The Atlantic

Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty

Let’s focus on the future, and fix the problems we still need to solve.
Source: Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Paolo Veronese; Getty

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”  

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone.  

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