More reflections. If you hate anything political and don’t want to see my opinion, then don’t. But if you have your own experiences that you want to share or live somewhere else where things were/are different, then I’d be interested in what you thought/think as well. We’re probably all going through or have gone through this differently and this is definitely a new world for most of us.
April 15, 2020
Societal/Political/Local Impact
I don’t know where everyone else lives and how their country has responded to the virus but in the United States, President Trump wants to open the economy even though there are a lot more people who will become infected and in response, state governors pretty much have had power over their own states to decide what will happen and when to reopen. Since the start, Trump ignored that the virus even existed and has done a horrible job of giving federal help to aid people and stop the virus. He disregards science and doesn’t know what he’s doing even though experts warned him months ago in January. Personally, I think the health experts are right and we should trust the overwhelming number of scientific research and experts that say you shouldn’t reopen things early. The World Health Organization, CDC, and many other major health organizations have repeatedly said that the best thing that we can do is quarantine and isolate those who are sick until the virus passes through and/or we get some sort of vaccine. Science and reason will always be more sensible than non-fact based misinformation and decisions aimed at political and economic gains for a small number of people. If we want people to die, we should let the virus spread quickly and reopen the country early. But if we want people to survive, we’re going to have to accept the inevitable and keep quarantining.
The biggest issue right now in the U.S. and in many countries is the lack of masks and medical supplies for nurses and doctors and not enough hospital beds, space or ventilators to supply infected people with. Since the pandemic started and maybe even before so, the U.S. government has pretty much delegated the management of resources and shutting things down to the states and state governments. The federal government said a couple days ago that they would provide test kits and medical supplies soon. But states have received less than 10 percent of ventilators and not near enough masks &material for producing masks yet. In general, the larger populated states with high population density have been hit hardest so far. New York has one of the worst infections and death rates in the world, surpassing even parts of Italy. But some less populated states still deny it is spreading much and haven’t quarantined yet. The problem is once it does reach them, it will be too late, and people will already have cases and be infected once they shut down. Here in Colorado, governor Jared Polis has done a pretty good job and shut things down relatively early. And there haven’t been very many cases, so we’re lucky. President Trump has done nothing but delay importing of testing kits and ventilators needed to keep patients in critical condition alive. His mind is all over the place and he says different things every day. He mostly just blames all the issues on other people and has been extremely idiotic in not listening to medical professionals earlier on how to manage the pandemic. Some of his suggestions and advisors even coincided against the World Health Organizations’ recommendations. The west wing, Trump, and his advisors are all naïve, under-qualified and he forces people out of power that he doesn’t like. They’re pretty much all very similar to Trump and neither him nor sometimes they don’t know what they are doing. So, at the least, that has delayed this quarantine and the spread of the virus will be more and last longer since we didn’t take action to stop it earlier.
I think the claim that opening up our country will somehow help our economy get back together and make things more productive again is a stupid proposition because it is entirely possible that we could quarantine ourselves to fight the coronavirus and prevent its spread and maintain a decent economy at the same time. If we had a strong-willed effort by the government to provide adequate health supplies and resources for hospitals and health officials and gave more money to the medical professionals to research the coronavirus and produce a vaccine, we could get the quarantine over faster and in the long-term have fewer cases. But instead, the federal government, namely Trump and the white house have done almost nothing to help the state governments and took action way later than they should have. If the states and the federal government could have cooperated early to minimize the damage done and get proper health insurance and support to people in the working sector and to all people who lost their jobs, we wouldn’t have major losses to our economy and might have avoided the worst of the pandemic. If you compare the U.S. to what South Korea did, it becomes clear what we could have done to manage this better.
I don’t know when the economy will open up and it will depend on how everyone continues to respond to the pandemic, but I’m guessing if we make the right decisions and follow the health organizations and their recommendations, things will turn out fine in the late summer. I’m guessing anywhere between July and September things might open up fully again and somewhere around there is the right time. Internationally speaking, some countries like China and parts of Europe have already gone over the hump of the spread of the coronavirus, and their complete shutdown and restrictions on travel and leaving their own houses prevented the virus from doing much. Most of the rest of the world other than North America, China, and Europe haven’t had many cases yet. But that will change soon. We’ll see how this goes.
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