Did It Matter That ‘There Was No Science Behind’ the Six-Foot Social Distancing Rule?

The latest rallying call in the war on science was the testimony by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious disease who spent five decades in government service,  that “there was no science behind” the six-foot social-distancing rule in the United States and that he wasn’t sure of the rule’s origin, saying that “[I]t sort of just appeared,” has been greatly taken out of context.
The most egregious example of this were the verbal attacks aimed at Fauci by Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Her attacks, it turns out, were not, in fact, based on science.
The young lady’s (as the chairman of the committee kept referring to Greene) notion that social distancing was not based on any science is simply not accurate. Indeed, science tells us that the risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 from an infected person drops the farther one is from that person. This is because the concentration of the virus gets diluted by the surrounding air. With larger droplets from coughs or sneezes which fall to the ground fairly quickly, 6’ of social distancing viewed by experts as a reasonable benchmark that would allow people to avoid exposure.
Moreover, a study just realized days before Fauci’s testimony showed that social distancing did save lives, in particular before there were vaccines and people with some degree of immunity.
The improvised strategy used to fight the novel coronavirus at the dawn of the pandemic slowed transmission of the virus and prevented almost 800,000 deaths in the United States alone, according to a recent study entitled “The Impact of Vaccines and Behavior on US Cumulative Deaths from Covid-19” that was published in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. The paper, by Andrew Atkeson of UCLA and Stephen Kissler of the University of Colorado-Boulder, is based on an epidemiological model that suggests that 1.98 million pandemic-related deaths would have occurred over the past four years rather than the 1.18 million deaths that did occur.
Any questions?
(Photo: Accura Media Group)