I like your writing so I have to quell the snark, but do you have children? They are notorious for transmitting anything circulating at school directly home as fast as possible. I’m led to understood this by friends who are parents, as I am quite the non-reproductive gay.

My Niece who had the luxury of sending her children to a private school with semi-residential setting (week, not weekend) during Covid, well even with that it was in 2021 the “which student had a parent with Covid week” which sent everyone home.

Throughout history communicable diseases have inevitably resulted in those cycles - isolate-identify-treat-prevent.

My irritation with COVID was that 1) exit criteria for epidemic isolation wasn’t clearly identified - we lacked incentives and because of that 2) it dragged on beyond what I calculated was pre-March 2020 baseline transmission.

I built a curve-fitting statistical model in good old Excel based on a group of self-fitting equations, including differential equations of spread (of actually Marketing “buy-in” spreads) and by 15 April, I had calculated the “red/blue” state flip (July 5th as I recall) and became close to 95% accurate for death and infection levels 6 months out.

3) There were many stupid things done. California has phone app exposure tracking but it requires around 90%+ compliance to be useful. Waste of time.

3) "Vaccination Certificates” were also bullshit.

If you were vaccinated, in theory why should you care? And if you weren’t why would you go to high-risk public situation. That died a zombie idea of death - it inconvenienced people who protected themselves and gave no benefit to the unvaccinated.

5) The vaccine distribution was mind-numbingly bad. Having to go online and register - plus address and ethnicity? And wait poised for the scare allocation to materialize? I wrote an app to hammer all registration sites within a 25 mile radius every 5 seconds and text me when a date was found. I snagged vaccinations for friends usually within an hour, often same-day. They should have sent first-come-first-serve tickets based on birth year-month. They can send campaign announcements tailored to a demographic but they can’t assign vaccination locations based on birthdate, verified by ID?

Like Harriet the Spy I take notes on.dumb things. Absent concrete disease data, isolation was prudent and legal in a health crisis, but not without exit criteria. That was my observation; and logic, based on math and research.