Arlington's Leaders Silent As Northam Ignores Fauci On Reopening
Expert advice goes unheeded in Virginia and Arlington
Have you been dying to hang out indoors at a bar with your friends? Are you just sick that you haven’t been able to gather in a group of 250 people? Gentle reader, your troubles are over: both are now allowed in Virginia. Ralph Northam has moved Virginia to Phase Three of the reopening plan, and we can all rest easy knowing the decision was made based on common sense and sound science. Just kidding. It was not based on those things.
The most senseless change allows bars and restaurants to operate indoors at full capacity. Find a public health expert, and you will find someone telling you how dangerous that is. Only one day before Phase Three went into effect, Dr. Anthony Fauci from the NIH testified before the US Senate:
“Bars: really not good, really not good. Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news. We really have got to stop that.”
The Washington Post interviewed six public health experts, including Dr. Fauci, and all six agreed that dining or drinking at a bar indoors was dangerous.
But you don’t have to be a public health expert to understand why bars are ideal for COVID spread: it’s impossible to wear a mask, you have to stand close and talk loudly, and alcohol impairs your judgement. An outbreak at a bar in Michigan infected at least eighty-five people - and the owners followed all the rules regarding capacity and table spacing. They blamed people waiting in line to get in for not wearing masks and not standing far enough apart. You can see the same lines, full of young people standing shoulder to shoulder with no masks, outside the doors of Whitlow’s and The Lot on any given Friday night in Clarendon.
Virginia’s numbers are also worrying. We have a considerably higher infection rate than New York, the first COVID hotspot. And those numbers from Europe are not typos. We really are failing that badly.
Here is Spain’s successfully flattened “curve.”
And here is Virginia’s “slight down-slope onto a plateau.”
This is where the pro-reopening crowd will object and say “Aha! That is simply a result of more testing!” Not true. Virginia’s testing has been basically flat for the last six weeks. The Harvard Global Health Institute says we need to double our testing for “mitigation,” and “suppression” looks like an unreachable dream.
One important metric has improved: the positive test rate. That is currently around six percent statewide, down from ten percent a month ago, but still higher than the five percent recommended by the World Health Organization. Arlington’s positive rate is under three percent, but nearby Fairfax County is at seven. There have been no proposals to close the border with Fairfax.
Adding to the confusion is the contradictory messaging coming from our local government.
You should stay at home, but it’s also fine if you want to hang out in a group of 250 people. Outdoor gatherings are high risk, but indoor gatherings, which we know are even a higher risk, are allowed. You should wear a mask and stay six feet apart, but it is also acceptable hang out at a bar where you can’t wear a mask, because you can’t drink with a fucking mask on. Ridiculous. You know what happens when you give people confusing and self-contradictory information? They ignore it.
Virginia and Arlington are obviously not the main culprits for our country’s disgraceful response to COVID. President Trump and his administration of clowns and grifters are the most guilty parties. But we cannot allow “better than Trump” to be the standard of acceptable governance.
Virginia has abdicated its responsibility to keep the public safe. It has thrown its hands up and said, “hey, you guys figure it out.” We are now expected to become amateur epidemiologists and individually make accurate risk assessments. And when people predictably make bad decisions, those same elected officials will poo-poo those dummies who didn’t socially distancing properly.
Northam is reopening the state to keep his big business donors and friends happy. He is gambling that he can open things enough to keep in the good graces of the Chamber of Commerce without triggering a spike in COVID cases. It is a dangerous gamble that our local officials should push back on, much like they did early in the shutdown, when they wrote a letter to Northam to delay reopening Northern Virginia. Northam listened, and the reopening was delayed.
That short-lived resistance is over. Remember when Katie Cristol tweeted “this sucks” at a picture of the crowd inside The Lot? She was right, it did suck. But it turned out The Lot wasn’t breaking any rules, so Katie backtracked and tweeted: “too many ppl = an administrative problem the County needs to fix.” Spoiler: Katie hasn’t fixed the administrative problem. You can go to the corner of Wilson and Tenth and see for yourself. She did delete all her tweets around this embarrassing episode, hoping we will forget about it.
We sent emails to all four County Board members asking them if they approved of the reopening and if they would feel safe dining or drinking indoors. Libby Garvey and Christian Dorsey did not respond. Matt de Ferranti responded that he would have to get back to us, and then never did. Katie Cristol ignored our questions, but did say she hopes to learn more the goals and focuses of our publication. Katie, we hope you read this and find out! Absent any public statement to the contrary, we must assume all four members support the reopening.
We here at The Spectator pray that Virginia can buck the trend of states seeing COVID spikes after reopening. But there is no reason to think it will. And if COVID does indeed make a comeback in Arlington, the blame should not be laid only at the feet of dumb twenty-somethings who want to party. It should be laid on the people who we have entrusted with the power to govern: Ralph Northam and the members of the Arlington County Board.
Thank you for speaking truth