Its the COVID carousel. One week you can get a haircut, the next week you use a Flowbee. One week you are eating in the middle of the street under a semi-effectual heat-lamp, the next you are overpaying for DoorDash. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the COVID fundamentals haven't improved. Infection rates and ICU occupancy rates remain far higher than last Spring's "shelter-in-place" panic when everyone freaked out as folks seemed to confuse COVID with cholera and toilet paper became more valuable than gold. Promised vaccines are here (or are they?) amid chaos, confusion and waste (spoiled doses) as our federal, State and local governments continue to flounder around aimlessly uncoordinated amid a whorl of conflicting statistics, politics and incompetence. There is no solid ground under any of this. No one, not much abused Dr. Fauci, "pass the foie gras" Gavin, nor "I will open the schools" Biden controls any of this or has an effective, workable plan. Meanwhile, retail businesses are jerked around and collapsing, school children are falling tragically behind, some people are dying (but not enough to scare us silly) and everyone is confused behind their masks and six foot social distancing (because everyone knows at 5 feet you will catch it). In a leadership vacuum, the virus is going to do what the virus is going to do and, eventually, so are people. Someone may find this funny some day. I hope we all live to see it.

Yes, it's a "covid carousel." Lockdowns and inconsistent panic and politics-driven policy has made a very a bad situation -- the virus -- worse, not better.

Almost a year in and people still haven't figured out that you can't stop the march of the virus by hiding from it. Locking down hasn't made people's lives safer and better, it has made them *more* perilous and worse overall than if we had adopted a realistic policy of management.

We have become so overconfident in our technology that people think we can cure anything or prevent death. This has fed wishful thinking. Politicians exploit this overconfidence, and people's panic, to showboat, pretending that they are "doing something about it."

At this point it will take 10 years to recover from the lockdown-induced damage, and that's on top of the tragedy of the virus body count.

I am grateful for the vigilance being taken. We do have ups and downs and I wish we were much more rigid like other countries so we could have it safer here now. I do hope people continue to read the effects of getting covid, even mild cases. It can be lifelong and vigilance is required to remain safe and healthy. Please wear masks, keep social distancing, have your small pod of people, and wait the few months till we all have the vaccine. We are so close and we have endured almost a year of this... stay strong, stay healthy, and stay safe.

What cmarg said.

It is unbelievable to me that Sarah Cody thinks a 150 mile travel quarantine for Santa Clara residents is justifiable on the basis of Southern CA covid cases. There was no such concern let alone public service notices regarding the massive Hepatitis outbreak in San Diego. There is nothing to prevent me from traveling to the remote places abroad where the WHO is trying to stamp out smallpox for good. I could have easily traveled to places where SARS 1, MERS and Ebola were raging in their time. If we want to know whether travelers are infectious with anything, we need to remove all barriers that currently prevent people from testing themselves. We do not need to require nurses and doctors to administer tests. If college students all across the country can test themselves for covid then residents of Santa Clara county can surely do the same. Sarah Cody’s approach to covid has certainly not evolved much over the last year. I believe its well past time to reverse AB 262 which gave county health officers this power in the first place (and was curiously passed in October 2019). I would sure like to know more about who knew what about the forthcoming health risks to all of California back then. It is written that the San Diego Hepatitis crises was the basis for AB 262 but I dont buy that one bit.