Fighting COVID with Superstition

Columbia University reverted their COVID-19 policy, requiring students to mask indoors.

Gabriele Holtermann

Boy, is US higher education full of idiots: Columbia University, affiliated Barnard College and Pace University, among other schools, have all started requiring masking indoors again.

Columbia-Barnard only scrapped the mandate on March 14, so students got less than a month to breathe free, and now will be muzzled through June.

And all because campus administrators deem it more important to virtue-signal than to follow the actual science. They blame an uptick in COVID cases, though COVID poses no significant risk to their fully vaccinated student bodies.

Plus, as noted above, case numbers stopped being a useful indicator of coronavirus perils at least a year ago.

And just 0.001% of 15- to 24-year-olds are at risk of dying from COVID, per data from Johns Hopkins. And masking does very little to reduce transmission risks, anyway.

COVID is now endemic, not pandemic — meaning we’ll have to learn to live with the background risks it poses, just like the flu. It’ll help that learning process when the supposedly smartest folks in America stop relying on superstition to “fight” it.