NYC Won’t Ask COVID-Positive Patients If They Attended Racial Protests

If you’ve watched the news over the last three weeks, you should not be surprised to learn that Democrat-run cities like New York have decided that protecting the public from the uncomfortable facts about packed racial protests is a more important mission than protecting people from the coronavirus. Last week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo took on a cowboy-esque persona as he threatened NYC businesses and patrons with total shutdown if he continued to see a lack of masks and social distancing. Meanwhile, Cuomo had nothing at all to say about the obvious, contagious quagmire of Black Lives Matter gatherings.

At the same time, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has apparently gone a step further. While the city is trying to conduct contact-tracing surveys to slow the spread of the virus, they have deliberately handcuffed these efforts by forbidding investigators from asking COVID-positive patients if they have attended a racial protest over the last three weeks.

“No person will be asked proactively if they attended a protest,” said a spokesman for the mayor’s office. “If a person wants to proactively offer that information, there is an opportunity for them to do so.”

Now you may wonder how exactly NYC contact tracers can do their jobs if they intentionally wall off certain major gatherings of this type, but then, woke public health officials and politicians have already told us that we are not allowed to blame protesters for spreading the coronavirus. In a statement earlier this month, NYC City Council health committee chief Mark Levine made this abundantly clear: “If there is a spike in coronavirus cases in the next two weeks, don’t blame the protesters. Blame racism.”

Right.

But see, it really doesn’t matter who you “blame” for spreading the virus, and assigning “blame” is not going to help us tamp down this pandemic. If these protests are causing COVID-19 numbers to spike, that’s something we need to know. That’s something that people who interact with these protesters deserve to know. Hell, it’s something that the protesters themselves ought to be aware of. So whether you call it “blaming” protests, “blaming” racism, or “blaming” Beijing, it all comes to the same. It’s about gathering information, not assigning guilt.

This is the sort of simple logic that would have been obvious to everyone only a few short years ago. It is only now, where we’ve outsourced our common sense to confused millennials, racial grifters, and Twitter that uncomplicated concepts have become lost in the murk of social justice.