« COVID spikes might be the result of bad tests | Watching a BLM riot develop in real time »
July 14, 2020

Gavin Newsom gives Californians a glimpse of their future

By Andrea Widburg

Once upon a time, California's Governor Gavin Newsom, the leftist boy wonder of America's largest and most leftist state, was considered a top future contender for the White House.  That future is not so clear now that he's made it clear to Californians that every time the Wuhan virus rears its head, he's again going to shut down their places of work and imprison them in their homes.

Back in March, as one PBS outlet reported, "California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered many businesses to temporarily close their doors to create 'social distance' and 'flatten the curve.'"  (Emphasis mine.)  The explanation for these measures was always meant to be a short-term way to keep the pressure off the health care system:

He says officials want to reduce the wave, or curve, of patients that hit the healthcare system at one time.

"One way to think about the health system is that it's there to manage the flow of patient health needs across the population in the same way that a drainage system is there to manage the flow of water that comes from storms," Clemens said.

Sometimes when it storms, those drains aren't able to manage all the rain, and that leads to damaging floods. Picture what could happen when a surge of patients check into doctors offices across the country.

"So the idea behind the social distancing and the flattening out of the curve is an effort to spread out the flow of patients so that it doesn't overwhelm the system like a major storm at any one point in time," Clemens said.

California, though, didn't stop with flattening the curve (nor did other Democrat-run states).  By May, Newsom told people that "temporary" was so yesterday:

"We're not going back to normal," Newsom said during a Tuesday press conference. "It's a new normal, with adaptations and modifications, until we get to immunity and a vaccine."

California did tentatively move forward with opening up, but, as was to be expected, once people were let out of their home prisons (and once prisoners were let out of real prisons), people started getting sick again.  So what did Newsom do?  He reinstated the economic end of California all over again:

At this point, it's unclear if Newsom is imprisoning his citizens without due process because he genuinely believes he must in order to prevent a single Wuhan virus death or if he's still doing so with an eye to depriving Trump of his greatest strength going into the election: the economy.  Whatever the motive, Newsom is ensuring that the California economy sinks ever lower.  (It's worth noting at this point that California's vast wealth his concentrated along the coast and in Sacramento.  The rest of California is a very poor state, which no economic resilience.)

Unfortunately, other states — conservative-run states — are getting in the act, announcing lockdowns all over the place in response to the leftist media's scorn.

The truth is that the curve has long since been flattened.  We know to protect the elderly, we know that the hydroxychloroquine-Azithromycin-Zinc cocktail works if given promptly, and we know how to use ventilators so they help rather than kill people.  Hospitals will not be overwhelmed.  The reason hospitals are filling now is because of all the people denied treatment during the lockdown.

An endless cycle of lockdown and release will not save lives; it will destroy them.  But that's still the road Newsom has chosen for California and that other, equally uncourageous governors, are heading towards with their states.

Image: Pixabay.

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com