VICTOR JOECKS: King Steve Sisolak puts Nevada in coronavirus time out

Gov. Steve Sisolak doesn’t know how to stop the spread of coronavirus so he’s putting Nevada in timeout. Because you aren’t going to behave, he laid the groundwork to take away Thanksgiving dinner.

On Tuesday, King Sisolak, who three days later tested positive for the coronavirus, unleashed his latest passive-aggressive lecture in response to Nevada’s rising coronavirus case count. He’s blaming you for the fact that a highly contagious disease remains highly contagious.

“For the next two weeks, we must mimic our stay-at-home behaviors from this past spring,” he said. “If we do so, we believe we can begin to turn around things in two weeks without having to place increased restrictions on our businesses or our schools.”

In other words, two weeks to stop the spread. That’s hardly an original idea. The White House tried “15 days to slow the spread” — in March. It didn’t work. Nevada’s coronavirus cases peaked in July, declined for two months and have now reached new records. Significant restrictions, however, remain in place.

“If we don’t come together at this moment, I will be forced to take stronger action in 14 days,” His Majesty said. “To be clear, I don’t want to take stronger action.”

Your Highness, if you don’t want to take stronger action — don’t. But then he’d have to admit that he has no idea how to stop the virus from spreading. That wouldn’t be a failure, just an acknowledgment that a politician can’t outlaw a virus.

There’s eight months of evidence that “two weeks to slow the spread” won’t work. To find out if it did — or more likely, if case growth happened to slow naturally — it’ll take three to four weeks. It can take up to 14 days to develop symptoms and even longer to be tested and receive results. Unfortunately, it’s nearly certain coronavirus deaths will be higher in two weeks than they are today. Deaths are a lagging indicator.

This timeline makes it likely that King Sisolak announces new restrictions just days before Thanksgiving. Those will probably include limits on who attends your Thanksgiving dinner. The best-case scenario is that he scolds you for having over too many family members and friends.

It’s worth noting that he didn’t abide by social distancing in the run-up to the election. He stood next to Rep. Dina Titus at a campaign event. He also posted a picture from a get-out-the vote event, which showed people not socially distancing. No word on whether those gatherings featured ambient background music.

Even hospitals in Clark County pushed back against his scaremongering.

“Today, Southern Nevada hospitals have more available capacity than we did at the same time last year,” five hospital leaders wrote in a joint statement Wednesday.

King Sisolak also urged his critics, like your humble columnist, “to encourage people to wear a mask. Just give it a chance and see if it works.”

Sire, you imposed a mask mandate in June. That was plenty of chance for it to work. More than 85 percent of Nevadans say they “wear a mask most or all of the time while in public.” That’s according to a survey by the Delphi research group at Carnegie Mellon University. If masks were a silver bullet, cases wouldn’t be surging.

Let’s hope the governor fully recovers from the virus. But rather than additional lockdowns, he should try more targeted approaches, such as encouraging those over 75 to wear an N95 mask. That’s the highest-risk age group. They shouldn’t be duped into thinking a cloth face covering provides meaningful protection against the virus. A properly fitted N95 mask does.

King Sisolak offers Nevadans false hope when he asserts that expanding widely adopted behaviors, such as mask wearing, will stop the pandemic. He should help Nevadans identify their individual risk level. People are smart enough to balance that with other things they care about.

Instead, King Sisolak is putting you in timeout and threatening Thanksgiving dinner. The sooner he relinquishes his crown, the better.

Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.