How important is it to get your hair cut? Or colored? To get your nails done? Get a message? Go to a gym or movie or a mall? Eat inside a restaurant? If you lived in Georgia or Nebraska, you could be doing these things real soon.
In this COVID-19 global pandemic, the worst pandemic the world has seen in a century, is doing these things right now worth your life? How about the lives and health of other people?
No one loves weeks of working at home. Children learning online are not having fun. Nor are their parents, who are working at home if they’re lucky, or part of the recently unemployed millions if they’re unlucky. Face masks are uncomfortable. Keeping six feet from everyone with whom you don’t live is difficult. Burying a loved one with no goodbye or normal funeral is heart breaking. So is not being able to hug your grandchildren or your grandparent.
Everyone is itching “to get back to normal.” Everyone wants the economy up and running. Everyone wants to exercise freedom to congregate. No one wants to line up at a food bank. No one wants to see their business tank.
But is “getting back to normal” before it’s safe worth the risk to health and life? Credible experts, including Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx who President Trump likes (for now), doggedly warn that relaxing social distancing prematurely is not medically safe and will cause a resurgence of COVID-19. More than three quarters of a million Americans have coronavirus. More than 42,000 have died.
Let’s see the case numbers and death rates in a couple weeks in the states that are doing away with stay at home directives in a few days. Let’s see if economy is more valuable than human health and life.
Ann M. Pompelio
Sparta