics, and those with other comorbidities – that everyone else should make permanent alterations in their lives – closing off manifold opportunities to learn, socialized, travel, and make a living – all in the name of protecting the vulnerable.

No, thank you. I am done. America is done.

I traveled through Los Angeles International Airport two separate times this summer. The authorities would play pre-recorded announcements every half hour or so saying that everyone at LAX should be wearing a facemask and staying six feet apart, but very few paid any attention. A small minority of the travelers there were wearing a facemask. The airport police did not care (or wear masks themselves). Same with airport employees and the flight attendants and pilots. They just ignored the canned announcements over the loudspeakers about wearing a mask.

I loved it!

I could have clapped my hands in approval.

What would happen if when the government made stupid mindless rules, everyone just ignored them? It is a form of democracy, I guess. I would readily agree with the old adage that the government rules the best which rules the least.

Meanwhile, the mainland Chinese government was locking entire metropolises down and threatening severe punishment for anyone who broke lockdown rules. It was brutal to read about. Thank God I did not live there. But I am sure the severe system of communitarianism in communist China has its defenders here in the United States. “In the name of disease mitigation, this is necessary. It saves lives!” You mistake the trees for the forest.

If Covid has a fatality rate of 20%, like in the movie Contagion, I would be locking myself down, no matter what the government said. But the death rate for Covid is a tiny fraction of that, and it is mostly focused among the elderly and those with comorbidities. I would not shut the economy down and lockdown populations for that. Take the appropriate mitigation strategies for those most at risk, but don’t lock down entire populations.

I am deep into my toes an individualist. I would only constrain the actions of individuals for specific reasons with a strong dose of legal protections. The rules of governments to protect the collective and solve problems often just make them worse. Covid and the policies of the State of California and public schools have brought me much more of a place of libertarianism than I was at before. Shutting the economy down and closing the schools was a severe self-wounding, with consequences worse and more wide-ranging than Covid deaths, in my opinion. Keeping young people out of school for so long was unconscionable. I am a public school teacher myself, and I was ready to go back almost immediately. The grocery workers and fire and police personnel worked through the outbreak, not to mention all the medical workers. Why didn’t public school teachers step up to serve our students in the same way? I was willing and ready.

I am still livid over this.

I remember one day trying to take my kids to the park in mid-2021, after they had been inside our house and for too long and were going stir crazy. But so many of the parks were closed, and the police would come and chase you away if you went there. I had a feeling that my family was trapped inside. Ridiculous! I will never forget early in the pandemic watching the Ventura Police roll up (with lights flashing but no sirens) on a couple of elementary school kids playing on the playground at The Farm housing community. “Kids playing on the jungle gym at the park! Someone call the police!” Similarly, the City of Ventura disabled the basketball hoops, so nobody could play on the public courts.

They put concrete blocks on the baseball fields here – I went there and took photographs of it because it seemed like such a drastic move that I wanted to document it for the future! 

They filled a skate park with sand. These are the people in charge of California https://t.co/ldMQ8UYA5F

— Adam Carolla (@adamcarolla) November 27, 2022

It was overreach by the State of California and the City and County of Ventura on a grand scale, and we now know that Covid is almost never spread outside in the open air. We could have continued to exercise outside or have our kids play in the parks.

Other states and countries had their schools in operation during the outbreak, and the schools did not prove to be hotbeds for the spread of Covid in those places. California made a different choice and young people suffered. The bars were re-opened here long before the schools or youth sports were. It was madness.

I don’t think I will ever look at local government quite the same again. They have at least a thin patina of “enemy” about them. I know they thought they were doing it for our own good, but that just makes it worse in the end. Because they might do it again.

Two years later my blood boils still to think about it – both as a parent and a citizen. 

Look at this man – Matt LaVere. He was one of the relatively faceless, nameless Democratic apparatchiks at the local level who followed the sheep in closing almost everything down in mid-2020. Matt was one of the Ventura City Council members who ordered basketball hoops removed, parks closed, tennis courts locked up, and concrete blocks placed in baseball infields – all overkill which helped stop the spread of Covid not very much, if at all. Then LaVere got promoted to the Ventura Board of Supervisors, without having explained his Covid orders before. One day I will come face-to-face with Matt and give him an earful about the lockdowns and other conflicting, everchanging “emergency” public health orders, and I wonder what he will say. How will he defend closing the parks? I will look forward to that day.

And that asshole Gavin Newsom, Governor of our state, who was in charge of the response to Covid here, can kiss my rose pink sphincter muscle. In 2020 they used to have digital road signs all over the place which blinked the following warning: “Stay home! Stay safe!” On my unending bike rides all over Southern California during the lockdowns, I would stop by them and take a selfie with my iPhone next to the sign while flipping it the bird. Fuck you, Gavin! I am not going to sit home for six months and stress cook brownies, watch Netflix endlessly, and drink alcohol out of boredom. I am an outdoors guy who likes to be active, and I have always been so. I wasn’t spreading disease in these road bike ventures or out on the tennis court. Yet still I was urged to stay home, “bend the curve,” just for a few weeks, to “save lives” and “not overwhelm the healthcare system”– and then a year had passed, and then two.

Once when I was on a bike trip a lady yelled at me from across the street, “Wear a mask!” I was forty feet away from her and traveling at high speed, and there was nobody else around at all that morning. I am not embarrassed to say I circled around and told her exactly what she could do with herself, and it was graphic. There was no risk at all in getting or spreading Covid while biking outdoors. What was even worse: I occasionally rode by other bikers who were wearing cotton facemasks. Years later I still wonder what logic led them to decide to wear a mask while road biking outdoors almost entirely away from sustained close contact with anyone else? I conclude it was fear, unreasoning fear, and its kissing cousin, hysteria. These are powerful emotions, no doubt. Not only during Covid but often in history do you see this unhappy dynamic.

But ever since I was given the choice not to have to wear a mask, I have never worn one. And I pay next to no attention nowadays to those who do wear masks. They have their reasons, I guess, and it is a free country (usually). When I don’t wear a mask, I am agnostic about others and masks. When I was forced to wear a mask, I paid attention.

You might notice, perceptive reader, that I am an individualist through and through. I don’t give much of a shit about the choices others make in their lives, not really. I am an introvert. I know who I am. Others can figure out who they are. Let people do what they want. And mind your own business and others do the same. The busybody who is judging and denouncing their neighbors on social media “in the name of decency” or “for the public good” is perhaps the most contemptible person in America today – a “Karen,” who is universally loathed. It was one such menopausal scold who decried me to club management in early 2021 for refusing to wear a face mask while competing on the tennis court, claiming I “did not understand my proper role during a global pandemic.” I understood my role just fine. I have no apologies. You nosy wench.

So I read with interest and chagrin the words of public health devotees during Covid, who explain that poverty and inequality mandate strong government interventions:

As long as disparities in healthcare and vaccine access exist, and wealth and “privilege” make certain people and populations more vulnerable, Covid and other infectious diseases will exploit inequalities and the public will suffer unequally. “We” over “me” thinking is what is needed to fight infectious disease.

Let me get this right. The Covid outbreak will not be over until we get everyone vaccinated, and reduce inequalities in society. Until everyone is vaccinated and nobody is poor. That is unlikely to happen soon, if ever, and so Covid restrictions will remain in place forever, as a permanent policy of government-led social engineering under the aegis of “public health.” It is a massive infusion of government into our daily lives in the name of “disease mitigation.” Measures meant to be temporary because of an “emergency” become semi-permanent instead.

But nevermind. The American people have moved on, even if their departments of public health have not. The rest of America already judged its risk and declared Covid to be over. They are voting with their feet in places like the Los Angeles International Airport.

And I will be sorry when the immunocompromised in America  – or the morbidity obese, or the elderly, or those with diabetes, or all of the above or something else – contract Covid and perish – as they surely will, to the tune of some 400-500 per day in a nation of 330 million. I wish it were otherwise.

But the globe continues to spin, we get older each day, and people need to get on with their lives.

And to restrict the personal choices of the vast majority in the hope that maybe perhaps it will protect the vulnerable few – that ain’t gonna happen.

Understand your risk with Covid, make your choices, and get on with your life.

Or live like a monk and never go outside, if you are deathly afraid of Covid. I’m sure there are those who will never eat indoors at a restaurant or attend a crowded public event again. They will continue to wear a facemask even when they are alone in their car. They will rarely see others in person by choice, and that is fine. It’s a free country (usually). Each to his own.

But this is how I see it: Getting sick is part of living in the world with other people. Everyone who survives an illness is better equipped moving forward with antibodies. In my classroom my students and I get each other sick endlessly; falling ill often is an occupational hazard for teachers in crowded face-to-face conditions. The risk of being together and learning is that sometimes illnesses get passed around school and we get sick. It is no fun, but it is an unavoidable part of being in community. This has been my reality over the past 28 years in the classroom. I accept it.

So I don’t look forward to getting Covid again – or any other cold or flu out there – yet I am ready to deal with what I must. When I had Covid two months ago, I felt miserable for a few days. But as I see it, getting sick occasionally is the price for participating in humanity. I am willing to pay that price, because I see no way of avoiding it, short of unavoidably costly measures to isolate and restrict. (I have no problem with vaccines. It is just almost everything else in public health.) There is always the chance when you leave your house in the morning that you might get infected by a virus or bacteria and fall sick, and maybe you will die of it (although it is unlikely); this is what humans have always endured. It is not reason enough to shy away from going outside, unless you are unbelievably neurotic.

Down with social distancing!

Down with quarantines and lockdowns!

Down with shutting down schools and small businesses!

Down with departments of public health and the government bureaucracies! 

And up with getting out there and enjoying your life and maximizing your potential for growth and fellowship.

They say that a pandemic like that brought about by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a “once in a century event.” I sure hope so, but I doubt you can make such a surefire prediction about the future.

Because God help us if we have another outbreak. Government restrictions in the future might not go down so well with a restive American population which remembers the last time this happened…