Michael Ejercito wrote:

>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.”

In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use Apostle Paul's
secret (Philippians 4:12). Though masking is less protective, it helps
us avoid the appearance of doing the evil of spreading airborne
pathogens while there are people getting sick because of not being
100% protected. It is written that we're to "abstain from **all**
appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22 w/**emphasis**).

Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8 ) way to eradicate the
COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by
rapidly (i.e. use the "Rapid COVID-19 Test" ) finding out at any given
moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
"convince it forward" (John 15:12) for them to call their doctor and
self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of stopping this pandemic.
Thus, we're hoping for the best while preparing for the worse-case
scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations and others like the Omicron,
Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu & Delta lineage mutations
combining via slip-RNA-replication to form hybrids like "Deltamicron"
that may render current COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no
longer effective.

Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry (
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/6ZoE95d-VKc/m/14vVZoyOBgAJ
) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.

So how are you ?