By Steve MacDonald
While we have disagreed on much with Governor Sununu, on this, we are aligned. He continues to say no to a statewide mask mandate, even though the entire New England region has succumbed to the idea.
Vermont, the other hold out, starts their’s on Saturday, August 1st.
That does not mean there are no mask mandates in the Granite State
Nashua, New Hampshire, punched that ticket a few weeks ago, and Keene, who proposed it then dropped it has reanimated theirs.
All the Liberal college towns are on the fence but leaning heavily toward mask mandates too. They’d like to tell their out of state students to learn remotely, but they need them to vote for Democrats (preferably by mail) from their dorm rooms. We should expect mandates at Dartmouth, Keene State, Plymouth State, UNH, and others – including the towns that surround them.
Keene did pass a resolution recommending masks but not demanding them.
A large crowd showed up for the most recent City Council Planning, Licenses, and Development Committee meeting on the topic of a city-wide mandate. The majority of folks appear to oppose that while not precisely objecting to the idea of letting businesses and people decide what works for them.
That has been Mr. Sununu’s position.
He rightly stated that each town is different, and a statewide mandate is inappropriate. Funny, he didn’t use that same logic for the emergency orders. After four months of them, Coos county has only had 16 confirmed cases, no hospitalizations, and zero deaths.
I guess we should take the leaps of common sense that come our way and ignore the rest? Like how everyone used to be focused on hospitalization. Keep the hospitals from getting overwhelmed in the name of public health. An idea that blocked access to testing and procedures for tens of thousands of individuals for weeks on end. A restriction on access that is itself a threat to public health.
There are no estimates on the damage caused by that. Instead, we are talking about infections as if that matters. It does not. Not in the grand scheme. You can test more people to find more infected people even if they never had a single symptom. No one is reporting that, of course, it would damage the narrative.
Take going back to school, for example. Parents are being terrorized, and unions are making ridiculous demands. Why? It’s all political. Take a look for yourself.
If you look at the table (data as current as 7 am this morning), in the past four months, fewer than 442 persons in NH under the age of 20 have been counted as having COVID19. With roughly 256,000 kids in that demographic, this means that 0.17% of that population got COVID19.
Over that same period, 9 of those were hospitalized (0.0035% of that population), all of whom recovered.
There were no deaths in this age group. Zero.
But what about teachers? If we look at the 20-60 age group, with about a million residents in this demographic, assuming no false positives, there have been 3802 infections (0.375% of that population), 209 hospitalizations (0.02%). and 18 deaths (0.0018 %).
Every death is tragic, and this does not mean people in older age groups or anyone with comorbidities do not need to take precuations, but it paints a picture. The hysterics are unwarranted. That fact should dominate the discussion so that adults can make sensible decisions.
We are definitely nowhere near there but we’d like to thank Gov. Sununu for allowing New Hampshire the opportunity to be the island of sanity in a sea of hyperbolic left-wing fearmongering. To allow adults, and towns full of them, to make decision for themselves, even if we disagree with mask mandates.
