A viewer asks: “Is this continued lockdown with masks, social distancing, etc., doing anything to reduce the spread of COVID-19?”

These are having a minimal effect on the infection rate, and the reason is that people still must go out in public to obtain supplies, if not attend normal gatherings, and will nonetheless be exposed to the virus eventually. When it is consistently being reintroduced into places where people still gather, whether masked or not, social distancing and mask wearing are of minor benefit. If people are keeping the recommended separation, but are present in an indoor location where the virus is in the air, the distancing will not matter, and the low level effectiveness of most masks currently used by the general population will not protect them either. The best strategy is social distancing and avoiding indoor occupancy with strangers. There is no perfect defense, given that aerosolized particles will penetrate all masks to some degree. So, it is a function of the numbers in the ambient air and the duration of time people spend in a location where there is a buildup of contaminated air present. This is why working from home has a great advantage in reducing spread of the virus. Being present in a workplace all day long, even wearing a mask, will not prevent spread amongst the workforce if there is a highly infectious person or persons working in that establishment. They are likely to cause a spread to one or more others even with universal mask wearing and social distancing within that environment. The question of safety must be considered in the broader context of costs to the general population, individually and collectively. With an illness that has a very low death rate, except among the aged, shutting down the economy to prevent what would normally be a short-term illness in almost all who become infected, is paying too high a price. Because even when it comes to mortality, lockdowns are lethal in worsening other kinds of problems people experience under those circumstances. When people lose their livelihoods and plunge into depression and suicide, they would certainly have been better off staying at work and perhaps contracting the illness for a time but recovering, and going back to work again. This is no different than people have experienced all their lives in having periodic bouts of infectious illness they recover from, even if they are sometimes quite severe. The logical approach to dealing with this pandemic is to quarantine those most vulnerable and minimize their time spent with others outside those they live with, and if they are within a family group where there are people who must go to school or to outside work, the ideal would be, still, to quarantine those who are at high risk in the household, to maintain a separate living area and precautions about cross-contamination with food, eating utensils, perhaps if possible having a dedicated bathroom for their exclusive use, and so on. We understand the hardships this can represent, but this is exactly what the government is mandating that all people be subjected to. As the many news accounts of even government officials violating their own policies attest, such draconian measures will not be universally followed. There will be much cheating and ignoring of the rules. It is the conscientious who will be harmed and made to suffer needlessly, and will cause a further erosion in confidence in the leadership that is warranted by rendering poor advice to begin with. We have said before, that these draconian measures were chosen early on through subconscious programming to make people believe they are the answer, even though prior pandemic planning never considered lockdowns for mild to moderate infectious organisms a viable option. This is new thinking and faulty thinking that creates more problems than it solves. The purpose of the pandemic in the first place was to cause financial collapse more so than mass death, but they used fear of death as the motivation to make people tolerate the crippling of their economy.