All Corona, All the Time
Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I find myself thinking a lot about all the ways life has changed since the start of all this, all the lives that have been lost and that will be lost, and the audacity of those who still insist on believing it’s all being overblown. Currently, over 130,000 U.S. residents have passed away from the virus, and the spikes in our overall cases recently has led European countries to block Americans from traveling there for the foreseeable future. That’s how badly our country has handled this. Meanwhile, our federal and state leadership (and I’m using that word loosely here) still have no concrete plan for fixing this other than basically, just learn to live with it, and oh, well...a bunch of people will die in the process. That just doesn’t cut it.
It’s been shown in other countries that if just 80% of the people wear masks in public, the cases of COVID-19 decline considerably; however, far too many people in the U.S. won’t even do that much - the bare minimum - to protect the health of the public at large. They won’t wear masks, and they won’t stop gathering in large groups and going places that aren’t essential. Memorial Day weekend, they decided they’d had enough of taking precautions and went out to celebrate and party, and bars began to open again. Now we are seeing the effects of doing all that prematurely in the form of many more positive tests and increasingly so in younger people. Now we’re into July, and with people still acting like there is nothing to worry about - socializing and crowding whatever beaches stayed open - for the 4th of July, things will likely only continue to get worse. There is talk of hospitals being near capacity in places, and they may be overwhelmed soon if things don’t change. Oh, but don’t ask the doubters to stay home or wear a mask because that is supposedly a violation of their rights. Who wants the right to get or transmit a deadly virus? They do, apparently, and it’s ridiculous. I remember writing a couple of months ago that seeing people out and about with masks on made me nervous. Now I am much more nervous when they are out and NOT wearing a mask. Wow, what a difference a few weeks makes.
A couple of months ago, I was also in the middle of juggling homeschool for my kids and working from home at the same time. If you follow my posts, you know I’ve already had to go back to working in the office, which I still have mixed feelings about. Thankfully, we also made it through homeschool, but now our less-than-smart governor is insisting that he wants the schools in our state to reopen at full capacity for the fall semester, which would be only a month away. Despite the fact that our state is one of the worst hotbeds in the country for COVID-19 now and that younger and younger people are catching and even dying from the virus, he thinks that’s a good idea. I couldn’t disagree more. That’s right. I’m actually all for going back to doing homeschool even though I thought it was a struggle previously. For one thing, we were thrown into it before. Now we know what to expect. But the biggest factor for me is that it is no safer now (and probably even less so) for kids to be in classrooms than it was when they closed the schools in March. We should not be sending them back to school in a few weeks and putting everyone involved in danger. I have heard of people in various locations who have been sent surveys to take for their school districts to gauge what they’d prefer to do, but I’ve seen no such survey for ours yet and am not sure there will even be one. Given the choice, I’d rather keep my kids home where I know they’re safe, even if I do have to keep going to work. We’d figure it out. We always do, and throughout this thing, my kids have already shown they’re troopers and team players, and they are capable of doing whatever we need to do to get through this together.
Over these past few months, it’s been glaringly clear that a large portion of the American population won’t inconvenience themselves in any way to help us beat this as a nation. Even wearing a mask is too much to ask. They’ve made this a political issue instead of focusing on what it actually is - a matter of public health - and they’ve listed more to our incompetent, not-fit-to-lead president than they have to the medical experts and actual scientists. People are dying in record numbers from this every day, yet they still think it’s a hoax created by the media or the Democrats, and to admit this is a serious concern would (in their minds) show weakness. It makes absolutely no sense, but this is where we are. Americans are so divided, they can’t even agree to save themselves or the people around them. And that’s a sad shame.