The U.S. is now on month-13 of "15 days to flatten the curve" and medical professionals are distributing three effective vaccines to Americans. Some states, nonetheless, continue imposing business lockdowns, mask mandates, and worst of all, school closures.
And the CDC appears clueless.
Last week The Associated Press reported that the "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says fully vaccinated people can travel within the U.S., without getting a COVID-19 test or going into quarantine."
Within an hour, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said, "While we believe that fully vaccinated people can travel at low risk to themselves, CDC is not recommending travel at this time due to the rising number of cases."
States with relaxed restrictions are either on par with locked down jurisdictions, or in some cases even doing better.
Michael Betrus, author of "COVID-19: Lockdowns on Trial," began looking into what lockdowns actually achieve after several high-profile cruise ship quarantines sparked his interest as the virus began to spread globally in 2020.
Especially compelling was what occurred when the ships were finally permitted to dock and the passengers disembarked. Betrus said the number of COVID cruise ship deaths made no sense when compared to predictions using newly-established models.
"About 10 days later the Imperial College [of London] released a model that predicted in a ‘do nothing’ scenario, like the cruise ships, we would lose over two million Americans by July 2020," he told Newsmax in a recent interview.
So he plugged the demographics of both cruise ships — the Grand Princess off California and the Diamond Princess out of Japan — into the Imperial model assumptions.
"We should have had 155 people lose their lives on the cruise ships to COVID-19, and we lost 10," Betrus said. "And so I knew it was off the rails."
He adds that on the basis of that apparently flawed model, "40 million people were suddenly unemployed."
He agrees that coronavirus is serious and shouldn’t be taken lightly, but people tend to make it worse than it is by concentrating on the wrong numbers — COVID cases and COVID deaths.
Both numbers aren’t necessarily accurate or real-time indicators.
He suggests instead concentrating on the number of hospitalizations — something always current and accurate.
"We’re at about 3% COVID patients who are occupying beds nationally," Betrus observed. "Why are we locked down? We locked down to prevent hospital overflow, and they are empty."
He said his research indicated that, other than "a four-to-six-week period when every community got hit," the majority of states have not had hospital overflow issues due to COVID during the pandemic and few communities got pummeled with the virus more than once.
Of particular concern is the switch to remote learning made by many school districts nationwide, a situation that’s lasted more than a full year for many kids and is likely to extend for some through the end of the current school year.
Depression and suicide attempts among school age children who’ve been denied in-person learning has skyrocketed during the pandemic.
"Fifteen times more kids died in transportation accidents in 2020 than from COVID-19," Betrus said. "Ten times more to suicide. How much information do we need?”
He said he looked into "two private schools — one in Texas and another in Georgia — where kids are not required to wear masks, and they have normal protocols. And nothing has happened.”
Some U.S. medical experts have also urged school districts to return to in-person learning.
Drs. Tara O. Henderson, Monica Gandhi, Tracy Beth Hoeg, and Daniel Johnson argued in a USA Today opinion piece that keeping schools closed — or even only partially reopening them — is ''unwarranted, harming children, and has become a human rights issue.’"
Betrus told Newsmax, "We could put kids back in school with normal protocols — meaning no social distancing, normal activities, no masks — and I would be willing to bet my house that we would have no statistical significance associated with an outbreak of hospitalizations or deaths."
Even American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, who’s been adamant about keeping schools closed, admitted (without intending to) that the time had come to reopen them.
When Biden bragged Tuesday that 150 million shots had been delivered in the first 75 days of his administration, she replied, "This is remarkable as is the number of educators who have had shots in the arms- 80-81%...Thank you @potus for your leadership and your administration’s effectiveness !!!"
To conclude his interview with Newsmax, Betrus asserted, "These ‘one-size-fits-all’ lockdowns, when we have a very identifiable segment of the population that’s at risk, it’s like a human rights crime against kids and against the general population."
Indeed, it’s time to get kids back in school and get the country back to work.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to BizPac Review and Liberty Unyielding. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter, who can often be found honing his skills at the range. Read Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.