—Voice of OC
Orange County might be picking another fight with Gov. Gavin Newsom over the state’s coronavirus restrictions after Supervisor Don Wagner hinted that county officials might not enforce the guidelines.
The state’s reopening guidelines under a four-tiered system announced earlier this month allows numerous retailers to continue operating at limited capacities.
When OC moved to Tier Two last Tuesday, it allowed restaurants, gyms, churches and movie theaters to resume indoor operations at limited building capacities.
“This board, back in May, unanimously approved our business reopening — our business opening guidelines,” Wagner said at Tuesday’s public supervisors meeting.
“I raise that because we are hearing about other counties — San Diego county is considering whether it passes or not, but it’s considering a resolution today … to indicate there will not be enforcement in San Diego county of the state’s mask mandate,” Wagner said.
On Monday, San Diego Supervisor Jim Desmond said he’s going to push San Diego to not enforce any of the coronavirus guidelines, including masks. He said the guidelines shift too much and are too difficult to follow for struggling business owners.
Wagner said OC is pretty much there.
“I want to make sure our public knows that we essentially got there in May. Do what is in the guidelines and what the industry recommends in respect to protecting yourselves, your employees and your customers,” he said.
Yet, Wagner noted the state rules still apply.
“The state rules are still going to apply. There’s nothing we can do about those. Nevertheless those guidelines are there.”
The reopening guidelines adopted earlier in the year don’t specifically address the use of masks. Instead, the guidelines offer seven bullet points of general advice to businesses, like “have a plan in place” if a large number of workers get infected.
Instead of offering specifics, the guidelines point to a slew of documents from the California Department of Public Health, which spell out masks for workers and customers in nearly all businesses.
Wagner, along with Supervisor Chairwoman Michelle Steel criticized OC’s previous mask mandate from former health officer Dr. Nichole Quick, which was issued during the Memorial Day Weekend reopenings.
A few days later, Dr. Clayton Chau — now the permanent health officer — walked the order back.
Virus infections eventually soared after the mask mandate was repealed until another Gov. order closed down larger venues back in July. Deaths continue to steadily increase from those spikes.
. . .
UC Irvine epidemiologist Andrew Noymer predicted there will be 2,000 virus deaths by the end of the year. [There's about 1100 now.]
Hospitalizations remain plateaued around 200…. [continue reading]
4 comments:
Wagner appears truly uninformed by medical science and common sense about the effect of this virus on humans. So what drives him and some other supervisors? The influence of business? Limited analytical thought processes? Ignorance? Or...?
What drives him? The same thing that drives Trump and millions of his supporters; mistrust. It's not new. Remember "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq? None were found, in spite of intelligence suggesting they existed. Want another, much older, example? Bay of Pigs fiasco in the early 1960's. US intelligence predicted Cubans would rise and topple the Castro regime as soon as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs started. It didn't happen. Oh, and let's not forget the Vietnam War. Trump has cleverly capitalized on these failures and put them on steroids, extending them to mistrust of science, of journalism, of military leadership. The goal is to create a general sense of mistrust in all of these sources and replace it with trust in ONE individual and what he says. And that individual is Mr. Trump, who claims he knows more than the scientists, the doctors, the military commanders, the journalists, etc. That is scary enough. But what is even more scary is that there are many inside and outside of government that are enabling and attempting to legitimize Mr. Trump and his twisted, toxic approach to governing.
Agreed. And well expressed. Thanks to 2:45 P.M.
2:45: you are conflating two distinct phenomena: one, genuine reasons for skepticism of "experts" (intelligence assurances about WMD, Bay of Pigs, Viet Nam, etc.) and the fascist's tactic of encouraging distrust/suspicion to discredit critics. Trump relies on the latter. There is no reason to be skeptical of such advisors as Fauci, Redfield, climate scientists, et al, but Trump encourages it for his long-term and short-term advantages. The Republicans are now the party of skeptics and relativists, the deniers of objective reality.
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