Hello, virus from Wuhan
Another problem’s here again
Because you see the contagion creeping
There are days when I don’t feel like wearing pants when I leave my house. But I do because it would upset a lot of people if I didn’t, and I’m a very considerate guy.
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| “2 or 3 lines” is not a d**chebag! |
If I can wear pants when I’m outside, you can wear a mask or some kind of face covering when you’re outside – right? It’s not really that hard to do, is it?
Don’t be a d**chebag. WEAR A MASK!
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I say this even though a recent New England Journal of Medicine article concludes that wearing a mask may not do much good:
We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within six feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.
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Apparently social distancing is more effective than wearing a mask. But regardless of that, how about having a little consideration for the feelings of the people you come in contact with during the day – even though those people might be overreacting to your failure to don a mask?
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Recently the governor of the state where I live (Maryland) announced that he was going to allow restaurants to reopen as of last Friday if they complied with some very stringent requirements – customers had to be seated outdoors, had to maintain social distancing, etc.
But the county executive of the county where I live announced that he thought the governor was jumping the gun. He decreed that restaurants in my county would remain closed indefinitely (except for carryout meals).
My county has the highest number of deaths in the state, and the county executive said that the number of new cases hadn’t fallen off enough to make it safe to reopen.
I suspect that his decision to put on the brakes was motivated at least in part by a desire to say “You can’t make me!” to the governor. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he chose to go his own way based on a sincere belief that he was protecting the health of the county’s residents.
Non-essential businesses in my county were told to close their doors effective Monday, March 16. So the shutdown had been in effect for about ten weeks when the governor decided last week to allow a limited reopening and the county executive announced our county wasn’t going along with the rest of the state.
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| Maryland governor Larry Hogan |
Think about what maintaining the status quo meant in this context. What the county executive was really saying was that because shutting things down for ten weeks hadn’t been effective, we were going to keep things shut down even longer.
If you did something for ten weeks and it didn’t work, does it seem like a rational strategy to continue to do the same thing for a few more weeks?
If you ask me, there were two ways for the county executive to go. Either he could have said “Enough is enough” – like the governor did – and start loosening the restrictions.
Or he could have decided to tighten the screws further – to order an even more stringent lockdown in hopes that doing so would finally stamp out the virus.
As far as I know, he never considered tightening the screws further. Why? BECAUSE PEOPLE WOULDN’T HAVE PUT UP WITH IT!
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It’s like taking your shoes off at the airport. (Do you remember doing that at airports once upon a time? Do you remember airports?)
I don’t think anyone really believes that taking our shoes off at airports reduces the chance that a terrorist will hijack a plane. But we’ve gotten used to taking our shoes off at the airport – we don’t like it, but we’re not going to make a big stink over it.
If everyone was strip-searched before they were allowed to board a plane, it would be much harder to get anything dangerous past security – but there would be riots at every airport in the country.
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A couple of days after our governor loosened the restrictions on restaurants, our county executive gave into the pressure he was feeling and announced that he would go along with the governor and allow limited reopening – but only as of the following Monday.
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| Montgomery County (MD) executive Marc Elrich |
The rest of the state began to reopen at 5 PM on Friday. But businesses in our county had to remain closed until Monday.
A couple of days might not seem like a big deal. But if you owned a restaurant and had been trying to survive on carryout and delivery orders for ten weeks, you needed every bit of help you could get.
As luck would have it, we had absolutely perfect weather last weekend. I guarantee you that virtually every available outdoor seat at restaurants in our county would have been filled from the time they opened until the time they closed.
But, nooooo – our county executive had to assert his authority and arbitrarily delay reopening until after the weekend.
Does anyone really believe conditions were one whit safer on Monday than they were the previous Friday?
Of course, not every restaurant would have been ready to reopen on Friday, thanks to the county executive diddling around until the last minute before announcing his sudden change of policy. But why not allow those who were ready to reopen on Friday to do so instead of making them wait until Monday?
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Singaporean entertainer Alvin Oon got the idea for “Fight the Virus” – a parody of the famous Simon and Garfunkel song, “Sounds of Silence” – on a Tuesday. Within 48 hours, he had written the lyrics, recorded the song, and released it on his YouTube channel.
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(Every girl in my high school who had an acoustic guitar immediately learned to play “Sounds of Silence.”)
Click here to listen to “Fight the Virus.”
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