State Officials Admit Again That the Crazy COVID Dial Was a Lie

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s crazy COVID dial is supposedly now retired, turning over decisions on how much freedom Coloradoans are allowed to have over to local jurisdictions.

This doesn’t make restrictions any less unconstitutional.

The questions Coloradoans must ask: What has changed between this time last year and today? The answer: Nothing. Why was the dial framework useful months ago but now is not? The answer: It was never useful. It was simply a tool to deflect direct criticism away from our political leaders for the economic disaster they created, and create an illusion of scientific legitimacy. The justification for the dial and the restrictions it enforced have not changed.

The virus still affects the very old and those with compromised immune systems. New spread and new infections continue, with no correlation between non-pharmaceutical interventions and epidemiological results. The mechanism behind the crazy COVID dial was simple: less severity, fewer restrictions. More severity, more restrictions. This mechanism remains. While the premise (the ability to physically control an airborne, respiratory virus) was laughably and clearly flawed at the beginning, the Colorado government has now admitted yet again that the framework was a political tool, not a scientific one. Are these not the same politicians who said we are at risk of a fourth wave? Why would they carelessly dispense with the “scientific” framework they designed to keep us safe if we are at risk of the virus once again getting out of control?

Without scientific proof of causation between increased restrictions and decreased severity, it is just as likely that the increased restrictions placed on counties under the dial prolonged severity and spread in those counties. The spread of the virus cannot be stopped, only slowed. Lockdowns and occupancy restrictions simply spread out the occurrence of infections – it never stopped them. Without medical capacity at risk for being overrun, we did billions of dollars in damage to Colorado’s economy, untold phycological damage to our citizens, and shredded our rights just so people would come into contact with the virus in the future instead of the present.

We must not forget: The Colorado state government knows that the input metrics for the dial are nonsensical. A county’s color is determined by new cases (determined by the woefully inaccurate PCR test) and hospitalizations (where a patient’s presence in the hospital may have nothing to do with COVID-19, but they test everybody using the same faulty PCR test). Colorado positivity and hospitalizations have always been determined by the volume of testing, meaning the state government is controlling the real COVID dial by either ramping up or ramping down testing. They have controlled the dial the entire time.