It means that there hasn't been a significant amount of time to have things in black and white regarding the extent of needed protocols to allow larger gatherings while not leading to outbreaks.
That's a significant thing. Right now, in our pandemic angst, people are all emotional and complaining about everything. One complaint is the sheer complexity of rules--like with schools. I don't know if you know much about the school protocols...but in some areas you could have 3 kids and 3 different protocols because they are in different schools in the same town. So a lot of people are complaining. And this is also a common complaint by conservatives against a tax code and corporate regulations in general...thus why Trump had said for every one regulation you add, remove two. So...that's the thing here: having a simple rule is expedient and beneficial because it is streamlined. The core assumption beneath "well, what about building size" is that adding complexity to protocols is always beneficial as opposed to hurrying up to get the protocol out because the government has to react very quickly. So...there are several factors that go into creating a policy and expediency, convenience, streamlining are part of that as much as science is. So if a person observes that a particular thing that the SC says about policy X is scientifically illiterate, it doesn't follow that there is a burden to prove absolutely everything about policy X was optimized for every case under the sun using science, even ignoring the additional ridiculous constraint that all such science must be peer-reviewed. Take, for example, balconies. So what if a church has upper levels? Sounds even riskier because the coughing and singing and whatever else may create clouds raining down on everyone on the lower floor. So, do we want to wait for highly optimized protocols that include building size, how many feet the altar is from the pews, if it has balconies, ...no, that's even more lawsuits. But what about building size? So...what exactly...you can have p% capacity and so a 1000 seat building should have let's say 10% or 100 people allowed? And that is expected to carry roughly the same risk as a 100 seat building with just 10 people. BUT does it? No, it doesn't. The assumption there is that there is something linearly proportional but there are aspects (or components) to the risk that you would reasonably expect to be non-linear. Here's an example: if you have 10 people in a room and everyone shakes everyone else's hands, you get O(n^2) handshakes...likewise if you have 100 people in a room, you still have O(n^2) handshakes. But it may be even way worse than that. Let's suppose you have 1 person without a mask who is infected and let's suppose that within an hour of them breathing and coughing in a 1000-seat building, they've pretty much saturated the the building with covid risk. Or let's suppose, that this 1 person
wore a mask on but after
3 hours, even with a 1000-seat building, they've pretty much saturated the building with covid risk. It goes beyond delivering a complex formula to people so they know what their capacity ought to be and expecting them to go to some website, enter a bunch of things in a form and getting out a number and then expecting police to be able to figure out how to enforce all that. It's also that in the latter case, the component of risk to people in a church is so high, that you do want to have a cutoff of 10 people (or whatever) even in a 1000 seat religious building. Now all this said about complexity and how we want to streamline rules in a pandemic for the purpose of
understanding, one could also argue using science that the simplicity and quick turnaround time of science-based protocols saves more lives than taking time and adding complexity. Does anybody know any of these things I have discussed? Yes! The health experts know much of it and they are relied upon when governments make the rules. Science is a component to the rules because the health experts are either scientists themselves or get educated on the science. Trying to redo the legislation from the bench because the justices are ignorant of the work that goes into the protocols is exactly what conservatives complain about--judicial activism. Moreover, the particular opinion piece cited in the op wasn't questioning the final decision of the court and so bringing up everything about the particulars of religious buildings and cults from the decision is not relevant to the points made about the expressed opinions of the majority. The concern that the author had had was that expression of wrong things may have an impact to other groups who then decide they too can play the religion card to a religion-biased court that doesn't understand the science or that others who make policies will be impacted by the words of the court majority's opining.
