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The pessimist looks down and hits his head. The optimist looks up and loses his footing. The realist looks forward and adjusts his path accordingly.

(1) Companies are going to do whatever they want, regardless; (2) the CDC "advice" was never anywhere close to binding; (3) they are real doctors - they know more about COVID and also other respiratory diseases than any of us here; but mostly what I wanted to say is (4) they did not make this decision entirely in isolation of all of the facts. They had a gun to their head, and it seems like they tried to do the best they were able given the circumstances.

But yes, I hear you, it is another victory for conservatives - and for some strange reason most Democrats as well - who want to pretend that the pandemic never happened. But it is not anywhere close to as bad as could have happened.

First, this is (legit!) the first I am hearing about a job that actually pays attention to the advice of CDC. For multiple YEARS now we have been inundated by stories of corps that have ignored that, time and again, sometimes being more lenient than normal (e.g. allowing WFH 100% of the time) while other times being far less. I am saying that this "advice" from the CDC was never binding to begin with. I wonder how normal that situation you describe is? Maybe it is far more common than our media sources have led us to believe?

Second, they still say to "take precautions", which now is expanded to include other respiratory viruses that can likewise kill - e.g. more severe flus that can be damaging especially to the elderly or those with compromised immune systems.

I haven't even mentioned how the variants have changed the scope of the situation, and/or what expectations there are in the coming months (perhaps, although this article did not tell us, this merely describes the baseline but there may be special alerts during peak times and/or irt special variants that would modify this advice, specially to those particular circumstances?). I was just presuming that they, being the CDC, know more than me, who to be absolutely clear, does not have an M.D.

What I do know is that Republicans kept HOUNDING the agency, DEMANDING that they explain every tiny little thing down to the smallest detail, all without paying the slightest attention to its responses - i.e. like a DDoS attack, it just became another form of harassment that wasted an enormous fraction of their budget every year - it's the election counting scenario all over again. Also, I note that despite the federal fiscal budget year having begun back on October 1, we are now IN THE SIXTH MONTH of that fiscal year, but still with no fiscal budget. i.e., the CDC, like every other federal agency, has come upon hard times. Will their budget increase (which seems as likely as flaming monkeys suddenly flying out of my butt), or will it be cut by some amount (i.e. they cannot really hire anyone until they know for sure), or will it be constrained to remain the same (which puts it into a legal quandary, b/c iirc there is some legal stipulation that federal staff salaries always have to increase by a certain amount each year, which was intended to help them keep pace with inflation although who are we kidding about keeping up with THAT in the modern era? but still, they HAVE to do it... except they CAN'T do it, if they are not given the funds, and to make matters worse, whatever budget eventually does get past the Congressional Obstructionist Wall will have to work retroactively back to have began on October 1... or something like that anyway).

So the CDC caved, it seems, yet managed to preserve its integrity in the process, by both keeping its standards within the realm of correct medicinal advice, while moving forward in a way as to "first do no harm" to those who would continue to be negatively impacted by it remaining under attack from Congress. Single mothers may die, yes, but that is not something that I would lay all of the blame at their feet for. With a gun to their head, and another one aimed at their crotch, they made a decision to move forward as best they could. I am not saying that blame should not be involved here, but I am saying that we should forget who did this to us all: conservatives. The CDC itself imho held up admirably, given what conditions they were operating under. If we want them to perform better in the future, perhaps we should exempt them from Congressional oversight, and allow doctors to give medical advice without having to pay overtures to powerful white geriatric men who for whatever reason continue to hold their strategy session get-togethers in Moscow even after it invaded Ukraine. i.e., look at what happened to the Post Office, and the IRS - it is remarkable to me that the CDC is one of the last bastions of government from the Golden Era of ye olden socialist (aka "sharing is caring") United States that is actually most of the way functional. Like, if my car ran out of gas and then managed to limp along another 100 miles, I wouldn't be blaming the car for refusing to go any further! Instead, I'd be praising how well it managed to perform in such a difficult scenario.