While we are expected to cancel Thanksgiving, Gavin Newsom attends a swanky dinner party, and a delegation of California legislators are off to Hawaii on a junket. Regardless, Gov. Newsom has again obfuscated the guidelines that would allow us to return to “normal.”
Do you recall the original lockdown orders in March were only to last a few weeks to allow hospitals to clear bed space (we called that surge capacity) and order vital equipment? Months later, Gov. Newsom dangled his first four-stage protocol to reopen our society and economy.
Local jurisdictions could move through the stages based upon the number of hospitalizations, the number of beds available for patients and the number of COVID-19-related deaths in their county.
As it turns out, the number of beds always exceeded the number of patients, so much so that Cal Poly San Luis Obispo had excess capacity that never saw a single patient. Neither did the military hospital ship moored off the California coast.
Moreover, the number of people in the hospital and the number of deaths eventually declined to the point that the governor had to change the criteria altogether to stay in unilateral — read that dictatorial — control mode.
So Gov. Newsom came up with a new set of four stages, this time based upon each community ensuring that they are testing a contrived set percentage of the population, and the testing positivity rate stayed below another contrived threshold number.
Yet when most counties in the state were moving through each of these stages in routine fashion, Gov. Newsom declared he had to “hit the brakes” because positivity rates were increasing even while hospital rates were still declining!
He unilaterally pushed more than 90% of the state’s population back to the most restrictive tier (purple) and added new mandates, including one that requires us to wear masks anytime we leave our home regardless of our ability to maintain social distancing protocols.
Our local leaders, notably county Board of Supervisors chairman Greg Hart, are failing to represent us as Gov. Newsom keeps moving and removing the goal posts in this sordid history of totalitarian control, including Hart’s complete and total failure to formally complain when the rules are clearly arbitrary and capricious, such as those affecting church services.
The only metric that really mattered was hospitalizations and deaths due to the fact that the vast majority of people who come in contact with the virus will never know it. Nonetheless, the state continues to ramp up testing, which results in additional positive test results deemed a covid “case,” even when the virus has had no effect.
Meanwhile, as Katy Grimes reports in the California Globe, here in California, 20 million people, more than half of the state population, have tested negative for COVID!
Nevertheless, the lockdown continues and people continue to panic.
The other deception that Gov. Newsom is holding over us is that neither of his staged protocols ever allowed us to go back to living in a free society. That is, he plainly stated he would never allow California to go back to normal unless and until there was either a therapeutic drug to cure the disease or a vaccine to prevent infection.
I firmly believe it is no coincidence that Democratic governors have imposed the most draconian COVID restrictions. I believe this had everything to do with the presidential election and the hope of an eventual Biden bailout, one that goes way beyond COVID, under the guise of COVID relief.
Finally, some 20,000 health care professionals have signed a document named the Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration states that keeping us in lockdown is causing more harm than the virus.
Why would Gov. Newsom care? He is not in lockdown.
Our only recourse? Please consider signing the Newsom recall petition posthaste (recallgavin2020.com/petition).
