Every time I see another pithy commercial telling me how we’re ‘all in this together’ I get a little closer to unloading a round or two into the television.
‘We’ are very much in this separately, seeing it through very different life lenses and being affected in radically different ways.
If you happen to be someone who is independently wealthy and can easily get through 3 months, 6 months, even years without even noticing a dent in your pocketbook you are looking on basically wondering what all the fuss is about.
Maybe you own a hardware store, grocery store or big box store manager and seeing unprecedented profits. You are loving life!
Or maybe you are one of the 30 Million or so hourly employees laid off temporarily and enjoying the vacation plus $600 a week government bonus. You have some concerns about the future but are largely unaffected financially in the short term.
However, there are millions of us small business owners and sole props who don’t happen to qualify for any of the government money or unemployment. We are farmers loosing thousands every day due to food chain disruption. We are small retailers, service professionals, mom and pop restaurants, barbers, salon owners, etc. forced out of business by power hungry governors.
This is why several of your friends seem like they’re about to go ‘postal’ while others are sitting back having a mere intellectual discussion
Our governors were initially blinded by fear, didn’t really understand what epidemiologists meant when they said ‘flatten the curve’, brought their economies to a screeching halt and now don’t know how to restart.
We saw our county hospitals in the vast majority of the country forced to cut hours and lay off staff because the virus didn’t spread like the models predicted and so we had wasted time and medical resources while everyone cowered in fear in their homes.
In mid-April when the Governors saw that hospitals were sitting empty they should have looked at each county individually and any who had less than 20% covid bed utilization, begin to open one low risk business segment each week that the utilization was under that level.
Had we followed that model we could very easily be almost 100% back in business with herd immunity firmly in place. Instead, we are now more than 8 weeks into this and our governors are cowering in fear now seeing they slammed on the economic brakes without ever having a model in place to restart.
Plus, having more smart doctors seeing more patients we may have had several other treatment options and possibly one that works consistently well.
Instead, we were led by politicians and a small cluster of medical professionals who were blinded by generalizations and didn’t stand back and look at what the data really meant – or what they really needed to accomplish.
Now we have politicians thinking we can actually eradicate this virus before they re-open. Not one epidemiologist across the nation ever thought we could completely eliminate this. Flatten the curve has always meant control the spread to a manageable level. Why are they moving the goalposts?
This video was produced in 2017 but seems even more appropriate today!
