{"id":125093,"date":"2020-12-03T04:27:42","date_gmt":"2020-12-03T01:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/heavy-handed-covid-19-lockdown-rules-are-an-all-around-disaster\/"},"modified":"2020-12-03T04:27:42","modified_gmt":"2020-12-03T01:27:42","slug":"heavy-handed-covid-19-lockdown-rules-are-an-all-around-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/heavy-handed-covid-19-lockdown-rules-are-an-all-around-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"#Heavy-handed COVID-19 lockdown rules are an all-around disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Heavy-handed COVID-19 lockdown rules are an all-around disaster<\/strong>”
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\u201cPublic hypocrisy fuels public rage and undermines the rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the nation, businesses are defying governors, such as California\u2019s Gavin News<\/a>om and New York\u2019s Andrew Cuomo, and refusing to shut down. The owners of Mac\u2019s Public House on Staten Island, for example, declared the place an \u201cautonomous zone.\u201d When sheriffs arrested them Tuesday night, crowds cheered the owners.<\/p>\n

This pandemic isn\u2019t the time to glorify civil disobedience. People need to wear masks and follow safety rules, and the sheriffs were doing their job. Even so, owners resisting lockdowns are giving voice to a powerful message that shouldn\u2019t be lost. If government and public-health officials want to maintain public trust, they need to enforce rational rules consistently and obey the rules themselves.<\/p>\n

The Staten Island \u201cautonomous zone\u201d was a playful reminder of the kind of protest activity blue-state governors and mayors too often tolerated and encouraged through the summer and into the fall \u2014 even as they cracked down on anti-lockdown protests, religious services and assorted activities often thought of as \u201cconservative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most recently, the likes of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot partied it up with liberals in their cities celebrating Joe Biden\u2019s app<\/a>arent victory in the November election. Then there was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi\u2019s visit to her hairstylist in San Francisco, Gavin Newsom\u2019s fine dining with lobbyists in close quarters and Austin Mayor Steve Adler\u2019s Cabo vacation \u2014 even as he urged people to stay home.<\/p>\n

Public hypocrisy fuels public rage and undermines the rules.<\/p>\n

There also has to be some scientific basis for the rules, something sorely lacking in the case of restrictions on restaurants.<\/p>\n

Since last March, governors have shuttered restaurants, gyms and other businesses, destroying what owners have built and putting employees out of work. As Mike Coughlin, owner of the Village Tavern and Grill in Illinois insisted when he defied Gov. J.B. Pritzker\u2019s suspension of indoor dining, \u201cI\u2019m not going to be the guy with the boarded-up building because I follow somebody else\u2019s science<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had a point: Some of the science is flimsy.<\/p>\n

Scientists disagree on whether restaurants are dangerous. Stanford researchers identified them as superspreaders based on mobile-phone data from last March to May. But Johns Hopkins\u2019 Amesh Adalja suggests most restaurants have installed more safety measures now. \u201cIf you went to a restaurant in early March, it\u2019s a very different experience from going to a restaurant\u201d now.<\/p>\n

Amazingly, most cities spending millions on contact tracing are failing to use the data to identify restaurants causing superspreading to notify the public. That\u2019s more scientific than shutting them all down, but in most places, officials don\u2019t care about destroying businesses. They\u2019re getting a paycheck no matter what.<\/p>\n

Forcing businesses to close arbitrarily violates the Constitution\u2019s Fifth Amendment, which bars government from \u201ctaking\u201d your property without just compensation. Yet Sunday, New Jersey\u2019s Gov. Phil Murphy announced that a shutdown \u201chas to stay on the table.\u201d Murphy should have to explain why, when thousands of health \u00adexperts recently signed a declaration to alert the public that lockdowns don\u2019t work \u2014 though, they do put people out of work.<\/p>\n

Five of the six states with the lowest unemployment rates, according to the Associated Press, have the fewest COVID restrictions. That\u2019s a compelling argument for getting state legislators involved in pandemic decision-making, instead of allowing governors to continue to wield emergency powers by decree.<\/p>\n

Legislators, after all, have to answer to the local constituents they force out of business. They will have to balance competing priorities, including controlling the pandemic and local business survival, not to mention other concerns associated with prolonged lockdowns.<\/p>\n

In March, the New York state Legislature gave Cuomo vast emergency powers. It was appropriate then, but not any longer. Unfortunately, the Democratic majority is MIA, content to collect their paychecks and defer to Cuomo.<\/p>\n

In Michigan and Wisconsin, state lawmakers sued to force their governors to work with the legislature. Wisconsin\u2019s chief justice warned that \u201cin the case of a pandemic, which lasts month after month, the governor cannot rely on emergency powers indefinitely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Listen up, Cuomo. Listen up, too, Albany Democrats.<\/p>\n

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.<\/em>\n <\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Heavy-handed COVID-19 lockdown rules are an all-around disaster” \u201cPublic hypocrisy fuels public rage and undermines the rules.\u201d Across the nation, businesses are defying governors, such as California\u2019s Gavin Newsom and New York\u2019s Andrew Cuomo, and refusing to shut down. The owners of Mac\u2019s Public House on Staten Island, for example, declared the place an \u201cautonomous…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":125094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/12\/082020_Restaurants_GPM.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[82432,70430,71155,70344,67243,70714,22512],"class_list":["post-125093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-12-2-20","tag-andrew-cuomo","tag-bars","tag-coronavirus-in-ny","tag-lockdown","tag-public-health","tag-restaurants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}