HeartDoc Andrew wrote:
> 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
>>
>> Add to your saved stories
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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.
>>
>> Follow Health & wellness
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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 ?
>
I am wonderfully hungry!

Michael