We don’t understand the math. None of us do. Well, the people who do are the people that governments don’t listen to, because costly facts don’t fit with an agenda that can only be preserved by denial.
The scary thing is we don’t know the math. But even the smallest set of figures now, in the earliest part of the pandemic, is already too scary to imagine. These are the early thousands who should not have otherwise perished but have. Those who will perish to come even more so should not perish otherwise.
The biggest threat about the pandemic is it’s undoing whole societies, and the threat is that some form of anarchy may reign — that’s the fear on everyone’s heart.
I’m not commending panic. Not at all. Indeed, I think a lot of Christians like myself see this as an opportunity to serve, not that we don’t deplore the suffering that is coming — that is indeed ‘here’ in some parts of the world.
There are those who panic-buy and there are those that hate the very practice. But there will always be the panic-buyer. That temptation resides in every one of us. Nobody wants to be stuck for months without the essentials.
Maybe it is time to overreact in a time that already appears we’ve overreacted, but a time also, very paradoxically, where history may prove that we (catastrophically) underreacted.
We haven’t overreacted. While schools stay open and act as childcare centres so mothers and fathers can continue their roles in hospitals, utilities, factories and police stations, etc, society continues to run like it has. But what about the ‘hotbed’ quality of schools that send little carriers of the virus home to infect Mum and Dad who will soon not be able to work anyway?
But what if children being together, in as close proximity to one another as ever, are carrying the virus — remember, it’s one child and that’s all it takes, and apparently children carry the virus so well. Think of the schools where a case is inevitably found. Sorry, but with incubation times, and fever being latent and held in store ready to lurch anytime, the horse has already damn-well bolted.
The modelling of this virus shows us that infection is inevitable when groups of people continue meeting together, and then individuals from those groups go on to meet with individuals of other groups. A perfect way to spread the contagion.
Of course, it’s not the young any of us should be worried about. It’s my mother and father and yours. It’s our grandparents. It’s the person with special needs who, with a little touch up of pneumonia is not going to survive.
Are we ready for 50 million deaths?
At the end of the day, control measures like personal hygiene, which put the onus on the individual, are almost less effective than having zero effect. All they do is give us something to do. They provide the illusion we’re in control.
The hierarchy of hazard control has elimination of the risk at the top for a reason. Personal hygiene measures are almost at the bottom of the pyramid, and I really wonder how serious governments are when they decide they’re going to “control” this, as if they have any control over this kind of thing at all.
It’s time for drastic action for at least the effort of the saving of many millions of lives. People who will die prematurely. Our mothers and fathers, and grandfathers and grandmothers. We’re not ready to say goodbye to them yet, so we need to bear a larger cost now.
Even in the ‘overreacting’ we may well find that we still moved too late.
And if we truly overreacted and saved a few million lives, would that be so bad?
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