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Somehow Everyone Missed the Obvious
Watching the news for the last day has made me want to beat my head against the wall. Somehow it seems that the media and a large part of the government somehow missed the relationship between “opening” the country and new COVID-19 cases. Most seem to be shocked that new cases are on the rise. Oh, not all of them are shocked, some are in denial, still saying that things are great and COVID-19 will magically disappear Real Soon Now.
There are a couple of exceptions, but for the most part, the news media and government at all levels seem to have missed the connection between disease and human contact. Somehow most people making decisions about how to respond to this pandemic or report on how it is affecting the world missed this basic fact of life. It’s like they don’t live in the same world with the rest of us, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I figured out by the time I was a preteen that if I got close to someone that was ill, there was a pretty good chance I would get sick. It didn’t take science or data analysis. It took being human in human society. Someone that is coughing sneezing and looks sick coughs on you. You have a fair chance to get sick. As I got older, this got more sophisticated, people that were sick didn’t always look sick, and there were times of the year that I had to be more careful. So, it wasn’t that great a stretch to realize that something like COVID-19 meant we had to extend that behavior until the number of cases was near zero.
But, somehow, media and government officials missed the little detail that if we stop being careful about our personal space and taking precautions, the number of cases would start going up again. To paraphrase an old movie, I am shocked, just shocked that there are infections in that country. Oh wait, I’m not, and unless something changes, it is getting a whole lot worse before it gets better.
