https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1d6qawr/in_the_pandemic_we_were_told_to_keep_6_feet_apart/

In the pandemic, we were told to keep 6 feet apart. There’s no science
to support that.
In a congressional appearance, infectious-disease expert Anthony S.
Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that
wasn’t based on data.”

By Dan Diamond
June 2, 2024 at 1:00 p.m. EDT

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The nation’s top mental health official had spent months asking for
evidence behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social
distancing guidelines, warning that keeping Americans physically apart
during the coronavirus pandemic would harm patients, businesses, and
overall health and wellness.
Now, Elinore McCance-Katz, the Trump administration’s assistant
secretary for mental health and substance use, was urging the CDC to
justify its recommendation that Americans stay six feet apart to avoid
contracting covid-19 — or get rid of it.
“I very much hope that CDC will revisit this decision or at least tell
us that there is more and stronger data to support this rule than what I
have been able to find online,” McCance-Katz wrote in a June 2020 memo
submitted to the CDC and other health agency leaders and obtained by The
Washington Post. “If not, they should pull it back.”
The CDC would keep its six-foot social distance recommendation in place
until August 2022, with some modifications as Americans got vaccinated
against the virus and officials pushed to reopen schools. Now,
congressional investigators are set Monday to press Anthony S. Fauci,
the infectious-disease doctor who served as a key coronavirus adviser
during the Trump and Biden administrations, on why the CDC’s
recommendation was allowed to shape so much of American life for so
long, particularly given Fauci and other officials’ recent
acknowledgments that there was little science behind the six-foot rule
after all.

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“It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,”
Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according
to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the
recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”
Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of
Health, also privately testified to Congress in January that he was not
aware of evidence behind the social distancing recommendation, according
to a transcript released in May.
Four years later, visible reminders of the six-foot rule remain with us,
particularly in cities that rushed to adopt the CDC’s guidelines hoping
to protect residents and keep businesses open. D.C. is dotted with signs
in stores and schools — even on sidewalks or in government buildings —
urging people to stand six feet apart.
Experts agree that social distancing saved lives, particularly early in
the pandemic when Americans had no protections against a novel virus
sickening millions of people. One recent paper published by the
Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, concludes that behavior
changes to avoid developing covid-19, followed later by vaccinations,
prevented about 800,000 deaths. But that achievement came at enormous
cost, the authors added, with inflexible strategies that weren’t driven
by evidence.
“We never did the study about what works,” said Andrew Atkeson, a UCLA
economist and co-author of the paper, lamenting the lack of evidence
around the six-foot rule. He warned that persistent frustrations over
social distancing and other measures might lead Americans to ignore
public health advice during the next crisis.
The U.S. distancing measure was particularly stringent, as other
countries adopted shorter distances; the World Health Organization set a
distance of one meter, or slightly more than three feet, which experts
concluded was roughly as effective as the six-foot mark at deterring
infections, and would have allowed schools to reopen more rapidly.
The six-foot rule was “probably the single most costly intervention the
CDC recommended that was consistently applied throughout the pandemic,”
Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, wrote
in his book about the pandemic, “Uncontrolled Spread.”
It’s still not clear who at the CDC settled on the six-foot distance;
the agency has repeatedly declined to specify the authors of the
guidance, which resembled its recommendations on how to avoid
contracting the flu. A CDC spokesperson credited a team of experts, who
drew from research such as a 1955 study on respiratory droplets. In his
book, Gottlieb wrote that the Trump White House pushed back on the CDC’s
initial recommendation of 10 feet of social distance, saying it would be
too difficult to implement.
Perhaps the rule’s biggest impact was on children, despite ample
evidence they were at relatively low risk of covid-related
complications. Many schools were unable to accommodate six feet of space
between students’ desks and forced to rely on virtual education for more
than a year, said Joseph Allen, a Harvard University expert in
environmental health, who called in 2020 for schools to adopt three feet
of social distance.
“The six-foot rule was really an error that had been propagated for
several decades, based on a misunderstanding of how particles traveled
through indoor spaces,” Allen said, adding that health experts often
wrongly focused on avoiding droplets from infected people rather than
improving ventilation and filtration inside buildings.
Social distancing had champions before the pandemic. Bush administration
officials, working on plans to fight bioterrorism, concluded that social
distancing could save lives in a health crisis and renewed their calls
as the coronavirus approached. The idea also took hold when public
health experts initially believed that the coronavirus was often
transmitted by droplets expelled by infected people, which could land
several feet away; the CDC later acknowledged the virus was airborne and
people could be exposed just by sharing the same air in a room, even if
they were farther than six feet apart.
“There was no magic around six feet,” Robert R. Redfield, who served as
CDC director during the Trump administration, told a congressional
committee in March 2022. “It’s just historically that’s what was used
for other respiratory pathogens. So that really became the first piece”
of a strategy to protect Americans in the early days of the virus, he said.
It also became the standard that states and businesses adopted, with
swift pressure on holdouts. Lawmakers and workers urged meat processing
plants, delivery companies and other essential businesses to adopt the
CDC’s social distancing recommendations as their employees continued
reporting to work during the pandemic.
Some business leaders weren’t sure the measures made sense. Jeff Bezos,
founder of online retail giant Amazon, petitioned the White House in
March 2020 to consider revising the six-foot recommendation, said Adam
Boehler, then a senior Trump administration official helping with the
coronavirus response. At the time, Amazon was facing questions about a
rising number of infections in its warehouses, and Democratic senators
were urging the company to adopt social distancing.
“Bezos called me and asked, is there any real science behind this rule?”
Boehler said, adding that Bezos pushed on whether Amazon could adopt an
alternative distance if workers were masked, physically separated by
dividers or other precautions were taken. “He said … it’s the backbone
of trying to keep America running here, and when you separate somebody
five feet versus six feet, it’s a big difference,” Boehler recalled.
Bezos owns The Washington Post.
Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, confirmed that Bezos called
Boehler and said the Amazon founder’s focus was the discrepancy between
the U.S. recommendation and the WHO’s shorter distance. The company soon
said it would follow the CDC’s six-foot social distancing guidelines in
its warehouses and later developed technologies to try to enforce those
guidelines. “We did it globally everywhere because it was the right
thing to do,” Nantel said.
Boehler said he spoke with Redfield and Fauci about testing alternatives
to the six-foot recommendation but that he was not aware of what
happened to those tests or what they found. Fauci declined to comment.
Redfield did not respond to requests for comment.
But challenging the six-foot recommendation, particularly in the
pandemic’s early days, was seen as politically difficult. Rochelle
Walensky, then chief of infectious disease at Massachusetts General
Hospital, argued in a July 2020 email that “if people are masked it is
quite safe and much more practical to be at 3 feet” in many school settings.
Five months later, incoming president Joe Biden would tap Walensky as
his CDC director. Walensky swiftly endorsed the six-foot distance before
working to loosen it, announcing in March 2021 that elementary school
students could sit three feet apart if they were masked. Walensky
declined to comment.
The most persistent government critic of the social distancing
guidelines may have been McCance-Katz, who did not respond to requests
for comment for this article. Trump’s mental health chief had spent
several years clashing with other Department of Health and Human
Services officials on various matters and had few internal defenders by
the time the pandemic arrived, hampering her message. But while her
pleas failed to move the CDC, her warnings about the risks to mental
health found an audience with Trump and his allies, who blamed federal
bureaucrats for the six-foot rule and other measures.
“What is this nonsense that somehow it’s unsafe to return to school?”
McCance-Katz said in September 2020 on an HHS podcast, lamenting the
broader shutdown of American life. “I do think that Americans are smart
people, and I think that they need to start asking questions about why
is it this way.”