Marlow said about comments from Deborah Birx: “She’s saying that Democrat-led states, blue states over-closed during the pandemic in 2020 in order to send a political signal.”
The purpose, IMO, was twin: to look like they were
doing something; to cause economic disruption people would blame on Trump.
Goobernor Noisome initially shut down everything not deemed "essential".Hospitals could only do the most essential procedures. Companies providing products and services to hospitals were deemed "essential". After a few months, that relaxed some, as hospitals were allowed to do some procedures that had been forbidden (e.g. my pace maker), but visitors to the hospitalized were still forbidden into January 2021 at least. When I was hospitalized in January, my family had to drop off things for me at an entry desk (I finished a book on Chinese history and read a book about the Pearl Harbor attack while hospitalized).
As the spring and summer 2020 anti-police riots accidentally demonstrated (and the officials who did nothing about the riots probably knew beforehand), outdorr activities, even with people in close proximity to each other, were almost as safe as being isolated from all human contact. The March 2020 shutdown of outdoor athletic events was not necessary, and at the latest, gooberment bureaucrats knew this by June or July 2020. Despite knowing this, SF Bay Area counties did not allow organized running events for another year, the first I know of having been run in June 2021.
I know of two organizers of running events driven out of business by the Covid shutdown, and another one or two that were unable to reorganize and recover. This is true of many small businesses (a Punjabi Indian restaurant near us took an extra year or more to rebuild its staff to the point it could do in-house service instead of just take-out).
