What's terrifying is that these are the same people providing the "science" upon which COVID restrictions are being based

Ready to head out to the mail box

The NYT interviews 700 epidemiologists; the results are disturbing.

The New York Times asked 700 epidemiologists to describe their COVID-19 habits, how their thinking has changed since the pandemic began, and when they think it will be safe for normal life to resume. Dismayingly, several answered that last question with a resounding never.

"I expect that wearing a mask will become part of my daily life, moving forward, even after a vaccine is deployed," Amy Hobbs, a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Times.

Marilyn Tseng, an assistant professor at California Polytechnic State University, said life would never revert to the way it was, though the preventative measures currently practiced—masks and social distancing—will feel "normal" in time. Similarly, Vasily Vlassov, a professor at HSE University in Moscow, said life was perfectly normal now because this is the new normal.

Others disagreed. Michael Webster-Clark of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said he expected "further relaxation of most precautions by mid-to-late summer 2021" following widespread availability of the vaccine. Some epidemiologists said their own risk aversion would decrease after they were vaccinated, but many said they would remain just as cautious until "80 percent or more" of the entire population had received the vaccine.

On the whole, the epidemiologists were less wary of touching surfaces than they were at the start of the pandemic, and some thought young children could go back to school. But just 26 percent said they either had or would have allowed their children to return to the classroom, or even attend an outdoor play date with friends.[and 96% forbid indoor play dates —Ed] Only 29 percent were willing to get a haircut, even though the most infamous case involving two hairstylists who had COVID-19 resulted in not a single infection among their 139 clients. A mere 11 percent were willing to ride the subway.

These people are nuts: they have kept their children away from friends for almost a year, and will continue to do so; 72% won’t spend the night away from home; 56% won’t visit a doctor, 28% are scared of handling their mail; 10% won’t leave their house at all.

I don’t believe these are people who know more than the rest of us; to the contrary, they are individuals so trapped in a tiny world of their specialty that they can’t grasp a wider view, can’t calculate a risk-benefit analysis. As one small example, the fact that 28% of them are scared to handle their mail, when there is zero — no — chance of infection sums up their irrational terror.

By the time this panic is over, faith in public health “experts” will, deservedly, be as low as that as our faith in politicians and news reporters.