Not to be crude, but the whole sexual education debate is fairly analogous here.
We can teach people to abstain completely, or we can teach them how to do things safely.
It's pretty settled on which works better to prevent unwanted consequences.
We can teach people to abstain completely, or we can teach them how to do things safely.
It's pretty settled on which works better to prevent unwanted consequences.
Thanksgiving is an American secular holiday about eating turkey.
Abstinence-only education is likely doomed to failure because you can't expect people to resist all possible sexual urges. But you could reasonably effectively get people to, say, abstain from having sex at Thanksgiving dinner.
I fear that there's a large subset of the population who won't follow safe practices unless you scare them with text like "don't visit your friends/family".
Masks are only 60%. The only methodology that's anywhere close to 95% effective is a vaccine. Furthermore, you can't wear a mask while eating, and its too cold outside now to hold an outdoor dinner.
If you have a combination of methodologies that reaches 95% efficacy, feel free to tell the world. But mask-up, social distanced (6-feet apart) and all that is only partially effective at controlling the virus. And such conditions are unlikely to be kept during a Thanksgiving party (especially if alcohol is involved)
If it was good enough for the Peanuts, it's good enough for us with appropriate clothing. :D
So certainly much to be learned, but like driving - you can follow all the rules and drive perfectly, it's always the other person who does not that crashes into you.
Just case of managing the flow like a production line and not seeing hospital capacity bottleneck, which seems to be the case in every country in the production line of normal life. So a mass risk increase all in short window of time is one heck of a sudden spike risk that could really jam up and backlog the bottleneck and have a knock-on effect that will not bode well.
This all happening in a country with leadership in a bumpy transition phase and potentially a perfect storm.
I'd hate to think though that the head of the CDC wasn't prepared to do an outright internal flight travel ban or harder notice statement for fear of upsetting the current president and getting twitter sacked and classed as a communist for not protecting American values. But for me and possibly others - I can see how that may well be plausible, so there is that in the back of my mind, can't deny that thought and do hope I'm wide of the mark even though it is a doubt I can't dismiss. But politics and health are never good bedfellows.