Coronavirus Is Making A Comeback!

Only in the news, however.

For months all we heard was 'rona this, 'rona that.  Then race riots began and the 'rona took a back seat.  Heck, the people telling America to "stay home" were cheering the protests and riots.  Now that those have died down somewhat, we're back to "stay home" because, you know, 'rona bad:

Yet even here, in the time it takes to upload a black square to your Instagram profile, those of us who move in progressive circles now find ourselves under significant moral pressure to understand that social distancing is an issue of merely secondary importance.

This feels like gaslighting. Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution. Many of us went much further, taking to social media to castigate others for insufficient social distancing or neglecting to wear masks or daring to believe they could maintain some semblance of a normal life during coronavirus. At the end of April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its lockdown, the Atlantic ran an article with the headline “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”. Two weeks ago we shamed people for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street...

The climate-change-denying right is often ridiculed, correctly, for politicizing science. Yet the way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science.

What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging? Merely pointing out the inconsistency in such a polarized landscape feels like an act of heresy. But “‘Your gatherings are a threat, mine aren’t,’ is fundamentally illogical, no matter who says it or for what reason,” as the author of The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, put it. “We’ve been told for months to stay as isolated as humanely possible,” Suzy Khimm, an NBC reporter covering Covid-19, noted, but “some of the same public officials and epidemiologists are [now] saying it’s OK to go to mass gatherings – but only certain ones.” link

And that author was a leftie, at a leftie paper!

Why do lefties really want to go back into corona-lockdowns?  This:

But after George Floyd’s death, the left (and that includes the media) stood in sheer awe at the number and size of the protests that occurred. It was like all of a sudden all those concerns about social distancing because of the coronavirus were erased. Wanting a haircut was a crime, but looting stores in the name of George Floyd and shouting “I can’t breathe” and “black lives matter” suddenly made it okay to gather in large groups, often without masks. The coronavirus pandemic was basically over. At least as far as the media was concerned.
That was until President Trump decided he wanted to hold rallies again. “President Trump will hit the campaign trail this month — despite the deadly coronavirus pandemic, which continues to impact the lives and livelihoods of households across the country,” tweeted NPR.
Two days earlier, NPR was literally gushing at massive Washington, D.C protest. “Thousands of voices at a protest in D.C. came together to sing the Bill Withers classic ‘Lean on Me,’ led by local musician Kenny Sway. ‘It sounded like unity and togetherness,’ he says. ‘It sounded like love and pureness of the people' "...
The media doesn’t want Trump holding rallies because they show the country how popular he really is, and expose the enthusiasm gap between him and Joe Biden, who could only dream of holding rallies of the same size and energy. But, by cheerleading protests despite the pandemic, they gave Trump the opportunity he was looking for to get back on the campaign trail. The campaign would do good to offer MAGA-themed face masks at the rally for attendees. It would be quite a sight to see.

Yep.
And the people who are involved in science! are just as political as the rest of us:

Three months ago, America was told to trust the public health experts. Never again. Most are left-wing ideologues cloaked in the mantle of science. On their advice, states slammed their economies shut, put 40 million people out of work, sent school kids home and pushed businesses into bankruptcy.
These experts hardly blinked at the economic losses. They and their media allies raged at anyone who questioned them for putting dollars ahead of lives. Now these same experts are doing a 180-degree turn, saying the threat of the virus is less important than big marches against racial injustice. This, even though they admit the marches will lead to more infections. Hypocrites.
Public-health academics from the University of Washington, which created the virus-forecasting model widely used by governors and the president’s task force, are circulating a public letter declaring the marches a higher priority than containing the virus.
“This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders,” the UW health experts add. Translation: No funerals for your loved ones, no congregating for causes of your own choosing. Only theirs.
This isn’t science. This is political advocacy. Similarly, Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, now claims the dangers of “systemic racism” exceed “the harms of the virus.” Sorry, professor, but that makes you a pundit, not someone to call the shots on ending a pandemic...
Sadly, science is losing its luster as the profession puts politics ahead of the truth. Last week, two prestigious medical journals, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, which until recently set the gold standard for scientific publications, had to retract articles they had published on ­hydroxychloroquine.
Both had dispensed with rigorous peer review to rush out articles purporting to show that President Trump’s favored COVID-19 drug endangers patients. They were so eager to ridicule Trump they ended up discrediting themselves. Turns out the data in the articles were shaky.

It's enough to make you wonder who to trust.
Update:  This is probably true:

The lockdowns were politically weaponized during this election year. Blue states thought the sinking economy would hurt President Trump’s reelection bid. Red states wanted to open up as quickly as possible to get the economy back and running before November.
Yet the mass progressive protests and violence forced an unplanned end to mass quarantining — and thereby inadvertently helped jumpstart the country back to business. Those who despise Trump may have done the most to help him.