I drove home from work today, traffic, stores were busy, restaurants full. What was the point of the world stopping in March? Why didn't people just Social Distance and start wearing masks then?
What is the point of cancelling weddings, concerts, rodeos, when 1000's of people are protesting every where?
1. To keep hospitals from overflowing and more people dying.
2. To delay the peak of the infection until medical science could devise even remote ideas of how to treat it.
3. To give the elderly and those with underlying conditions a chance to shelter.
4.
To decrease the spread and death among health care professionals.
5. To keep front line, essential employees (yes, including LE, but also of course Doctors, Nurses, EMT's, Firefighters, Physical therapists, teachers, childcare workers, not to mention
truck drivers, food stockers, grocery workers) from getting a consistently high viral load. And dying.
We should have started wearing masks in February (like South Korea or Japan or China or Republic of Georgia) or at least by March 1 (like Turkey or Greece). We should have social distanced, but probably in a more measured way - but hey, we had no plans, unlike much of the so-called Third World.
World didn't stop. Of the almost 200 nations, some slowed to a near stop, others allowed more commerce but with strict use of masks and distancing, and also keen attention to avoiding mass gatherings and even other less risky behaviors that still transmit.
I have no idea who is protesting (no one I know is rioting or protesting, nor does my region have much of that) but it has nothing to do with canceling weddings or rodeos. Perhaps people should have been allowed to do those things, but with contact tracing (like much of the rest of the world). Then, each bridge and groom could decide on their own whether they wanted their guests to get the dreaded notification: you've been exposed to CoVid, with employer notified, as well as other contacts.
While I agree that the lockdown increased anomie and angst, I don't in any way think that CoVId is responsible for the exact form of this civil unrest. People who shove girls to the ground, people who go out of their way to run over someone (and their dog) because of perceived political views - that's not CoVid. Police who shove old people, police who suffocate people - this is all at the root of those protests, not CoVid.
If it hadn't been CoVid, it would be one of the other looming viral crises (or weather crises).
That's something else that's very deep and historical that's going on.
But the world did not stop. Many nations are going along, much as usual, but with more effective control over CoVid because they already knew what a plague was. They already knew that they didn't have hospital care.
Americans are just now waking up to how thin the "thin green line" of healthcare workers actually is. And it is now thinner. And I think it's going to get even thinner.
Safe travels
