Contact Tracers In NYC Have Been Instructed To Not Ask If People Attended Massive Protests
Ignoring if someone with COVID has attended a protest with thousands of people seems like a big deal, no?
Contact tracers are individuals hired by the government to question people who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus about their interactions with other people. The theory is that people who came into contact with the COVID-positive person would then be made aware of that and self-quarantine to slow the spread of the virus. This is difficult at the best of times considering the number of people that we’ve been in contact with on a daily basis, and that’s without thousands of people taking to the streets to protest and/or riot.
In yet another stunning failure of the de Blasio administration, New Yorkers won’t be asked by contact tracers if they’ve been a part of a massive protest.
The hundreds of contact tracing workers hired by the city under de Blasio’s new “test and trace” campaign have been instructed not to ask anyone who’s tested positive for COVID-19 whether they recently attended a demonstration, City Hall confirmed to THE CITY.
“No person will be asked proactively if they attended a protest,” Avery Cohen, a spokesperson for de Blasio, wrote in an emailed response to questions by THE CITY.
Instead, test-and-trace workers ask COVID-positive individuals general questions to help them “recall ‘contacts’ and individuals they may have exposed,” Cohen said. Among the initial questions: “Do you live with anyone in your home?”
Tracers then ask about “close contacts” — defined as being within six feet of another person for at least 10 minutes.
Source: The City
New Yorkers will be given the opportunity to volunteer the information, but won’t be proactively questioned about them.
Doesn’t this prove that all of the talk about contact tracing is a sham? You can’t effectively contact trace if you don’t include a protest of thousands of people shoulder-to-shoulder shouting slogans and chanting.
It doesn’t matter if public health experts have beclowned themselves and said that anti-racism protests are fine during a pandemic, the fact is the virus doesn’t discriminate.
Besides, it’s not like those “experts” will hold their position when President Trump holds his first rally in Tulsa on June 20. They’re already saying that massive protests are fine but Trump rallies are dangerous.
Though he’s not the first to notice it, conservative commentator David Burge pointed out the blatant hypocrisy on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog/status/1272510796736745473?s=20
Here are the images he posted, note the time on the NBC News tweets–they’re just a little over an hour apart.
“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies–all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
George Orwell, 1984
