Your reasoned response and respectful tone are truly appreciated. Thank you! As a matter of fact, I do have family in NYC, Queens, and CT. It's perhaps the h

Your reasoned response and respectful tone are truly appreciated. Thank you! As a matter of fact, I do have family in NYC, Queens, and CT. It's perhaps the hottest "hotspot" in the world. In general, children below 5 and older adults don't have immunocompetence comparable to older children or younger adults. So caution is certainly called for for those age groups. At the same time, for me personally, after spending years in biotech and healthcare (doing academic mathematical research on hand hygiene, including published peer-reviewed study of compliance rates of doctors to their own hygiene protocols, working within and analyzing clinical trials, doing pharmacokinetics, publishing epidemiological studies, mathematics of mass decontamination, etc.) I've realized a few things. One is that doctors in particular are always calibrating their behaviour to what butters their bread. In the same way American police write "to serve and protect" on their cars, when it really it should say "to serve and protect [THE STATE]", doctors believe they should "do no harm [TO MY CAREER]". Meaning, the treatments and recommendations for patients are totally different than the standards they apply to themselves and their own children. It's safer, and garners more power, to prescribe a lockdown, than to risk getting caught out on the off-chance this is another Black Death. You'll see the same repetitious behaviour with respect to things like dietary supplements, lockdowns, and masks: do as I say, not as I do. And what I say is always going to be coming from a cover-my-arse perspective. It's the outrageous hypocrisy that drives me mad. No doctors that I know or work with personally believe the hype, yet the peer pressure to conform in public and lick boots is overwhelming. The impact of the deaths from delayed non-covid-19 medical treatments, mental issues, depression, hunger, economic distress, and so on is going to be enormous. There is no accountability in this scenario, because of the mass hysteria. All the damage gets ascribed to the virus, and none to the policy makers, similar to how iatrogenic deaths get swept under the rug. The only positive that I see is that the mask has slipped and the possibility exists that soon, some proportion of the people will see what maniacal control-freak lunatic weirdos the people in charge of the state have become. Never shake hands again? Guess what, if strangers never touch each other, it will be the end of the human race in just 50 years. God help us.