Wednesday on Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Company,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) pushed back against a revamping of coronavirus restrictions as cases are on the rise again due to the Omicron variant.
Cassidy emphasized that local governments should be the ones in charge of placing clear recommendations to combat the spread of the virus but said that “a lot of the restrictions do not seem to be rational.”
“As a doctor, I am a physician. I always recommend we rely upon local health officials,” Cassidy explained. “We are seeing an increase in the number of infections, but we’re not seeing the increase in the number of hospitalizations. As I gather what the [Louisiana] governor has said, state agencies are allowed to recommend that their employees wear masks — not so much a mandate as much as kind of an urge. So, I will defer to the state public health officer.”
He continued, “My push has always been you allow local officials to make the decisions that are important for their locality because they’re the ones that are on the ground if you will. And so, that is consistent with this principle, and I continue to kind of hold that.”
“[A] lot of the restrictions do not seem to be rational,” Cassidy added. “We need to have a strategy; it needs to be clearly enunciated. And the strategy should be how do we keep hospitals from becoming overburdened? You’re not going to prevent infection. Infection is going to occur. And so, let’s have a strategy that keeps the hospitals from being overburdened. If folks had a line of sight as to what was being recommended, prevented that from occurring, I think they’d feel better about it.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
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