COVID shutdowns championed by U.S. governors and D.C. bureaucrats are responsible for destroying nearly 40% of small businesses since the virus was unleashed on the world—and we know now that it was for little to no damned good reason. A study by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences revealed recently that shutdown orders made little to no difference in COVID’s impact. From the abstract of the study:
“Previous studies have claimed that shelter-in-place orders saved thousands of lives, but we reassess these analyses and show that they are not reliable. We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behavior, and small but adverse effects on the economy. To be clear, our study should not be interpreted as evidence that social distancing behaviors are not effective. Many people had already changed their behaviors before the introduction of shelter-in-place orders, and shelter-in-place orders appear to have been ineffective precisely because they did not meaningfully alter social distancing behavior.” [Emphasis added]
And it should have been evident for those caring to look.
While bureaucrats gave Walmart, Costco, Lowe’s, and other big-box stores “essential” status, allowing them to stay open during the COVID pandemic, 38.9% of America’s small businesses, the providers of most of the country’s jobs, were forced to close based on fear, hackneyed social-distancing rules, early ignorance about transmission, and an insatiable desire by governors to micromanage the affairs of men.
Related:‘Plexiglass Theater’ to Fight COVID Is Being Given the Hook
In short, small businesses could have operated the entire time, exactly like big-box stores did, had it not been for tyrants in statehouses and mayor’s offices around the country destroying lives in the name of “science.”
Twitter user Mark Changizi showed the precipitous drop in small businesses in a series of charts from both Womply and Harvard. When he first checked, 37.5% of businesses had been closed. That number is now 38.9% as of June 13. That’s far worse than when he used the word “decimated” to characterize it. – READ MORE