According to the State Journal Register of Illinois, after four months of restaurants and bars being open to indoor patrons, local health officials have not traced a single outbreak of COVID to bars and restaurants.

Yet, because of an arbitrary more than 8% positivity rate, the Illinois governor is again shutting down indoor patrons at bars and restaurants.  Why is 7.9% OK and 8% a level that is used to destroy?

The governor and his health officials always say that they base all their decisions on scientific data, but if there are no outbreaks traced to bars and restaurants, that is clearly not true.

It is truly dangerous that powerful politicians can pick and choose which businesses to destroy and which individuals to put out of a job.  It is sad that politicians decide who is essential and who is non-essential based on arbitrary feelings instead of facts.  All jobs are essential to the people that have them and to the economy.  Then these same politicians say they care, and the government will save and take care of you.  Economic independence is good.  Having more people dependent on government is very bad for the short or long term.

I have always found the positivity rate to be an odd benchmark.  Supposedly, only people who believe they might have COVID get tested, yet a 92% negativity rate is considered bad.  Think of all the tests and money being wasted.  In our county, we have two major hospitals, and only 22 people are hospitalized.  Not once have our health facilities been overwhelmed in eight months of the virus but we have suffered through major, disastrous government edicts.

The 2019–2020 flu season was considered moderate with an estimated 38 million people getting the flu despite having shots to prevent it.  Eighteen million people visited doctors, and 400,000 were hospitalized.  Therefore, during the eight-month period of the flu, there were an average of 160,000 cases per day.  Yet...

We didn't get daily reports of cases to scare the public; we didn't have free testing sites throughout the country; we didn't require masks; we didn't have contact tracing; we didn't require social distancing; we didn't close schools, sporting events, churches, health facilities, stores, or anything else.  We didn't put up Plexiglas everywhere.  In other words, we lived our normal lives.

We also have never attributed deaths to the seasonal flu or the swine flu that were clearly caused by other factors just because they happened to get the flu.  Think of how high the deaths would be if we always counted that way, so why do we do it with COVID-19?  It appears that it is done to scare the public or for some political reason.  My guess is that the positivity rate on people tested for the flu is well over 90% because people who get tested have significant symptoms.

We have lived with viruses our entire lives.  What we haven't lived with is dictatorial edicts from powerful politicians and bureaucrats seeking to control us, limit our freedoms, and keep the economy in depression.  The amount of physical, mental, and economic damage being done to all the people, especially the children, is immeasurable.

Every day, we see the headlines that the economy and jobs are being destroyed by the virus, but after eight months, fewer than 3% of the people have tested positive, including a huge number with few or no symptoms, while 100% of us have been infected and  greatly harmed by powerful politicians and their government edicts.

It is a true shame that so many in the media and in government want to keep the economy in depression instead of seeking ways to get everything open.  The priorities are absolutely backward.

Image credit: Pixabay public domain.